A while back, we reported that Tur­bine was look­ing to hire a man­ager for micro­trans­ac­tions. A lot of us won­dered what this meant. Would exist­ing games be affected? Would this only affect upcom­ing titles? Most impor­tantly for us, what is the effect on LotRO?

I sup­pose we still don’t know the full answer to that last ques­tion, although Tur­bine has said they have no cur­rent plans for that.

The first two have been answered today with the announce­ment of Dun­geons and Drag­ons mov­ing over to a hybrid model. The game will offer both paid and free accounts. Paid accounts get addi­tional fea­tures (and 500 Tur­bine Points to spend on items), while free accounts are more lim­ited. The sys­tem is now in its beta stages and can be signed up for here. I’ve pasted in some basic notes for you:

• Free means Free! – Players down­load and play DDO Unlim­ited for free by vis­it­ing www​.ddo​.com and within min­utes can be explor­ing a rich, beau­ti­ful and dan­ger­ous online world crawl­ing with leg­endary mon­sters, glo­ri­ous trea­sures, devi­ous traps, mind-bending puz­zles and end­less adven­tures from the world’s best known RPG. There is no time limit or level cap on free play.
• Visit the new DDO Store!  — The DDO Store is loaded with hun­dreds of con­ve­nience items as well as pre­mium dun­geon packs, addi­tional char­ac­ter slots, hirelings (hired mus­cle), potions, char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion and more! The DDO Store is seam­lessly inte­grated into the game play and lets the player iden­tify new and excit­ing ways to enhance and cus­tomize their experience.
• Be a DDO VIP! – Players who elect to sub­scribe to DDO Unlim­ited will have unlim­ited access to every pre­mium adven­ture pack, receive pri­or­ity server access, 10 char­ac­ter slots, a shared bank slot, and a monthly allot­ment of 500 Tur­bine Points to spend in the new DDO Store.

Obvi­ously this isn’t totally LotRO related, but I think it is an impor­tant announce­ment. I can see some peo­ple feel­ing that this makes real money trans­ac­tions less likely in LotRO and oth­ers feel­ing it makes them more likely. I think the thing that’s impor­tant to remem­ber here is that DDO has been sig­nif­i­cantly less suc­cess­ful than LotRO and has sig­nif­i­cantly less servers. I think this allows Tur­bine to pump some new blood into the title, which com­pa­ra­bly speak­ing is some­thing LotRO doesn’t need.

All I know is that I’ll be play­ing free DDO when it’s com­monly avail­able.