It’s clear! I’ve read it all! And with a cat sleeping on my keyboard so I can’t type without hitting her ear (got to love helpful cats). So here goes, with two stories from a variety of blogs this time – one about WAR and one about LotRO:

A lot’s been written about the new WAR free trial, taking out the 10 day restriction and just opening up Tier 1 for free play. WAR is a game that will always be close to my heart and I would definitely boot it up sometime post-Mirkwood and play through some Nordenwatch for old time’s sake. I hope it gets them some extra subs, and going streaming is great too. Of course, it’s not ALL good news, because apparently GOA hasn’t announced a similar scheme yet.

When we were writing The Book of Grudges back in the day, it always frustrated me how much of my time I had to spend talking about the differences between the EU and US experience for players. I thought I’d dropped that as a topic when I switched to a more generic blog, but now it’s raised its ugly head for me in LotRO. Turbine run and develop the game in the US. Codemasters run it in Europe. In terms of server stability and even my own personal experience with GMs, I have no problem with the Codemasters service. But, it did take an age to get EU players access to the Lorebook for editing purposes (a bit of a smokescreen I have to say and one I never got behind, because I think the Lorebook is pretty pointless).