Don’t despair - here’s what worked for me, posted a couple of days ago on the thread just below this one:
“I'm running on an Intel High Sierra, OS 10.13.6, using Wine 1.8.6 (so similar age to yours?) and I found this fix described in a LOTRO thread (
https://forums.lotro.com/forums/show...age-quot/page4) from 2019 where Mac users were having the same frustrations.
What I'm doing:
1. Before launching DDO, I'm opening Activity Monitor (from Applications > Utilities) and a spare browser window (the browser window doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary, it just speeds things up when the launcher is trying to open a window to Microsoft)
2. Launch DDO - get to the message described in the quote above, and everything stops.
3. Go to Activity Monitor, where wine-preloader seems to be taking up all the CPU work (NOT the '64' version, just the plain preloader). Quit that.
4. Wait just a sec while the DDO launcher tries to open a link to download MS Visual C++ (404 not found, but that doesn't matter). Close that browser window.
5. Back in the DDO launcher, normal service is resumed. (First time I did this, this morning, I then had to wait ages for the U56 patch to load too - but there was at least progress and the game does now play).
It's very much a workaround, not a fix, but for me at least it does work. I hope the same for you too.
Good luck and I hope you can get back on soon.”