I’ve been so focused on redo­ing MMeOw that actu­ally pay­ing atten­tion to LotRO took a back­seat. In the inter­ests of get­ting myself back up to speed and mak­ing up for a week or so of no con­tent, I thought it’d be a good idea to put together a small news/info com­pi­la­tion. This was a lot eas­ier thanks to the awe­some LotRO blog col­lec­tive (and if you have a LotRO focused blog with a RSS feed or a MMORPG blog with a cat­e­gory speci­fally for LotRO let me know thta I can add you), so thanks guys!

• Under the Ban­ner notes that Book 8 is bring­ing more anti-exploit fixes and the results are appar­ently good this time! Very happy about that.
• Tur­bine posted an offi­cial arti­cle about Des­tiny Points. I like the system’s con­cept, but I agree with Jaxom92 at The Middle-Earth Adven­turer that the Freep side bonuses are lack­ing over­all. Still, the bonus XP can be nice when you’re out of bonus rest XP.
  • As a side note, I know some peo­ple com­plain that they level up too quickly in this game … I often won­der how much of this speed is due largely thanks to rest XP. I feel is gath­ered way too eas­ily and quickly in this game, even ignor­ing the Des­tiny Points option.
• Mas­sively con­tin­ues their nice screen-shot based devel­oper tours, this time for Book 8.
• Epic Book weighs in on Ten Ton Hammer’s inter­view with Jef­frey Steefel. We’re both pretty much on the same page there, so check it out.
• Jaxom92 reacts to the Book 8 Craft­ing Dev Diary. The fixes seem like a good first step.
• Every­one loves Moormur’s LotRO audio pod­casts, but it looks like’s get­ting into video pod­casts as well.
• LotRO Chron­i­cles and Mid­dle Earth Adven­turer react to the War­cry dev chat that was held the other day. You can read the orig­i­nal tran­script at War­cry.

And that about does it. I really need to play soon!