LotRO Stratics

Hey everyone, we now have an official page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Strati...6732274?ref=nf

Become a Fan!

Also, if you did not already know, you can follow Stratics News on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Stratics/

Cheers and safe travels!

The Lord of the Rings Online's Spring Festival of 2009, on the North American Servers, closed yesterday, April 8th, after a 2-week run. Turbine has just announced however, that the Spring Festival will re-open today, April 9th and will then close again for the season at Noon (-4 GMT) on Monday, April 13th! Just as during the scheduled run of the Spring Festival, all players who log in will receive a bonus of +25% experience to all mob kills! Good news I say, good news indeed!

Unfortunately, due to unforseen reaons, as the Horse Races were disabled during the festival, they will remain disabled during this temporary re-opening of the Spring Festival.

Happy Spring-flinging!

It is that time of year again, for any of you who were aware of Earth Hour last year.  For those who missed last year's Earth Hour or have never heard of this Global Event, now is your time to get involved and make your Voice Heard on our Global Ecological situation. This year, Earth Hour is on March 28th, 2009 at 8:30PM local time, wherever you live on Planet Earth!

So grab those candles, plan an hour of board games with your family or friends, or just enjoy the darkness. But most importantly, spread the word to your neighbors and friends!  This may not seem like much individually, but if even a small percentage of our World participates, we can save so much enery and show our support for the conservation of energy.

By turning your lights off for just one hour on March 28th at 8:30pm Local Time, you will be casting your Vote for our Mother Earth!

This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million

We're pleased to announce that we have updated our Screenshot Galleries again today.  We've added 5 New Exclusive and Official Screens to our Official Screenshots page, which illustrate Strange Happenings, a new quest arc that begins deep within the Waterworks of Moria. As well, we've added another Loading Scene Screenshot to our Loading Sceen Screenshot page, which advertises the latest Free Content Update from The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria - Volume II, Book 7: Leaves of Lórien!

Calling all Pollers!  Is that even a word? Never-the-less, do you like to vote on polls and have ideas for intriguing and engaging Poll Topics that pertain the The Lord of the Rings Online?  If so, please drop us a line at lotro@stratics.com or make make a reply to the discussion thread here with your suggestions on Poll Topics! We will review the suggestions and choose a new topic at least once a week - maybe more!

We're pleased to announce that we have added 6 new exclusive Official Screenshots from Lord of the Rings Online's upcoming free content update, Volume II, Book 7: Leaves of Lórien! Check them out here!

A reminder that our House of Commons chat with the LOTRO team is today at 3pm EST/Noon PST/20.00 GMT! Join us in the #straticshoc channel on Stratics IRC for a great hour of questions and answers!

You can connect to one of Stratics IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client, such as mIRC, ircle, xchat, trillian or whichever you prefer. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or the server closest to you:

• irc.frws.com - USA - Colorado
• irc.epaxsys.net - USA - Colorado
• stratics.afraidyet.net - USA - Georgia
• irc.glowfish.de - EU - Germany

You may also connect through the Stratics Java link. You must have Java installed to use this which can be downloaded from the Java homepage. We'll see you there!

We want to take a minute to introduce the new Stratics In-Game Community Toolset that we're making available to the Stratics community completely free. Below you will find out how to download the new tools and information on how we're trying to improve your gaming experience.

We've been busy working with PLAYXPERT to deliver a totally unique experience for you while you play the games you love. This new technology allows you to use gamer-inspired tools without the need to alt-tab. Now for those of you with dual monitors, this is already an option. But for the majority of users out there this will be a new luxury, allowing you to surf the web, chat with friends, listen to music and even kill process's all while still in-game.

We have built these Stratics Community tools just for you.

DOWNLOAD HERE

The hand-picked widgets that will come standard for our users:

• Universal chat across all major chat IM tools (Yahoo, Xfire, Windows Live, ICQ, AIM, Gtalk)
• Pandora for your music listening pleasure while you're raiding or grinding in-game (Pandora has a US only restriction)
• Web browser widget so you can access the stratics news, reviews and even your guild pages while in-game and
• Switchblade so you can test playing your favorite games with a Xbox 360 controller.
• GoogleGadgets – Allows the user access to the wealth of Google Gadgets in-game
• Notepad – Gives the user the ability to use the Notepad application in-game to take notes for quests, locations, etc.

*The technology works on XP and Vista but the in-game overlay system will not be available to Vista users until January. Take note – the updater will auto-upgrade your vista version when the in-game support is added.*

More about the Technology:

Part 1 of our preview can be found here.

Our next stop on the tour was the Twenty-First Hall, a hub of trade and social activity for players in Moria. Again, you can get a glimpse of just how large the caverns of Moria really are, and the fact that there are no loading zones in-between areas is truly remarkable. The Twenty-First Hall is home to one of the forges in Moria, and here we were introduced to the Legendary Weapon system, another customization technique in Moria. Essentially, some weapons in LOTRO can be identified as "Unique" and can be developed into Legendary Weapons. As you kill mobs, in addition to gaining experience for yourself, you're also gaining experience for your weapons. When a weapon gains enough XP, it can be reforged at the forge-master, and gain "legacies". Legacies are basically special bonuses provided by the item and can be anything from increasing the power or duration of a class ability, to adding DPS to an item. Every time a Legendary Weapon is reforged, it can gain new legacies. Furthermore, the player is given a certain amount of points that he can spend to improve legacies. Some legacies are ranked higher (i.e. better) than others, meaning they'll cost less to develop or provide more of a bonus at each point investment, or have longer duration effects. These points are given back at each reforging to allow the player to choose how to respend them with the new legacies. With up to six Legendary Weapons, the player is able to have a set of top-tier weapons with a wide area of customized uses, without having to depend on raids or camping mobs for a rare drop (though, other rare items than weapons will still drop this way). A player could choose to develop one weapon by putting all his points into increasing its DPS, while developing another weapon to have better tanking stats, and a third to have better offensive skill abilities. These weapons can be further customized by drop-in relics that provide even more enhancements. The result is yet another layer of customization providing for a truly deep and varied experience.

I must confess, I've never been a big Lord of the Rings fan. The first movie was pretty good, parts of the second and third ones as well, but nothing spectacular. (I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the fanboys now. WHAT! HE MENTIONED THE MOVIES BEFORE THE BOOKS? BLASPHEMY!) Yes, I've read the books too, every tortuous long minute of them. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some fantasy books, and I actually find some aspects of the Tolkien universe pretty intriguing. But I'm a law student; I already spend my days reading through hundreds of pages of dense material, it's not how I'd prefer to spend my off time.