LOTRO Community Manager, Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, posted a notice on the forums and other social media about upcoming server maintenance: The LOTRO Game Servers and http://myaccount.turbine.com will be offline for maintenance on Monday, May 18th from 3:00AM to 2:00PM Eastern (-4 GMT). The forums will remain up, but players may not be able to log in....

The Tolkien Estate website has been updated to include some of the working drawings from Tolkien of maps that he used for The Lord of the Rings. These have not been previously available to the public. On the website, the drawings can be explored with zoom, allowing a close-up view of details such as the map above, which has Beornings written in red ink near the...

LOTRO Community Manager, Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, posted a notice on the forums for upcoming server downtime: The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Monday, May 4th from 8:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT) for an update to the game. Patch notes will be available during the downtime. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll see you back in the game...

LOTRO has announced the rewards for its 8th anniversary. Rewards from previous years are carried forward, with a new tier added for those who mark their 8th year along with the game: 8 Year Accounts created on April 30th, 2007 or earlier Songs of your deeds have traveled far and wide. Rohan, and now Gondor know your name! You will receive: An 8-year character...

This week’s Thursday stream from LOTRO featured Community Manager Andy “Frelorn”Cataldo and developer Trevor “Jinjaah” McEwen discussing the new system for Legendary Items coming in Update 16. For those who missed the stream, the recording is available as a highlight on LOTRO’s official Twitch channel, and was also posted on...

Please note: The following post was an April Fool’s joke and is not real. Word of the latest addition players will be able to acquire in the next update has reached us from a confidential source at Turbine: cosmetic pet balrogs. Presently, we have a variety of tiny huorns, chickens, shrews, cave-claws and more, all available for the price of however long it...

The release notes for Update 15.3 are available on the forums. As expected, this update has addressed the music system, but there were some other fixes included as well. Two of the more significant changes that caught my eye were the following: The OSX Launcher will no longer download all the splash screens every time you start it. It does make an HTTP request...

LOTRO Community Manager, Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, posted a notice on the forums for upcoming server downtime: The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Monday, March 30th from 8:00AM – 12:00PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for Update 15.3. Patch notes will be available during the downtime. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll see you back in the...

LOTRO’s Community Manager, Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, posted an invitation today for players to apply for the 2015 Player’s Council. This year, they are looking to also have a second Player’s Council which will focus solely on PvMP. As in previous years, members of the community can nominate others that they feel would be a positive...

Yesterday, LOTRO posted a video on their official YouTube channel of the lore discussion that Senior World Builder Chris Pierson had with Tolkien scholars Dr. Corey Olsen (President of Mythgard Institute) and Dr. Michael Drout (Professor of English at Wheaton College). Originally streamed live earlier this month, the discussion centers around the history of...

  From yesterday through March 22, featured items in the LOTRO Market are on sale for 50% off. The featured item is the Helm’s Deep expansion, but the sale includes the Expansion Quad Pack, each individual expansion (Mines of Moria, Siege of Mirkwood, Rise of Isengard and Riders of Rohan), and Samwise Gamgee’s Starter Pack....

Frelorn posted on the forums of some upcoming downtime: “The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Wednesday, March 4th from 5:00AM – 12:00PM Eastern (-5 GMT) for maintenance. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll see you back in the game soon!” No mention of any patches or changes, so hopefully all will go as planned and we can be...

Some LOTRO players may remember the live-streamed events that Rick “Sapience” Heaton started a little over a year ago: Taking the Hobbit to Isengard (T.T.H.T.I.). This was followed up by the Strategic Hobbit Incursion to Evacuate Lost Dwarves (better known as S.H.I.E.L.D.). The current community manager, Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, has continued the trend with his...

Pretty much everyone knows how ‘Follow’ works, in theory: you select another player, right-click their portrait in the screen, then click on ‘Follow’ from the drop-down. If you spend a lot of time following someone, or occasionally have trouble clicking on things (or, like me, are too lazy for clicking), you can keybind it to something...

At the time of this writing, Sapience’s “Take the Hobbits to Isengard!” challenge has been completed on nine servers, with twenty more left to go (twenty-one if Bullroarer makes it on the schedule). Having gone over the archived recordings of almost all of the runs, I thought it might be helpful to have a list of things to keep in mind for...