Veneration posted this on July 31st, 2010.
Categorized as General, kinship.
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Now before we get started on this article I’d like to lay down a few basic statements to help you understand where I’m coming from, as well as my experiences with this topic.
For the past 5 years I worked extensively with online gaming communities to better their appeal, organization and overall cohesive interaction. This means doing everything from event coordination to designing and maintaining heavily used, community driven websites. In this time I have discovered a number of effective ways to reduce overhead for the community leaders, increase user activity and provide efficient communication between members.
In this article (and hopefully additional articles if feedback is positive) I plan to highlight ways for Kinships leaders to design and maintain a community website driven by its members with minimal cost and coding. All of the options and ideas listed bellow are do-able with a basic budget of around $50 or less!
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Veneration posted this on July 25th, 2010.
Categorized as blog, kinship, opinions, wordpress.
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WordPress is one of the most popular open source CMS’ in existence! With close to 27 thousand users, WordPress is also without a doubt the most used blog platform on the web!
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Veneration posted this on July 25th, 2010.
Categorized as General.
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Wordpress is one of the most popular open source CMS’ in excistance! With close to 27 thousand users, WordPress is also without a doubt the most used blog platform on the web!
So how does a blog platform help me design a kinship website?
Simple! Open Source (FREE) PHP Driven CMS’ allow designers to create and form a website to fit every aspect of their needs. And with WordPress’ ever growing community of designs and developers, its easy to find a plugin or widget to help you do what you want to accomplish! This means that you can use wordpress for almost anything from E-Commerce to well, Kinship Websites!
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Veneration posted this on July 6th, 2010.
Categorized as Enedwaith, General, leveling, Region.
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This week while playing on my new Rune-Keeper, I decided to quest in a few areas I hadn’t done in the past. Low levels in the Shire and some quests in the odd quest off near Thorin’s hall helped to break up the scenery nicely. But this got me thinking about zone alternatives for level ranges and how the map of Middle Earth is progressing.
Turbine currently has the game moving in a path following key points and characters as they progress in the War of the Ring. This can lead us in many directions, but more often than not, players find themselves moving East. Up until now! This pattern of moving east has been broken with Enedwaith, where we find ourselves traveling south of Eregion.
But geography only plays a part in this story of progression and gameplay. Level range and quest content also plays a huge role in how a region fits into the world of LOTRO. Recent news and information from Enedwaith suggests that it is a zone from level 60 – 65! Meaning players will have an alternative to leveling in Mirkwood! So where does this talk of geography and leveling zones fit together? Why the title Enough is never enough?
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Veneration posted this on June 28th, 2010.
Categorized as dungeon, Dungeon Guides, Guide, Mirkwood, Sword Hall.
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So before we begin this End Game Guide I’d like to first off apologize to my readers for the stupidly long wait between part I and part II. A few personal things came into play and I was forced to take a small sabbatical from finishing this article. So lets get down into it shall we?
First things first! This Part II will not be as numbers based or as technically versed as Part I, and there is a very good reason for that. Guides that put people on a "Track" of sorts, only giving them the information they need to complete the task at hand forces players to work almost perfectly to the guides specifications. No two groups are the same; no two players play the same way. For this reason, I’ve decided to write this in a way that will help you to understand the reasons that things are done a certain way, instead of just telling you how to do it step by step.
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Veneration posted this on June 16th, 2010.
Categorized as E3, General, LotRO News, PC Gamer, store.
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This week is the all mighty and powerful E3. And in good old E3 Fashion… they get to see the fun stuff first. PCGamer has done us a service by posting some great news on F2P Turbine Store Items! See their article which includes some (blurry) pictures of the store items!
These are just a few items in the store, and this should give you an idea of the types of things we’ll be seeing! For those of you actively invited to Free to Play Beta, you’re already seeing this, so you know more than we do!
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Veneration posted this on June 10th, 2010.
Categorized as dungeon, Dungeon Guides, Mirkwood, Sword Hall.
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EGGuides (End Game Guides) is a new mini-project I’m doing to keep players involved and interested in End Game content. Feel free to let me know if you’d like to help out or get involved!
This guide may be old news to some of you, but to others the Sword-Hall of Dol Guldur is still a challenging and new experience waiting to be conquered! For this reason I’ve taken the time to break this Small Fellowship Instance down into an easy to read guide. This guide will be posted in Two Parts. Each part will cover an aspect of the instance challenge from Preparation to Boss Fight Strategy.
- Part I: Brief Overview, Group Composition, Preparation, Arena Layout and Knowing Your Enemy
- Part II: Strategy and Boss Fights
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Veneration posted this on June 5th, 2010.
Categorized as Free to Play, lotro, LotRO News, turbine.
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This chart was posted at The Beta Signup subpage. I ran over this link on the forums and felt it was necessary to post it on to you all. You can view the official page here: http://www.lotro.com/betasignup/vipchart.html
Veneration posted this on May 14th, 2010.
Categorized as future, General.
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On March 26th, 2010 PAX East hit Boston. We were there hoping and praying for that an announcement would be made about a new expansion, like what happened at PAX Prime and the announcement of Siege of Mirkwood. Although no official announcement was made, Adam Mersky (Director of Communications at Turbine) may have given us one after all!
This video surfaced on the 5th of May on GameSharkVideo’s youtube channel and was titled “Interview with LOTRO”. I don’t think they knew what that had on their hands or this would have surfaced a little faster!
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Veneration posted this on May 4th, 2010.
Categorized as game systems, General, MMO.
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For my fairly young age I’ve most likely spent more time in MMOs than I have bathing, eating or… well, other required human tasks! My interest in Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games has shaped many aspects of my life, like my work, relationships (My wife is a huge MMO player as well) and my choice of friends.
In this (what I would call well spent) time, I have seen game mechanics and game features/system that have changed the way we play MMOs today. Features like the modern day Aggro Mechanic all the way up to LOTRO’s Cosmetic system. These unique ideas and features in games often become well known find themselves into other games in one form or another. This is how game development works and is a healthy part of how progress is made.
Truly original ideas are hard to come by in gaming these days, and when they are found they either fail or flourish. Features like LOTRO’s Cosmetic System and Ultima Online’s Housing Customization are two such features that players will always compare and hope for. Successful ideas that were implemented perfectly.
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