I'm really frustrated, and I'm trying to be reasonable. With any new MMO, you inevitably have to learn a few new things.

But WTH. My wife and I, after fighting with the downloader/installer, finally created characters tonight. Once we made it out into Archet and I invited her into a group, we couldn't see each other. Why not?!? Nothing was obvious. Log out, research.

Aha, layers. Well the game never mentioned anything about that. Ok, so we group, she can click a button to get into my layer. Great, though you would think it's obvious that people who group together would want to be in the same layer and it could be done automatically.

Anyway, we group. She finds the button. Loading screen... and she's still in her original layer.

We disband, regroup... same thing. Disband again, reform with her as the leader... and now she still has the button to switch layers, even though she's the leader. I have no button. She tries to use it anyway and of course it doesn't work.

This is absurd enough to make me give up on this game straight away, though I don't really want to... can anyone offer advice about what we might be doing wrong?

So at the start of the game things are instanced based on the quest that you're on through phasing. This might be why you're not seeing each other -- although if you both started in Archet and both finished the initial "tutorial" questline then I don't know why you wouldn't be able to see each other after that.

Yeap, we were out of the initial intro quest instance and had even done the next couple quests and trained our first skills at the trainer before even trying to group.

Been doing some more reading, we're not the only ones experiencing this problem. Also reading about the big differences that Turbine has made in their F2P system between DDO and LOTRO. LOTRO's F2P restrictions seem positively draconian by comparison. I was really looking forward to this, but between these two issues I may be bowing out pretty early.

Yeah, honestly, LotRO F2P is a joke..