Merric posted this on October 21st, 2010.
Categorized as Codemasters, Europe, F2P, Free-to-Play Beta, LotRO News.
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Codemasters has announced that their Free-to-Play will begin on Monday, October 25th. This is great news and shows promise that F2P will indeed be coming soon to Europe. Considering how shortly this is going up after the recent announcement by David Solari, this might mean we will see a release of F2P in November; hopefully either before or at the release of Turbine’s scheduled November content update!
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Merric posted this on August 31st, 2010.
Categorized as Codemasters, crafting, dev diary, Dev Team, faction, Free-to-Play Beta, LotRO News, reputation, turbine.
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One of the things that I personally glossed over some are the changes coming up to Crafting in the upcoming release of Free-to-Play; which is ironic since I have a ton of crafters. For those of you who may or may not remember, Jewelers and Cooks had quite a few changes with the release of Volume 3, Book 1. With Volume 3.2 Weaponsmiths and Woodworkers are having some revisions which “…introduces an arsenal of new crafted weapons…” that target not only their stats but their damage types as well. However, it’s important to note that no existing crafted weapons will be changed.
Also, many existing Weaponsmith and Woodworker recipes will now be multi-output (meaning they can create different versions of the same item as can be seen in a previous post) as well, allowing players to better adjust the weapons to have stats that would be more relevant to their playing style. I’m vastly in favor of multi-output recipes and I am very much looking forward to these options. Mostly because it’s fairly frustrating to want to create a weapon for a character and the type that I want is meant for a different playing style.
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Goldenstar posted this on August 11th, 2010.
Categorized as beta, changes, Classes, Enedwaith, Episodes, Episodes from 2010, F2P, Fall Festival, Free to Play, Free-to-Play Beta, podcast, roundtable, Roundtables.
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This is our Beta Roundtable that was recorded Tuesday, August 3rd. We have with us five special beta testers who agreed on very short notice to talk about their experiences. We appreciate them taking the time to share their adventures in the beta so far.

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Merric posted this on August 11th, 2010.
Categorized as Codemasters, dev diary, Dev Team, Free-to-Play Beta, instances, jwbarry, LotRO News.
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Today’s post from Joe “jwbarry” Barry is all about Helegrod and the changes that we will be seeing with the upcoming changes in Free-to-Play. This is a fairly long and detailed post, mostly because it was a fairly detailed process. What was a huge outdoor raid has now been segmented into several raids, scaled down from 24-man to 12-man content in most areas, and then re-vamped to the new Instance System. Joe gives a great explanation into most of his actions and the reasons behind them which makes it a good read.
After reading the whole post, I have to say Helegrod seems to have returned with a vengeance. It sounds extremely tough, and the challenge modes sound challenging. I will definitely be paying attention to see how long it takes for the raiding guilds to complete these instances on-level. That aside, considering that these are adjustable by level, it might be possible for kins to run through these on a lower level to acclimate themselves to the fights until they’re ready to do them on-level.
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Goldenstar posted this on August 10th, 2010.
Categorized as beta, F2P, Free to Play, Free-to-Play Beta, General, Minstrel.
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Honestly this post could be summed up quite simply as “Not Much” but I thought it worth a post to describe the smaller more subtle changes currently in beta.
First I’ll take care of the simpler stuff:
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Goldenstar posted this on August 2nd, 2010.
Categorized as beta, Enedwaith, Events, F2P, Free to Play, Free-to-Play Beta, roundtable.
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I’m certain just about everyone has heard by now that the LOTRO Free-to-Play Beta NDA has been lifted and we are now able to share our experiences in the beta. While we do have plans for some juicy beta information posts, we thought it would be fun to have a little Beta Roundtable to record some discussions with fellow beta players and give everyone a bunch of beta impressions at once.
This will be broadcast live as well as recorded and released via iTunes (sorry no transcript will be available).
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Merric posted this on July 28th, 2010.
Categorized as dev diary, Dev Team, Free-to-Play Beta, instances, jwbarry, LotRO News, turbine.
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Released today was Part 2 of 5 in the Instances 2.0 series created by Joe “jwbarry” Barry. In case you don’t remember, this discusses the scaling instance system that’s coming with F2P. This post however covers the rewards that come from completing and scaling instances.
The main issue that Joe ran into when designing this re-vamp was how to scale rewards that are seen in the dungeons. He gives the example of the Great Barrows that scales from level 20 to 60, which would require quite a bit of adjustments on its rewards if it gave them the “unique loot” that we are currently used to from typical dungeons. Learning from the Skirmish System, which uses 3 different types of tokens as rewards/currency, they felt that this system would be a perfect fit for classic dungeons.
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Merric posted this on July 23rd, 2010.
Categorized as Free-to-Play Beta, LotRO News, turbine.
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Released today were several Beta Journals, written by actual players within the Beta, concerning the upcoming LOTRO Store.
Clover writes:
Each week, we’ll ask Beta participants to submit their personal “Beta Journal” on a given topic. We’ll then take a sampling of those responses and post them for the entire LOTRO Community to read.
This week, we’re giving you the initial reactions players reported upon first using the new LOTRO Store.
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