I was doing Filikul runs nearly every Monday and Thursday last year but only one since my recent return to LOTRO. I always did PUG raids before, but lately my kinship attendance has been picking up. Tonight when I logged on there were 15+ level 65 characters on so we did a quick Filikul run. It was a first for several of them. I was the only Lore-master so we couldn’t use the strategy I used last year. For that matter, I currently have Arwellyn traited for full-on flaming dps, so her crowd control, healing and power sharing are gimped.

Tonight was The Stoned Alliance’s very first kinship-only Filikul run!

I haven’t played DDO in over a year so I can’t say how things are there, but since F2P launch the number of compromised LOTRO accounts have skyrocketed.

Mine included.

Luckily, I was online at the time. My kinship had just finished an instance run about a week-and-a-half ago and were in the process of reloading back into the world when I got the message that I was being disconnected because I had just logged into the Brandywine server. Huh? Suspecting the worst, I immediately hit up the Turbine Account page and changed my password then re-logged back into the game, which would boot the hacker offline just like I had been minutes earlier.

I was lucky, and did that before the hacker had time to switch servers to where my active characters are.

Quick question for you walking LOTRO encyclopedias out there:

While I realize the Lore-master loading screen (Turbine calls them “logo screens” whatever) is artwork, not a tweaked screenshot, is this light armour outfit actually in the game? If so, what’s it called?

I had planned on visiting the family for Christmas as a surprise, but my travel options fell through and I barely made it home Christmas Eve at all. My girlfriend is in New York with her family as usual, so that left me home alone for the holidays. I decided to see whether my LOTRO burnout had worn off or not, since dabbling in STO at least got me re-interested in the MMO genre again.

Enedwaith

I briefly visited the new zone of Enedwaith in the F2P Beta but only to see things and visit the stable masters. Now I’ve taken Arwellyn through the majority (it seems?) of the actual Enedwaith content, with only a small fellowship quest and a solo quest (which I’ve attempted three times, and still have no clue how to survive it solo *grumble*)

I returned to LOTRO a few days ago after taking a break shortly after the F2P Beta began. Between brief beta participation, automatic completion of several new deeds when F2P went live, plus my monthly Turbine Point stipend for being a Lifetime VIP, I had around 6,000 or so Turbine Points. I bought three additional storage “chests” for Arwellyn: one for her vault, one for wardrobe, and one shared storage. Then after a few days of participating in this year’s Yule Festival, she went to her personal house and came to the realization that F2P has rendered housing essentially pointless.

LOTRO housing has always had its share of criticisms: the “hook” system, the instanced neighborhoods with nothing to actually do or bring you there, and so forth. Other than the cosmetic appeal of arranging your personal house how you wanted and perhaps displaying trophies of your achievements for passers-by to see, the primary use for housing was additional storage, which until F2P was at a premium.

As Turbine tweeted earlier today, they have released us from the NDA for their upcoming F2P/Freemium conversion. I have an actual article in my head that I may sit down and write tomorrow but for now I’ll just leave you with a slideshow of the Beta 1 screenshots I took.

I have had neither time nor motivation to participate in Beta 2 yet other than keeping the client patched. Mostly because I found myself approaching the situation I was in during beta for The Burning Crusade which caused me to cancel my WoW account, delete every character on every server and never look back. I don’t want that to happen with LOTRO so I have intentionally backed off my playtime in Beta 2.

I did tweet this earlier, but need to vent and get it off my chest here in more than 140 characters. I’ve done my fair share of beta testing and it isn’t often I come across the type of NDA that doesn’t even allow testers to admit they’re in beta. Turbine did that to us. Then they release every possible tidbit of information to the gaming sites and blogs, then very detailed developer diaries. Meanwhile we’re still under NDA so we can’t even comment on all this because doing so is admitting you’re in the beta and therefore violating the NDA. Is there much left to even discuss at this point? It was an extremely aggravating experience, to say the least.

I’ve been back to LOTRO for roughly two months-ish and have been dabbling with Arwellyn’s progression in a few areas. She’s been kindred with the Galadhrim in Lothlorien for some time now, though other than wearing the armour as a cosmetic outfit I’m not really seeing where kindred is any advantage. I’m sure I’m missing something somewhere?

One of Arkenstone’s best Lore-masters, Hexhazzard (Arwellyn used to be included in that elite group; not sure where she stands now after being gone a year) leads Filikul raids every Monday and Thursday when the locks expire so I’ve done every one of them and this past Monday, Arwellyn had enough Bright Emblems of Nimrodel to barter for her first level 60 First Age legendary staff!

I gave it the same name as the Second Age staff which was crafted for me awhile back since I had a Relic Master NPC deconstruct that staff.

Both Massively and Ten Ton Hammer put up the E3 preview of LOTRO’s upcoming content update, which sounds like it will coincide with the business model shift this autumn. Currently untitled, Book 2 will continue the storyline where Book 1 The Oath of the Rangers left off. It sounds like this will also be a FREE update, not a Quest Pack in the LOTRO Store; though I also read the new zone of Enedwaith and the Epic Book quest line will be free, and the rest of the quests will be in a Quest Pack. So, that bit is unconfirmed currently.

As stated (accidentally?) by Adam Mersky back in March, the update will contain a new landmass of Enedwaith, which will be a level 62-65 zone located directly south of Eregion. From the preview map seen on Massively’s article, along with guesstimates from the forums, it sounds like Enedwaith is roughly the size of Eregion as well. Also we can see two points on the south to travel to Dunland, which is technically a part of Enedwaith so we’ll see how that gets handled later.

A day late and a dollar short on writing this, eh? Hey, I was more motivated to play the game rather than write about it this past weekend. Plenty of others have done the writing, and I agree with most of what other informed and reasonable (thus automatically disqualifying Keen) bloggers and writers have already said.

I’ll openly admit, despite being “in the know” about how Turbine handled things in DDO, that my first reaction to the LOTRO announcement was a sharp gasp, followed by a Darth Vader-esque “Nooooooooooooo!” But that reaction was caused by years of exposure to what “Free to Play” or “F2P” has meant under the predominantly Asian model. A few seconds later, my mind returned to reality and I realized this will most likely be a great thing not only for LOTRO, but also something the other developers and publisher may want to watch with a keen eye.

What will it mean for me, personally? Looking at the VIP Chart on the Beta Signup page, nothing is going to change in my own gaming, aside from finally giving me a few options I’ve been wanting. I am a Founder and a Lifetime member, which means I will automatically become a VIP member without the subscription and I’ll still get the 500 Turbine Points in addition to the Loyalty Reward points for my existing account status.