Turbine has started a new feature - Lotro Beta Journals, for all Lotro players who didn't get a chance to participate in the beta. Each week Beta participants can share their thoughts on a given topic with the entire LOTRO Community.

Running a Beta Program can be a tricky thing; everyone who isn't in the beta wants to know what’s going on, but due to NDA restrictions no one in the program can tell them. So how do you let players talk about what they’re seeing, without violating their NDA? The answer is the LOTRO Beta Journal Project! Each week, we’ll ask Beta participants to submit their personal “Beta Journal” on a given topic. We’ll then take a sampling of those responses and post them for the entire LOTRO Community to read.

This week, we’re giving you the initial reactions players reported upon first using the new LOTRO Store:

• the store itself is broken up into multiple categories to make searching for your specific desired item easier
• the store sells all kinds of mounts (temporary mounts, regular mounts, Festival Mounts and Reputation Mounts)
• The store also sells various "power-ups." These can come in many forms, such as temporary or PERMANENT increases to virtues, increased outgoing damage, heal-over-time potions (both morale and power), and Armor buffs.
• store-bought items are all bound to your account though, so you can't trade them with other players.
• they also provide education for patrons: you can learn new ways to express yourself (read: emotes), as well as new dances.
• they run sales and have recommendations as well.
• you can see the description of the item on the box, but you can’t open it to see the pretties, you can’t try on the clothing or even see it on a model.

[More information on lotro.com]

During the last few weeks I have noticed a lot of new Lotro players. New players seem to be confused by the official forum's Reputation System and all it involves. Lotro Life to the rescue with this little guide about the official forums' Reputation System.

Starting January, 2010 Lotro forums introduced a Reputation System which allows forum members to give and receive "Reputation" points to each other based on each others' posts. How much Reputation you can give or take depends on how long you've been a member of the forums and how much Reputation you have yourself!  If you want to give Reputation points to the poster, click on the Reputation icon. You'll be asked if you approve or disapprove the post, then click on "Add to Reputation."

Reputation System
You can give positive and negative Reputation but you must have at least 1500 positive Reputation before you can give negative. When you have positive Reputation, it is displayed as green boxes. The boxes are grey if you have disabled Reputation, and red if you have negative Reputation.

Reputation System Boxes
You can toggle whether your Reputation is displayed to other members by going to User CP -> Edit Options and checking or unchecking the Reputation box.

How to Hide Reputation
Based on your Reputation level you'll earn Reputation titles. The Reputation Titles are viewable by hovering your mouse over a user's Reputation boxes. The Reputation titles seem to be attached to rating numbers and the number of squares:

Number of Squares: Title (Rep Range)

1. The Neutral (1-99)
2. The Wary (100-199)
3. The Wary (200-299)
4. The Wary (300-399)
5. The Wary (400-599)
6. The Neophyte (600-699)
7. The Neophyte (700-899)
8. The Neophyte / the Bounders-Friend (900-1099)
9. The Bounders-Friend (1100-1299)
10. The Bounders-Friend (1300-1499)
11. Watcher of the Roads / the Undefeated / Indomitable (1500+)

The Community Team, after the initial launch of the Reputation System, has opted out of being able to give or receive Reputation.

[Source: FAQ, Thane9, romoen]

Mmorsel and Turbine are giving you a chance to join the Lord of the Rings Online Free-To-Play Beta test. There are three ways to enter and 100 winners will be chosen via random drawing on Saturday, July 24th (5:00 p.m. Pacific/8:00 p.m. Eastern). Winners will not be announced publicly, since participation in the Beta is confidential per the NDA.

More details on Mmorsel

Today Turbine released a bunch of new Enedwaith screenshots which are mainly related to beautiful Enedwaith landscape and new Windfells goats.

Fordirith River	Gloomglens Hobbit House	Lich Bluffs Graves
Nan Laeglin Road	Thrors Coomb Lake	Nan Laeglin Hut
Windfells Goats

This morning 233 brand new screenshots of the LOTRO Store from the F2P beta have appeared on MoB site. As Mordor or Bust explained today, there was a small misunderstanding between Turbine and MoB. The main problem was the fact that the beta NDA is still enforced. Consider this as a sneak peak 🙂

Please note that due to extra work being carried out on the servers, this week's maintenance on 22/07/10 will be extended from 03.00 to 13.00 UK time (GMT+1).

[Source]

This fall with F2P Lotro model, new features and a new region, Turbine will also be adding new servers! We still don't know how many new servers will be added but with the current poll choices (13 names) there must be more than two. As we can see the new servers names will be a break from the current name pattern. New options for servers names are locations in the Middle-Earth world while this wasn't a case with more than a half of the live servers. Unfortunately players don't have a chance to suggest new names 🙂

This fall many exciting changes are coming to The Lord of the Rings Online. In addition to new features and a new region, we’ll also be adding new servers! Choosing a server can be an important part of your LOTRO experience and the name of your chosen server is an important consideration. So we’re asking you to help us name our newest servers!

We’ve assembled a list of names to choose from. Simply cast your vote for your favorite and we’ll refer to the community selections as we name our new servers. Make your choice quickly! You only have until Friday, July 23, 2010 at 5:00PM Eastern (-4 GMT) to cast your vote!

[Sapience]

The latest news about implementation of LUA scripting in Lotro have cause mixed reaction among Lotro fans. Today, Narrel, Game Systems Engineer, made additional clarification about LUA scripting abilities.

With the breaking news of Lua’s introduction into The Lord of the Rings Online, we wanted to give you a brief history of how this system came about, what state it is in, and where we want it to go.

History:
To start, I will say that the primary driver behind introducing UI plugins is this: no single version of a UI element will ever be ideal for all players everywhere. What one player loves about part of the UI can send the player standing next to them reeling into a frothing rage of frustration. Knowing this, a small group of us got together last year and began investigating the possibility of adding a UI scripting system.

As several other games have used Lua successfully for UI scripting, we decided to look into it and were quickly able to get a prototype Lua UI scripting interface into our engine. Since then, we have gradually continued to develop the system alongside our other initiatives. Today, we are in the process of Beta testing the Lua UI scripting interface on our closed Beta preview servers.

Current State:
Many of you have been asking what this means when it goes live. This system has been implemented to allow players to override existing elements in the graphical user interface. The functionality available in its current state is small in scope but introduces a lot of fun UI possibilities. Our Lua-based UI plugin system exposes functionality through chunks of functionality referred to as “APIs.” In its current state, we have implemented the following APIs:

• Basic UI element creation (such as windows, text boxes, buttons, etc.)
• Quickslot information (allowing for additional quickslot arrangements for skills, items, etc.)
• Inventory UI information
• Your character’s morale/power information as well as what effects you currently have on you

To clarify, our implementation of Lua scripting in our game is not a macro-able/BOT-able interface. The system does not allow automated input such as mouse-clicks or macroing, nor does it allow automatic skill execution. Any UIs created through Lua scripts will still require human interaction to use.

We intend to continue heavy Beta testing on the Lua UI scripting system on the private test servers. There are several internal hurdles that remain to be cleared before the initial launch of the system and it is not yet guaranteed that “Lua in LOTRO” will launch in the Volume 3 Book 2 (F2P launch) timeframe. Much like our initial launch of QuestGuide or DX10, we will likely launch the feature as a public “beta” stage/“work in progress” as we continue to solidify and expand the initial functionality.

The Future:
As for our future plans for this, our intention is to continue to add more API functionality after the initial launch. For example, some of the popular requested APIs are: target, fellowship, and raid vitals, as well as vault functionality similar to the current API’s inventory functionality. The ultimate goal for this system is to allow players to legitimately customize their UI as a largely upgraded version of our current long-standing “UI skinning” tech. It’s all about the UI and letting players change it so the information we already expose in our current UI can be presented in different aesthetic fashions.

I hope this information clarifies what “Lua scripting” means for The Lord of the Rings Online. As we come closer to the actual launch, we will provide more information into the specifics of the system. We are very excited about this feature and look forward to the day when it goes live allowing players to have a much more customizable experience with our graphical interface.

This is not a post about making and decorating beautiful cakes. I would rather define it as a little batch of yummy Tolkien-inspired cakes. The first one I came across was beautiful Hobbit Hole cake on CasualStrolltoMordor. This great article is for all of us who have a sweet tooth, and the best part is that they have decided to make a new one.

My next discover was cakewrecks blog - Think of this blog not just as a collection of baking disasters but accidental art in the kitchen, at once spectacular and bizarre (time.com). When I read this my first though was - Do they have anything about LOTR. And the answer was yes, but under NON-Wrecks feature 🙂 As they specified the most popular LOTR cake themes are Minas Tirith and The One Ring.

And my next step was - google! Several sites like greatwhitesnark, wetanz, always.ejwfiles, lotrfanshop, have also tickled my belly. At the end of this journey I wish you beautiful Sunday!

Lotr Cake	Lotr Cake	Lotr Cake
Lotr Cake	Lotr Cake	Lotr Cake

MMORPG.com  is offering 2500  Lotro Beta Keys in a random sweepstakes event from July 16 to July 22. The only thing you have to do is to login to MMORPG.com during this period. If you do not have an account yet, you can get one free of charge.

[Source]