1st Community watch by Lotro Life

While browsing the net for LOTRO related news and articles (and an everlasting battle to promote our young site) I usually come across a lot of fun articles and projects. The LOTRO community feels to be still at its very beginning. There are not that many community created sites and fresh ideas seemed to be few and apart. This seems to be changing as the game world goes into it's 2nd month and the free content update is around the corner.

What I found is that there are the, almost obligatory, big portal LOTRO sites like the ones at IGN, Stratics, Curse-Gaming, and Tentonhammer. These guys are backed up by the big internet corporations but played a large role in promoting the game pre-release. Some of these portals are led by very dedicated people that are true LOTRO enthusiasts like Loktofeit at lotrovaul.ign.com. Tentonhammer's portal is one of the oldes LOTRO communities around as well.

Then there are the gold selling fronts. I have been surprised by how fast the gold selling enterprises have responded to LOTRO release. They have put up sites that feel as if being legit and made by genuine fans, but than you see this huge block of gold selling commercials and every other word in their "articles" is about how you can buy gold... Even our LOTRO top list feels to be a part of this circle along with some sites promoting themselves to be lotro wikis, databases, guides sites, lotro player faces sites, etc. Now I have no proof of my allegations and they are an expression of a personal opinion, but I sure as hell won't be losing my time on these kinds of sites. You'll probably recognize them by yourself.

Finally, coming to the focus of this article are the efforts of individuals that would just like to contribute something to the LOTRO community. The kinship sites, EU and US server "portals", player blogs and some really cool groups of people with unique ideas. We have tried including such sites in our links section but this part of the community is still in its forming stage and we hope it will progress rapidly. Without further ado  here are some interesting stuff we picked up on the net:

- http://www.evernighteurope.co.uk the home for the players of the server Silriel and I play on managed by Nuala in a very tasteful fashion. Great looking site.
- Our friend Trinity from www.female-gamer.com has posted a webcomic of her own which I truly enjoyed. Female gamer is a regularly updated blog and each article is a joy to read so you can check it out without fear of boredom.
- Jesters of middle earth is one of those cool and unique ideas springing from the LOTRO community. They are a group of RPG players organizing really fun and unique events including the "first ever organized conga in Lord of the Rings Online" to the "Battle of the Bards contest" I find particularly cool. Check them out at http://jesters-of-middle-earth.com/
- A Catholic priest doing a podcast about LOTRO - now that is something to check out - http://www.sqpn.com/?cat=34
- Last but not least is the http://savethenorbogs.org/ - an outrageously funny and unique spoof site that sure brought some joy to them gloomy mornings.

So much for this weeks community watch. I hope you enjoy this attempt of ours to bring you some fun sites to browse. If you have any links to recommend don't be shy and post in our Site Suggestions forum or contact us.

P.S. We came across a Russian mmorpg community at leash.ru and guess what - these guys actually translated Lotro Life webcomics to Russian! You can see an example here.