Lord of the Rings Online

While it didn't take much reading between the lines to realize that Turbine has an expansion in the works for Lord of the Rings Online this year, the team confirmed the terminology in a dev chat. The devs hinted that the full announcement would come around the game's sixth anniversary next month.

Players had many questions regarding the promised but vaguely detailed revamp coming to characters. Turbine revealed a few more details in the chat: "Three trees per class. Some degree of blending at a higher cost than sticking with a pure build. Bonuses granted based on an early-level specialization choice that grows as points are spent. You can have multiple specs. You can respec."

Other interesting nuggets to chew on from the Q&A session include the news that player housing will include crafting facilities, virtue acquisition may see a significant change, and that applications for the player council will begin tomorrow.

Virtues are never far from my mind in Lord of the Rings Online, although recently they've been more a concern as I've been dithering around with several alts in a reality TV show-type vetting of a backup character. While not very sexy in comparison to class, race, and legendary traits, virtues are essential to bolstering your character's stats. As I've said in the past, not pursuing and equipping virtues is akin to ditching a very useful set of armor; you can do it, but it's not recommended.

As LotRO really does not go out of its way to explain virtues and particularly which deeds you'll need to pursue to rank each one up, you'll have to go out of the game and do some basic homework or else be left behind.

While I'm not an expert on all things virtue-related, I've certainly been around the block a few times and would like to share 10 strategies that help me to choose and acquire a good set of virtues over the long haul. And getting 16 ranks in five virtues is a long haul, make no mistake.

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Lord of the Rings Online raiders rejoice: Today marks the end of a very long wait for Riders of Rohan raids. Update 10: Against the Shadow, Part II ushers in the second half of the expansion's instance cluster as well as some fairly significant stat changes as the dev team prepares for wide-sweeping class revamps.

The new instances include a six-person fight, The Bells of Dale, plus a trio of 12-person raids: Flight to the Lonely Mountain, the Fires of Smaug, and the Battle for Erebor.

Update 10 has beefed up fate's effects and made agility the Warden's primary stat. Also included with the patch are several new store options, the ability to turn off forced emoting, the removal of dread upon defeat on the landscape, and new scaling for all of the In Their Absence instances. You can read the patch notes on the official site.

A few weeks ago I asked everyone to send me in screenshots of pre-2004 MMOs... and only Brad delivered. Seriously, people, you've been shown up by Brad. Brad gets the gold star. Brad gets the golden ticket and can come on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to see the fabled Massively word factory. Brad is my hero.

Brad (if you didn't catch his name) sent us in this shot of Ultima Online: "So much fun with vendors! This is a shot of Angelica's on the Chesapeake Server -- a popular shopping spot in Felucca to grab gear on the go. It was one of the few player-owned vendor spots in a protected zone near Lord British's Castle. This would have been taken around 2002. Notice the detail of the fish tank made from stacked cloth and the flowers made with an onion and two cooked eggs!"

Yes. Notice Brad's eggs, people. In them you can see the reflection of your failure. Aw, just kidding!

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In addition to my tried-and-true kinship home on Landroval with The Council of the Secret Fire, I'm part of several other guilds in various MMOs. One of them, Mercy Gaming, went from a Star Wars: The Old Republic guild to a multi-game guild as our interests expanded and shifted. A few weeks back, I discovered that several roaming members of the guild had decided to set up camp in Lord of the Rings Online and found it a great spot to make a game home.

As someone who's been playing LotRO on and off since launch, I think it's downright refreshing to get to experience the game through a whole set of newcomers' eyes. You remember how it was when you were just a low-level Hobbit skipping through the Shire and ignorant of the larger world. It does wonderful things to cleaning off the crusty familiarization that builds up on veterans, I tell you.

I thought it'd be a good learning experience to talk to two of my guildies -- David and Mark -- to show you their perspective as LotRO newbies in 2013. Yes, it's true: New players do come into this game all the time.

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One of the issues plaguing player housing in MMOs is what to do with those houses after the player-owners have left the game or stopped paying for their subscriptions. In Ultima Online, the granddaddy of all MMO housing, your home drops to the ground if you haven't paid your sub in 90 days (and your shardmates can loot all your stuff in a grand free-for-all!). In Star Wars Galaxies, your house stayed standing until it ran out of pre-paid maintenance money, which worked pretty well to help the active players reclaim city space until maintenance was turned off for a few years in consideration for hurricane victims.

Even games with instanced housing feel the space crunch. In Lord of the Rings Online, failure to pay your maintenance fees in-game leads to the eventual return of your lot to the public pool and your having to buy back all your loot from an escrow NPC.

MMO developers are torn between the desire to lure back former players with the promise that their houses are still intact and the desire to keep the world, instanced or not, clear and open for paying or active players. So what do you guys think -- what should be the more dominant goal? If you step away from a game, should your character's home decay? And if it did, would you ever return to the game?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Few people are without opinions on minigames in MMOs. Some love 'em, some hate 'em, and some just ignore 'em. Some even despise that I won't type "th." Takes all types, really. Personally, I'm all for including new types of enjoyable systems that can be repeated, particularly if it benefits my character in some way.

There's also this perception that minigames are just for kids. It's true that more kid-centric titles like Free Realms and Clone Wars Adventures thrive on minigames like you thrive on deep-fried butter balls, but these little diversions exist all over the place in "grownup" titles too. Holidays are a favorite time to trot them out, although there are plenty that exist year-round.

Today we're going to look at 10 creative minigames that have tickled my fancy over the year. Yes, I used the word "fancy." Whatcha gonna do about it?

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Lord of the Rings Online's Wardens are understandably nervous about the big stat changes coming to the class in Update 10. To help clear up any confusion, Turbine's posted a dev diary crunching the numbers and outlining how the change will roll out.

The big change is that the Warden's primary stat will switch from might to agility, and the class' primary form of avoidance will switch from blocking to evading (although the Warden's shield will still provide plenty of the former). As a result, one block-based trait is being reworked to feature evading, and the devs are looking for ways to beef up Wardens' mitigations now that might is no longer a primary stat.

Because the change will impact Wardens who have stocked up on plenty of might gear, Turbine is offering a lengthy grace period to allow the class' players to start switching over to agility gear while keeping both might and agility as primary stats. The grace period is said to last the full length of Update 10 and perhaps longer.

A few weeks ago we previewed Lord of the Rings Online's Update 10 raids. Now, you can get even more info straight from the horse's mouth thanks to the latest Turbine dev diary. The lengthy piece offers up detailed mechanical peeks at the new six-man Bells of Dale instance, the Flight to the Lonely Mountain raid, the Fires of Smaug Raid, and the Battle for Erebor raid.

There's also a blurb on the ITA ("in their absence") instance cluster that you can read at the official LotRO website.

Lord of the Rings Online players had a third go-around with Turbine's staff in the latest dev chat series. Well over 50 questions were asked and answered during the Twitter event, many of which concerned the upcoming class changes, housing revamp, and player council. There was even talk of a new monster play class, although the devs were careful to cage answers in "maybes" and "we've discussed it."

So what are some of the possibilities for housing? "Just ideas for this month but... more/better storage, better item placement rules, ways to display armor/weapons." The team also hinted that "rewarding choices" will be tantamount to class builds, getting away from the hybrid design that was prominent in the past.

It's a long and perhaps rewarding read, so get thee to the transcript if LotRO is your bag!

Wondering what to do while whiling away the time waiting for the second half of Lord of the Rings Online's promised Riders of Rohan instance cluster? How about lose yourself in some of the imagery that will be awaiting you when Update 10 finally hits servers! Turbine has released 10 new screenshots showing off scenes from all three raid instances -- Flight to Lonely Mountain, The Fires of Smaug, and The Battle for Erebor -- as well as the single group instance, Bells of Dale.

Feast your eyes on the images in the gallery below. And if that isn't enough to tide you over, you can get more up-close and personal with Massively's hands-on preview.

[Source: Turbine press release]

It goes without saying that many Turbine players were disheartened by last week's excessive downtime. To make it up to the players, the studio announced that it's turning on the happy bonus switch in some of its games as a way to welcome fans back.

Lord of the Rings Online players will get 100% more XP per monster kill and an increased drop rate for lootboxes until February 26th. These bonuses come on top of the 250 Turbine Points that will be given to established players as compensation for the downtime.

Dungeons and Dragons Online players will see +2 quality loot in chests and receive +25% Heroic and Epic XP. These bonuses last through February 20th.

I could hear some of you thinking in disbelief last week, "If Age of Conan isn't one of your top MMO scores, what is? And just how much am I not sending you a Christmas card this year, you loser?" You were kind enough to just think it and not say it, but I could hear it even so.

As we've mentioned countless times in this column, musical tastes are subjective. What's appealing to you may not be for me and vice-versa. What more is that musical tastes -- and favorites -- are always shifting around. I listen back to the jams that I enjoyed in the '90s and absolutely pity my younger self for such a deficiency in his musical diet.

So I thought that I'd take a week off our normal soundtrack reviews to bring to you my current top six favorite soundtracks. This list comes with the caveat that it's always subject to future changes as I continue to listen through more soundtracks for this column.

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