Thanks to the watchful eye of the LOTRO community we have been notified that our site has been swamped with gold selling ads in the Google ads. Prior to posting the google ads on the site we made sure to put in all the best known gold selling sites into our filters. Unfortunately it seems that this was just half the road and that our battle with gold ads has just begun. Therefore we have taken down the Google ads for now and have posted a no gold ads button on all our pages as a statement of our dedication to prevent these from showing up. We will be looking into other alternatives for ad placement on our site and if you have anyone to recommend please make sure to contact us. We didn't start this site with profit in mind but it would be of great importance for its existence if it could at least maintain itself. Thanks again to the Lotro community for pointing this out to us.

Edited: The google ads are back up and I hope our filters have kicked in. If you see any inappropriate ads showing up please let us know.

Turbine added another one of their Exploring Middle-earth issues this time presenting Free Peoples’ fortress of Ost Ringdyr. I've been to the Ettenmoors with my Uruk Warleader and had fun raiding this place. Can't wait to level and start defending it with my mighty minstrel :). Here's the official press release:
"Take a look at one of the mighty fortresses commanded by the Free Peoples in their stand against the forces of Angmar!"
Go here to see the page.

Once you enter the Old Forest you know you are in The Lord of the Rings game. Tom Bombadil is waiting ahead and we are all filled with excitement of seeing what we have read with our own eyes. But, Old Forest would not be what it is without the dangers it holds. In LOTRO one of those dangers has become our life long enemy purely because of the annoyance factor. Read all about it in our latest casual comic.

Dear visitors it seems we had a little glitch in our registration validation process. If you had trouble validating your registration and have been seeing the "Email sent too many times" message please Contact Us and we'll fix the issue promptly. We have made changes to the code and it should work properly now.

We wish to welcome all of our new visitors to the site. Thanks to the lovely European community manager Satine we have been featured as one of the official LOTRO fansites. We will do our best to make our site your everyday stop in between game sessions. I would just like to encourage you to create your characters on the site and comment on our comics and news items because we would love to hear your thoughts - don't be shy - we don't bite :). As a little bonus you can see a little something from our next Epic comic and tomorrow you can read a brand new Casual comic we have in store for you.

Continuing on the news bellow, the moment I've seen the news I thought to myself we have to make a comic about this guy. A couple of hours later and we present you the next in line of our Casual comic series with the lovely elf lady and that psychotic hobbit. We take a look at what would Lord Glorfindel do with some of the players one can meet everyday in any given MMORPG (the ones called trolls, l33t speakers etc.). Hope you like our take on it. (click on the picture to read the comic or go here)

Turbine presents yet another famous character from The Lord of the Rings world - Elf-lord Glorfindel. I've always loved the part when he appeared in the books and his mysteriousness always managed to capture my imagination. Being able to meet him in game is one of those great things that keep me glued to the screen. In any case, you can read what Turbine has to say about him here.

* Updated: The prohibited names ("taboo list") has been updated. It should now be less restrictive
* Guardians can now play some musical instruments at level 5.
* Fixed a bug with "Mischievous Glee" (Burglar) and "Sign of Power: Wizardry" (Lore-master) that was causing some enemies to assist the player in combat.
* The sky-diving NPC in Bree has been grounded, and will stop dropping from the sky now.
* In the “Shield Brothers” quest, players will no longer have to worry if the wight slave is killed by someone else. Using the barrow door again will cause the wight to re-appear so they can complete the quest.
* Bosses in instances are no longer scared of the players! They are immune to fear and will not be sent running like little scared hobbitses!
* Players can now destroy any and all of their Pre-order items if they so wish. This includes, but is not limited to, the Ring of Agility. Be warned, however, that once you've destroyed the item, that character can never get it back!
* Removed uncommon & rare loot drops from Tarburz the Wood Troll.
* Fixed a problem where some players were unable to enter any private instances.
* The problem with Undying titles not being granted to players has been identified and fixed. We’re still looking into whether we can retroactively grant the titles to those who didn’t receive them because they were fellow’d up in an instance with another player who died. This may not be possible, but we’ll try!
* Fixed pathing issues with the Rhavameldir encounter in Fornost and the Lagmas encounter in Urugarth.
* The Auction UI will now properly enable Kinship Only options when an online player’s Kinship reaches the appropriate Lifespan Rank (6).
* Fixed the following bugs on machines running Windows XP. A Windows Vista fix is still being investigated:
* Players will no longer see their Overall Graphics Quality as "Custom" when they log in if they had originally set it to Low, Med, High, Very High, etc.
* Fixed a bug which caused certain Graphics Options to reset to 0 every time the game was started.
* The "Fresh Steeds for Bree" quest will now complete normally.

Known Issues

* On the quest ‘Fresh Steed for Bree’, Éogar sends you to Bree to deliver a horse to Bill Rosewood. You’ll notice that a quest ring does not appear over Bill’s head (or on the radar). Ride the horse up to him as closely as possible to complete the quest - that should get his attention!
* When in a fellowship, you may not receive credit for the completion of an instance quest unless you yourself speak to the NPC which starts the instance. In light of this, when fellowships plan to run an instanced quest, members who wish to receive credit for the quest should not use the "Travel Now" option. Players should decline this option and instead, speak to the NPC themselves to enter the instance and join their fellows. A change to the Travel Now dialog box will be made in a future patch to help clear up any confusion.
* At level 40 the enhanced xp perk (purchased with destiny points) is off by a decimal point, granting 10x the expected rest XP. This is ONLY at level 40
* The recipes for Greater Celebrant Salve and Greater Athelas Salve are backwards; Celebrant teaches Athelas, and vice versa. Hang on to the recipes, because we'll fix this retroactively in an upcoming patch.
* If players log out during the Newbie dwarf raid "Skorgrím's Tomb," the walls and entities may disappear. If this occurs, players should open their quest log, click on the Quest for the instance, then hit Cancel Quest to be removed from the instance and start the quest over again.
* In a field of like creatures, it is difficult to determine who will be tracked both before and after using the skill.
* The mouse pointer is lost when using mouse controls to steer the character and a dialog box appears onscreen.
* Animations are choppy when the game is run in windowed mode on a non-primary monitor.
* The Orc Reaver trait for flaming weapons should display a flame fx, but doesn’t.
* If the player opens their map in a dungeon and chooses "Show Map" to view any other area, the map's fog-of-war gets refreshed, covering the explored area.
* When you equip a weapon or weapons while stealthed, they remain faded out even upon exiting stealth, and stay faded at all times until they are un-equipped and re-equipped.
* Players running Windows Vista may get a message that says "chat server unavailable." This can be corrected by following the directions in LOTRO EU forums
* Equipped items sometimes don’t change colour when dye is applied. Un-equipping and re-equipping should fix this.
* Players may sometimes see references to "Accomplishments" throughout the game. These are what are now called Deeds, and are the same thing.
* The Flute does not have an associated sound effect.

It's that time of the week again. We are holding a cup of coffee. We read the morning newspapers. Work starts in a few hours. And the LOTRO servers are down. Well fear not - we have a new Casual comic up.

Just to give you a little taste of the things to come tomorrow we give you a sneak preview into our next Casual comic's hero