A Casual Stroll to Mordor

Last week Eurogamer interviewd Turbine about mounted combat and LotRO’s Future. Here are the interesting things they found.

Early yesterday there were reports of lag in LOTRO coming out on the forums. Now, most gamers will tell you that “lag happens” and outside of game servers being overloaded a lot of the time lag is on the player’s side. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

Sapience posted today in a thread entitled “What we know is coming” confirming that Volume 2 and some classes will be getting updates with the Quarter 1 update.

The Skeleton Pony (The Painted Skeleton Steed) is now in the store from December 17th 12am Eastern (-5 GMT) through January 6th, 2011.

For a long time people have been asking for LOTRO related merchandise, however due to copyright issues Turbine was unable to actually have any licensed products. However, that all seems to have changed with their acquisition by Warner Brothers!

Today, the official LOTRO twitter account posted that the release date for the November update will be on November 29th.

Recently it has been brought to our notice that some people who stream the podcast from their work computers are now unable to do so. Well, as some might suspect this weekend we moved our podcast files over to a new host.

Posted today was an interview that ZAM’s Senior Editor Chris Tom was to have with Kate Paiz about LOTRO, the Free-to-Play launch and what we might see in the future.

Sapience has posted today that the Bullroarer server will be open later this week.

Today Kate “Nereid” Paiz released a letter today talking about the state of the game since the launch of Enedwaith, Book 2, and Free to Play on the Turbine servers.

In an article on Joystiq posted last night there are some interesting numbers coming from Turbine’s Kate Paiz from GDC about the changes since LOTRO has gone Free to Play roughly a month ago.

It was announced today by Kehleyr that the previously named Isengard program has been retitled and is now open for applications. Ask yourself this: Do you gain a sense of pride when you file bugs, knowing that you’ve helped us improve the game by doing so? Do you have a few hours of free time [...]

Released today were several Beta Journals, written by actual players within the Beta, concerning the upcoming LOTRO Store.

LOTRO will be having several new (US?) servers opening in the near future. If you’d like to help choose their name, head over to the official US forums!

In a bit of a late announcement Sapience stated today that certain servers would not be accepting any new character transfers (Creep or Freep) to certain servers.

The 28th Annual Golden Joystick Awards have started their short list (final) round of voting! And up for two awards are LOTRO’s Siege of Mirkwood for Online Game of the Year, and Codemasters for UK Developer of the Year! So go and vote!

Well, I didn’t think it would happen, but I guess I need to listen to Mordor or Bust, because apparently he’s psychic. But here it is: LOTRO is going Free-to-Play! We’ll definitely be talking about this in the future and in our next podcast, but I’m interested in hearing about what you all have to say about it!

An exploit has been discovered allowing players to earn hundreds of thousands to millions of Skirmish Marks per hour.

A look into the new Skirmish-join UI where players can create Skirmishes, see if quests are avaialble, and all the little intricacies that can go into creating and joining a Skirmish.

Tuesday saw the release of another Dev Diary where Vastin discusses the development of Mirwkood as a whole instead of a particular aspect of the upcoming expansion as we’ve become accustomed to.  Although there was no specific game mechanics discussed I found it fascinating to hear about how Turbine’s developers have gone about designing different [...]

A new MMO Calendar supporting St. Jude’s Children Hospital and expanded lotteries are the news of the day from Turbine.

Brian or “Zombie Columbus” once again posted a Dev Diary concerning Skirmishes and their randomization and scaling.  Interestingly enough, if you listen to our last episode Goldenstar and myself discussed several of the topics addressed in this diary that center around the ever challenging replay value.  To sum up the diary we have the following: [...]

There were two articles released (so far) today on the official Lord of the Rings Online website.  The first was a Dev Q&A concerning a myriad of answers to questions from the LOTRO community, along with a promise of more answers to come!  I thought overall there were some very interesting tidbits such as the [...]