Mini Geekwatch

Too bad we don’t have pictures of baby asuras or I could’ve used one for this update. ;)

The one announcement I’d been waiting for just came: Lotro’s Yule Festival starts on December 20! Yaaay. They just tweeted it. That’s good because rumour said that it won’t be here until January.

As you can probably tell, I’m a lot more excited about this than about Update 5. I’m not doing much in Lotro anyway and me preparing the Christmas outfit for my characters was the most time I’ve spent in the game in weeks, I guess. But it’s also been lots of fun. So, hopefully, the Yule Festival will be fun again as well. It was last year. :)

Oh, and they also just tweeted the link to another developer diary about their reputation item revision. Interesting.

Still no news from Guild Wars 2. Not much time left till the end of December and they did say that closed beta would start before the end of the year and if I remember correctly, they also said we’d get to know the last class before that. So… *taps foot impatiently* ;)

Promotion time! ^^

As soon as we saw it, I created a Google+ page for us. So, if you like, follow us at Google+. We’re going to be linking to our blog postings over there but so far, discussions or comments have been added there a lot more frequently (well, at my personal G+ account up until now because I used that for crossposting until G+ added the pages). Still, we appreciate all comments, no matter where they’re posted. :)

And with that, I think we really do have enough places that we’re at. I think we also have a page on Facebook but we’re not really using Facebook anyway. So we’re at Google+, wordpress and on Twitter. That should be enough, right? ;) Oh, and Youtube if you count our GW2 PvP videos from GamesCom. Social networking is fun, if you ask me. ^^

The second part is, for a change, not a self-promotion. I totally forgot about the The Lone Hobbit. A blog that I’m theoretically co-author of – but I have never actually posted there! So I’m not taking any credit for it (and that’s why it can’t be a self-promotion… yet ^^). It did get me into wordpress, though, as I had created an account purely for posting screenshots there. It’s been inactive for quite some time now but as it’s about posting screenshots from Middle Earth (sorted by region), it’s still worth a look! The scenery never gets out of date, after all. ;) I might even post some new screenshots there when I find the time. So, have a look at the prettiness that is Lotro’s world if you like.

Lotro security problem! – Yes, it’s official now.

Edit 4 (October 15): They finally admitted that it is an “issue with their security”. Change your password as soon as possible if you haven’t done so yet! No need to panic or anything. As far as we know (from the person who found the security breach), the passwords are hashed and potentially even salted. So they can’t just be copied and pasted! ;) Still, the issue still means that people did have access to your user information (user name, password, email address), so take it seriously enough and don’t sit on your old password just because you finally managed to memorise it. ;)

Yesterday, I stumbled over a post on the German subforum of the inofficial Lotro community (you can read everything without signing up, by the way!). You can find the thread here and a rough English translation here. All in all, it seems that there could be/could have been a security issue on the official Lotro forums. The forum database could have been “open” and granted access to usernames and passwords. The user who reported about it on the inofficial forums had apparently posted on the official forums prior to that but that posting got deleted. No reply from Turbine to him or to anybody else who asked about it.

Then yesterday evening (European time), the Lotro forums went down. Several hours later, we got one tweet about it: “The LOTRO Forums are currently unavailable. We do not have an ETA for their return at this time.”

The official forum tells us this: “The LOTRO Forums are currently down for maintenance. Thank you for your patience.
Please follow us on Twitter @LOTRO or like us on Facebook to receive updates during the maintenance.”

The thread on the inofficial forum has people saying that when they asked if they should change their passwords etc. on Lotro’s Facebook page, that the postings got deleted really fast. That’s weird, if you ask me. I also went to their Facebook page to get more information and oddly enough, I didn’t find any mentioning of the forums being offline at all. Not even mentioning of said forum maintenance. So the only message we’ve gotten so far is the one on the official forums directing us to Twitter and Facebook. And Twitter is the only of the two with at least one short message.

Security issue or not, that’s not a good way to inform your customers of what’s going on! I think it’s weird to take down the forums for maintenance and keep them offline without telling us when they could come back and, most importantly, without telling those worried about security issues that there’s nothing to worry about.

My advice would be to change your Lotro password soon. And if you’ve made the mistake of using your Lotro password on other websites/for other accounts as well: Change those as fast as possible! One shouldn’t have the same password for different accounts anyway. Who knows which site gets hacked next?

Edit: Just found this thread – again, German, sorry. It seems that the user “freundlich” who first wrote about the security issue had proof by posting user data (username, IP address, email address and password hash – Valandir says they’re salted) on the inofficial forum (which got deleted by the moderators). For now, everything points to a security issue.

Edit 2: Here’s a link for the Dutch-speaking Lotro players.

Edit 3: We finally got an update from Turbine: “We have identified a potential issue in the forum system. As a precautionary measure we have disabled our forums while we investigate. We will bring the forums back online when we complete our work. We thank you for your patience.”

Edit 4 (October 15): They finally admitted that it is an “issue with their security”. Change your password as soon as possible if you haven’t done so yet! No need to panic or anything. As far as we know (from the person who found the security breach), the passwords are hashed and potentially even salted. So they can’t just be copied and pasted! ;) Still, the issue still means that people did have access to your user information (user name, password, email address), so take it seriously enough and don’t sit on your old password just because you finally managed to memorise it. ;)

MMORPGs and their expansions

Recently, there’s been a lot of diversity regarding Lotro’s upcoming expansion “Rise of Isengard”. I’m not even going into the pricing “issue” now. But I’ve seen a lot of people argue about “there’s not enough content to call it an expansion” and the other side that says “all I want is in there, so there is enough content”.

I’m curious to hear more opinions and on more general terms (e.g. not necessarily bound to one single MMORPG). What do you want, as a minimum, in an expansion? I know MMORPGs differ, so opinions may also differ here… but still. Or back to Lotro: Are you happy with the upcoming expansion from what we know so far? What else would you want to have to make you happy/happier?

Or, to theorise further: Think about Guild Wars 2. What do you think will be in future expansions or how do you imagine your ‘dream expansion’ here? – Yes, I know, the game’s not even released yet. But we’re playing with our thoughts here anyway, so why not go even further? ;) Would you want extra levels in Guild Wars 2? Would you maybe have loved extra levels in Guild Wars already?

For me, I want more than “more of the same”. Yes, slapping extra levels on top together with new quests and new regions is nice (unless it is Guild Wars. Then please only new regions but no more levels – which is the way they went, fortunately ^^). So I’d put that as an absolute minimum for me. But then it’d be a minimal expansion and I’d only be minimally happy. ;) What I want to be happy and a satisfied customer, is something new and fresh. Something that wasn’t in the game before. For example, a new class, a new profession or a new feature (thinking about the heroes in Guild Wars that were added and can be customized while the NPCs cannot). In Lotro, I’m still dreaming about a) overhauls of existing things (housing redesign, for example), b) something new to play with (more hobbies than just fishing, new professions in general, a new class maybe) and c) “more of the same”: new regions with new quests. Maybe not necessarily on top with more levels. Going broader would be nice as well (for example, alternative regions to level and quest instead of Moria).

In GW2, I’m not sure about more levels. For that, I’d have to see the system first. I can imagine that introducing new playable races wouldn’t be too difficult (compared to Lotro where you have a predefined world that Tolkien created, so you can’t just invent new races), new classes like they’ve done in Guild Wars already or adding housing to the home instance. Plus new (old) regions like making Cantha accessible again.

Lotro Cremello Mounts: The winners were rolled

We used our 0 – 99 dice to decide for the 6 winners.

Our winners are:
1. Sylvyn
2. Ferret
3. Sarah
4. Chris Galbraith
5. Saelarien
6. Immanuel

We will send out the emails now (that is, within the next half an hour or so). Please respond to it! As we wrote in the original post, we want to make sure the email address is valid first before sending out a code.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you all for participating!

Edit: All winners received their codes now. Have fun with your new mount! :)