He couldn't do this:

Just saw this news over on www.actiontrip.com. Turbine's company background page no longer features Jeff Anderson as their CEO and President? There were no official news or announcements about this so we can't confirm this as nothing else but rumors but we'll try and get some official response. As to why would this happen (the guy was giving out interviews just a several days ago and no hints about this were mentioned) and what effect will this have on LOTRO we can't tell, but we'll keep you posted.

Here's the originating news source: Warcry

Update: in the comments section of Warcry's news there's this piece of information:

"Jim Crowley has replaced Anderson as President and CEO of Turbine. Crowley has held executive positions as Chief Operating Officer at Network Plus and Vice President Digital Content & Messaging at Verisign."

We'll keep you posted with future developments.

UI Changes

* Reversed a previous change to the Auction UI that would prevent the entry of non-alphanumeric characters into the search field. You can now search for Barrow-Iron again!
* No more crashes due to deleting chat windows.
* Your UI will no longer move around by itself when you resize your window or switch between fullscreen and windowed mode.
* Player and opponent power and morale bars should look cleaner now.
* Fellowship and raid pet vitals are once again green. See? Loremaster Smith's pet Yogi isn't really aggro to you!
* Session Players will now see the Monster Controlled and Player Controlled mapnotes in the Ettenmoors.
* Kinship Officers may now promote and demote Members and Recruits.
* Opening the bank (interact w/ banker) while the UI is [F12] hidden caused the bank to appear, but toggling the UI back on would cause the bank to DISAPPEAR until relogging. This has been fixed.
* Popup UI boxes while using mouse-steer caused the mouse cursor to disappear. This is now fixed.
* Fixed a bug that was resulting in previously deleted items returning to inventory in a state that incorrectly prevented the player from moving or deleting them.

Quests

* You should now be able to speak to Laerdan in Gath Forthnír up until you have completed both Books 8 and 9 of the Epic.
* 'Book 10, Chapter 14' - Now if you don't follow Laerdan into the depths of Barad Tironn, the quest will properly fail.

Crafting

* Ingredient recipes used to process items for some reputation recipes were not available in game, preventing players from executing these recipes. The missing reputation ingredient recipes are now auto-granted to the Jeweller (1 recipe), Prospector (1 recipe), and Forester (2 recipes) professions.
* Crafting (Tailor): Players can now purchase "Spool of Elven-thread" from Expert Tailor vendors.

Miscellaneous

* Fixed a crash which would frequently occur when flipping keeps in Annuminas.
* The respawn rate of Angmarim at the Gates of Annuminas has been adjusted to match normal landscape respawn rates.
* The Hunter's "Tracking Guide" passive skill was missing from trainers. No longer!
* Fixed a bug that was preventing Fellowship members from looting a corpse with money on it when it wasn't their turn under a round-robin loot rule.
* High level Decayed now drop Putrid Fingernails again.
* The House of Elrond is no longer invisible in low-detail graphics settings on some hardware.
* Fixed an issue where monsters' pets would sometimes fail to summon. Be on the lookout for more adds!
* Fixed the issue with companion pet skills. If you keep using only 1 companion skill, it would only work once and then never again until you click another skill.
* Added a bunch of server-side fixes and changes that are transparent to the players.

Our tour of guest comics continues with a brand new member of LotroLife community - Zaimoku. He was kind enough to visit our Forum and the user submitted art section and post a couple of his works.

Click here to view this comic.

Ambush Martyr provided us with a couple of guest comics that I will be so free to post during our vacation. We'll have a couple of new artists presented as well during this period. The comics are self explanatory and very fun so props out to Ambush. If you ever want to send us some of your creations please feel free to visit our forum.

Dear visitors,

We'll be on vacation for the next two weeks and the updates will be scarce if any at all. See you all in September. (I'll try and post some guest comics on the site but I can't promise anything)

The second free content update for LotRO has hit the US servers. European players will have to wait for a bit of localization and the patch will be available on their servers on August 23rd. Meghan Rodberg aka Patience, the US community manager posted all the patch notes on the US forums. They are massive as always spanning over 9 forum threads. You can read them all at:
[Part 1 - Overview, Of Special Note]
[Part 2 - Gameplay (misc), Loot System, Skills/Classes, Traits/Titles/Deeds, Monster play, Crafting, Items]
[Part 3 - UI, Kinships, Chat/Social, Emotes, World, Town Services, Travel/Maps/Radar, Music System, Adoptions/Notary System/Bios, Auctions, Mail]
[Part 4 - Graphics/Animations/FX, Audio, Miscellaneous, Quests, Carn Dûm, Helegrod]
[Crafting Summary] [Month of the Captain] [Month of the Hunter] [Monster Play Dev Diary]
[Known Issues]

The most interesting stuff:

" New Area : Annuminas!

* Reputation System
* Barter System
* UI Scaling
* Expanded Vault Space
* Monster player Tribes
* Emotes: We've added 40 new emotes! /clap
* You can now disable the Dread/Hope FX! The option is "Enable Dread Effects" located in the "Special Effects Options" section of the "UI Settings" option tab.
* Dealt a telling blow to Sauron's auction pilfering operation! (AKA - Fixed a bug in the Auction System which would occasionally consume an item and send out "Sauron stole my l00t" letters.)
* Water will now splash when you jump into it! CAAANNONBAAALLL!
* If you currently have Book 8 - Chapter 5 underway and have defeated Mordirth, you will want to turn it in before the update goes live on August 20. "

In the few days left until Book 10 is released Turbine and Codemasters keep releasing new info about the free expansion. Here's the news we received:

"Make friends and influence factions with LOTRO's new Reputation system! Jessie "Vastin" King explains how in the latest developer diary about LOTRO's second free content update - Book 10: The City of the Kings!"

Read the Developer Diary here.

The release date for the next free expansion is now officially August 20th - only 7 days away. Man, I still didn't get a chance to go through all the content of the previous expansion - these guys are fast and we love it!

Here's parts of the official announcement:

"WESTWOOD, MA – August 13, 2007 - Turbine, Inc. and Codemasters Online Gaming announced the details of the second free content update for subscribers to The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™. Book 10: The City of the Kings continues the epic story, adds over 100 new quests, implements significant enhancements to monster play and introduces the Reputation and Bartering systems. Book 10: The City of the Kings will be available to subscribers of The Lord of the Rings Online on August 20, 2007.

“We are working very hard to deliver the most content and best experiences to our subscribers and it is extremely satisfying to see such a large number of players embracing the game and joining us in Middle-earth,” added Anderson. “We intend to continue our long established reputation of delivering frequent and substantial updates to our players with the release of Book 11 this Fall which will offer players the opportunity to live in their very own house in Middle-earth!”

Damn, they've changed Session play to Legendary/Critter play - I'll have to change our Session play comics to accommodate for the new name :P. Anywho, follow this link to read the full announcement...

As some of you may have noticed we are getting ready to do something new here on lotrolife.com. The new epic comic series is about to get launched. The obligations are many and we want to make this as good as we can so once we start please spread the word and come by our forums to tell us whether you like the way story goes or not. For those of you that haven't noticed - we released the Great Barrows instance guide.  Beleglin and me finally managed to get a group and Azimov came to rescue as the high level member of the party so the run was easy and we could make a lot of screenshots to make the best great barrows instance map we could. We actually made some progress in our leveling lately so we'll be bringing you more instance and Epic Book walkthroughs in the future. The game is more interesting every day and at this point I am eagerly awaiting every free moment I can spend on doing quests and leveling. North dawns really bought me - the best area so far and I took a peek at Evendim and I was mesmerized by the first few quests and areas. We've also discovered the Auction house. So far we couldn't craft a single item that was really in demand, but by reaching expert in metalsmith and with some Auction House trading we managed to make some profit - first time for everything I guess :).

Summer vacations seem to have slowed down community activity so not many news to report on.

I'll start with interesting topics I came across while browsing the US forum. Those guys really know how to have fun 🙂

- Level 23 and I HATE this game - another topic by TheStormKing - the ultimate whining LotRO player (check his other work on the forums as well)
- Rejected Cloak designs - some cloak designs that didn't make the cut in the last competition
- Pugs where a problem for Gandalf also...

Lettuce was kind enough to inform us that http://www.lotromovies.net/ started its life and is in beta stage. The purpose of the site is to catalogue, and host (where possible) videos and movies created in LotRO. LotroLife welcomes another community site to the scene. May your visits be plentiful and may you not be plagued by gold selling freaks. Concerning which...

There is another LotRO site dedicated to LotRO movies. I will not name it here because I always believed it was a gold sellers front rather than a legitimate fansite. If I'm wrong I apologize sincerely. In post-WoW era gold sellers have become quite sneaky. Backed now by substantial profits from WoW gold selling they were prepared for LotRO so there are almost just as many fake sites that are used to advertise gold sellers as there are genuine fansites. The reason for my enmity towards these businesses lies in the fact that one of those sites recently stole half the articles from our site and posted it on their gold selling portal without asking or permission. Now we have to hire a lawyer and send an official complaint to Google and their hosting provider so they remove the stolen material, which takes time and resources. We're not the first nor the last that had this happen to them, but man is it annoying. In any case, we had to implement some forms of protection against theft. If you are a legitimate fansite or kinship site and you want to use our pictures or texts on your site please do let us know and we'll put you on our whitelist.