LOTRO

The official Lord of the Rings Online site has been updated with a new developer diary by Brian 'Zombie Columbus' Aloisio. The diary goes into great detail about why the team chose to look at and overhaul the Rune-keeper class. Aloisio and team wanted to enhance underused skills, nerfed a few 'overpowered' skills, and to make pathways to power more interesting and varied.

Four Trait set Bonuses

Confession time: the four Trait Set Bonuses were bugged and don’t work. Some people knew this, but now everyone who reads this diary will. Fixing them was a high priority for this update, but in the end, we decided that remaking them was the best option. This allowed us to give out a bonus that was more appropriate and (in the case of fire) needed, while avoiding giving a buff that would likely throw balance out the window (in the case of light-ing). The individual buffs we’ve added are listed below. Remember, these are 100% additions; the bonuses you’ve seen written in the live tooltips were not having any effect in game.

Read more here.

The official Lord of the Rings Online blog has been updated with a new Producer's Letter from Turbine's Kate “Nereid” Paiz. In the letter, Paiz reviews some of the information about subscriptions that was revealed during the Austin GDC and then continued on discussing Turbine's expanded view of LOTRO. Included in Paiz's remarks is information about a fundamental shift with regard to updates and how that impact the game's development throughout 2011.

On the topic of updates, I wanted to let you know that we have shifted the way we think about our releases. In the past our updates depended on new Books being added to the Epic story. Going forward, updates will not always feature a new installment in the epic story line. By decoupling the Books from Updates we’ll have the flexibility to offer different types of new content and new features in each release. This will also allow us to do more releases each year. Don’t worry, continuing the Epic Story and continuing along the path of the Ring is very important to us! We’ll have more information to share about that and our plans for 2011 in the coming months.

Read the full Producer's Letter here.

PLAYER ALERT: Recently we have been made aware of a website that has copied the exact design and uses a very similar URL as that of our official account management page. This site is in not associated with Turbine in any way.  This is an attempt to phish (steal) player information and compromise player accounts. Please be aware that the official Turbine account management page is found at https://myaccount.turbine.com.  We recommend bookmarking the official account management page for future use.

MMORPG.com writer Adam Tingle has been on a quest to find great free-to-play games. Delving into our site's Game List, Adam has spent time playing F2P games, both good and not so good. This week, Adam takes time to look at Lord of the Rings Online, recently turned F2P by Warner Interactive and Turbine. See what Adam thinks of Middle Earth in its newest incarnation and whether or not it is worthy of your time.

For those unaware or simply too cool to care, Turbine has taken a bold move and converted its flagship MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online, to the F2P subscription model. While this decision has polarized opinion, it is a brave step and the developer deserves praise for trying to find a way out of playing second fiddle to bigger games such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

Read more F2P Survivor Guy: LOTRO.

At last week's PAX convention, MMORPG.com's Garrett Fuller had the opportunity to check out the new F2P-P2P hybrid version of Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine's Aaron Campbell took Garrett through the game and discussed some of the finer points like "Does free to play actually mean free to play?" Garrett also got a look at what he called "he most interesting online haunted house I’ve ever seen." Read on!

Turbine has been working hard converting LOTRO to free to play, and, if you’re like me, you probably either have some skepticism about the idea or simply don’t understand how it works. Aaron helped clear this up and even explained how a character doesn’t really have to pay a dime to enjoy time in Middle Earth.

Read more LOTRO: PAX Chat with Aaron Campbell.