After the previous weekend’s failure at Weathertop, we decided it was time to work on getting a few levels before attempting to move on with the epic quest line again.  With four of us looking at a 6 person event, we need to get well ahead of it in levels before we go back.

The whole team was out on Saturday night:

September 10th.

That is the day that Lord of the Rings Online follows Dungeons & Dragons Online into the land of Free to Play.

Or endless beginner trial.

Or no-money down access.

Or however you want to frame the business model that Turbine is adopting.

But the change is coming.  The floodgates will be open. (Current subscribers will get a 2 day head start)

The LOTRO Store will be a fact of the game.

How much the store, and the unfettered access to the the game will ..read the full article

Facebook ads are to this coming decade what 3am TV ads used to be 20 years ago; low budget and often humorous.

I keep seeing ads on Facebook that make me chuckle or scratch my head, like this one.

How is this different than regular paper?

The Facebook ad system allows you to pick your target audience, but keeps you to a tweet-like level of text that often cannot get across what the advertiser is trying to express.

By the way, Gaming Paper appears ..read the full article

The Site

This month saw another big spike in traffic due to something pretty much unrelated to the site.

Cracked.com linked to a rant I wrote quite a while back about the mis-use of the term “microtransactions.”  They did a humor piece about FarmVille, and somehow my post seemed relevant.

Obligatory Traffic Graph

Also driving traffic this month were the search terms “Blood Elf Porn,” “Elf Porn,” and “Ancient Porn.”  All this for a post titled Fighting Blood Elf Porn.  Do you suppose ..read the full article

There are always multiple ways of looking at a problem.  The entertainment software industry sees the used game market, embodied by GameStop, as a bad thing.  As THQ’s Cory Ledesma put it in an interview over at CVG:

We hope people understand that when the game’s bought used we get cheated

And Penny Arcade got in on the act and made the “used games = piracy” association.

I wrote 1,500 words on the subject, but tossed them because in my mind it all ..read the full article

We had what is essentially the whole available team online and together in Middle-earth on Saturday night.

Our group for the night was:

Due to absences and alts, we have managed to get ourselves a bit spread out with regard to levels.  While LOTRO is somewhat self-correcting in this regard, lower level characters get more exp for the same, quest both ..read the full article

Massive Blips is gone.

I woke up this morning and found their feed down.

Their site now redirects to this message (click to enlarge):

Thank you for your interest

Massive Blips was, until yesterday, a site that tracked and helped promote MMO related blogs.  It was one of a set of similar sites under the DailyRadar brand which also included WoW, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and other gaming categories as well as a large number of non-gaming topics.

DailyRadar was somewhat in the Digg category ..read the full article

If you didn’t like the IP idea in my last post, why not just go with Forgotten Realms?

Is Forgotten Realms good for everybody?

(Quiet you Dragonlance weenies!)

As noted over at Massively, Cryptic announced their next project, Neverwinter.

This is what Cryptic has to say about the game so far:

100 years have passed since the Spellplague consumed the world of Faerûn. Neverwinter, a once majestic city of magic and adventure upon the mighty Sea of Swords, is still being rebuilt from ..read the full article

Why not Stunt Rock?

What base doesn’t that cover?

Filed under: entertainment, Humor, MMO Design Tagged: MMO IPs, Stunt Rock

Our correspondent headed through Southshore in the Hillsbrad Foothills only to find that the Alliance had been pushed out and that the town lay in ruins.

Southshore Deserted

Pools of Plague All Over

The Southshore Inn Deserted

A Fire Still Burns Inside Though

A Plague Spreader on the Edge of Town

Tarren Mill

New Camp on the Road to Silverpine

A Closer Look at the Camp

Filed under: Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft Tagged: Cataclysm, Cataclysm Beta, Correspondent Report, Southshore ..read the full article

There were only three of us available on Saturday night.

Earl had an opportunity to drive in an autocross event, one of his many hobbies, on Sunday morning.  But that meant getting up early, something not exactly compatible with staying up until 3am gaming.  So he bowed out for the night.

Gaff as well was out, though for the longer term.  A high school teacher, the coming onset of classes and coaching one of the sports teams signaled the end of his ..read the full article

Reader Kirjath sent me a link to a Yahoo article about boar problems in Germany.

Climate change has been good to the boars of Central Europe and they are flourishing.  According to the article:

Central Europe is turning into a land of plenty for the animals, as warmer weather causes beech and oak trees to overproduce seeds and farmers to grow more crops the boars like to feast on such as corn or rape, said Torsten Reinwald of the ..read the full article

I have pretty modest expectations for the coming transition of Lord of the Rings Online to a Free to Play financial model, which is scheduled to happen on September 10th.  Subscriptions will be out… sort of… there will be that whole VIP Level of commitment… and the LOTRO Store will be in.

And since my expectations are modest, I haven’t really felt the need to join in the beta just to check out the store.

Last week, however, they were going to ..read the full article

The Barrens.

Home to Ratchet, the Crossroads, and every Chuck Norris joke known to man.

Our Cataclysm Beta correspondent spent some time (under duress) taking some screen shots of the giant crack that has torn the Barrens asunder.

I am waiting for the best Chuck Norris joke that explains how it happened.

The molten crack and the invading jungle

Maybe this will keep the Alliance out of the Crossroads

Lake on the edge of the fissure

Staring into the crack

Trees on the ..read the full article

It is true.

I have disliked the flavor of raspberries my entire life.

I do not like them fresh, I do not like them as jam, I do not like them as a filling between layers of a cake, I do not like them as a sherbet, I do not like them as a flavor in iced tea.

I won’t go near a jelly doughnut with a red colored filling, because it always ends up being raspberry.

I don’t like things with artificial raspberry ..read the full article

One of the potential downsides of going back to Lord of the Rings Online is that I have been through the level 1 through 30 content nearly a dozen times now.

As you grow older it has been my observation that your tolerance for repetition goes down.  When I was 20 or so and sharing an apartment with a buddy, we had a VCR.  It was his family’s first VCR, one of the giant RCA models that was so big it ..read the full article

I have had several posts up of late about accounts being compromised and phishing attempts I have received, all revolving around World of Warcraft.

It seems like a huge issue.  But I have four accounts that belonged to friends compromised in the last few months (one of which was a double, two accounts with different user IDs and passwords compromised) and I get more than one WoW related phishing email per day, so it is something that is up in my ..read the full article

Every time I bring up World of Warcraft accounts getting hacked, as I did yet again this past weekend, the comments that follow seem to fall into three distinct categories.  This pattern seems pretty consistent.

Unfairly, but in the name of simplicity, I have given these three categories names,  They are:

Or, graphically:

It Is Your Fault

This point of view is probably best summed up by a comment from a read that said, essentially, “Blizzard ..read the full article