A while back I posted about how Tur­bine had plans for social net­works related to their games. We hadn’t heard any­thing about it lately, so I just assumed it was some­thing that fell to the back burner. Turns out it’s been mov­ing ahead as planned.

The offi­cial site now has a post about the beta ver­sion of my​.lotro​.com. All cur­rent sub­scribers will be able to sign in to the beta site, which will be avail­able between now and Fri­day, Decem­ber 12^th.  Non-subscribers can appar­ently view the site, but not really par­take in any of its functionality.

my​.lotro​.com fea­tures a search-able data­base of play­ers, char­ac­ters, mon­ster char­ac­ters, kin­ships, and tribes. It also keeps track of your last quests, when you lev­eled up, your lat­est deeds and all sorts of infor­ma­tion. It also gives you your own blog (each Kin­ship gets one as well), which is a nice touch. I guess I have tons of com­pe­ti­tion now.

The beta ver­sion, at least, does not auto­mat­i­cally link your player pro­file and your char­ac­ter pro­files. You have to do this your­self. There’s a bit about this and other top­ics at the offi­cial FAQ. How­ever, in the inter­est of sav­ing time, once you’re logged in to my​.lotro​.com, you can just click on My Admin at the top of the page. This will bring you to a Word­Press back end (much to my sur­prise), where you can change your char­ac­ter set­tings and other things. Just change your char­ac­ter from Anony­mous to Pub­lic to have them show up.

Inter­est­ingly, you’ll notice that page also lets you affect your blog, change your design and enter events into your own cal­en­dar. You have a lot of the other ben­e­fits of Word­Press as well, such as being able to com­ment on other people’s blogs and adjust­ing your wid­get setup for your sidebar.

Per­son­ally, I love this con­cept. I’ve com­plained a lot about how LotRO hasn’t shared much in the way of, well, any­thing. Other MMORPGs have had char­ac­ter pro­files, equip­ment data­bases, log­ging of char­ac­ter events and so forth. LotRO, on the other hand, had noth­ing but extremely basic char­ac­ter sig­na­tures for forums. It’s nice to have some­thing that’s such a HUGE leap for­ward from the pre­vi­ous offer­ings. I would have loved if this was infor­ma­tion I could pub­licly use else­where (such as post­ing a pro­file on my site), but at least we’re get­ting somewhere.

You can check out the page for my main at http://​my​.lotro​.com/​c​h​a​r​a​c​t​e​r​/​g​l​a​d​d​e​n​/​b​r​a​n​s​on/.

I’m still play­ing around with it. I do have to say that I would have liked for the site to have a way to keep peo­ple from see­ing cer­tain things about my char­ac­ter.  I can bet some peo­ple will want to share their equip­ment build, but not the amount of gold they’re car­ry­ing, for exam­ple. Addi­tion­ally, while you can unlink a char­ac­ter from your player pro­file, you can not hide the char­ac­ter entirely. Maybe if enough peo­ple are inter­ested in such fea­tures they could change by the time the final ver­sion rolls around.

You might also want to check out the known issues list too.

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