So this will be a busy catch-up day for me.  Should have 3 posts out (including this one) to cover various news articles, Orion’s latest blog post, and some warden specific Mirkwood changes.

From my last post, I really haven’t done much in Mirkwood since Thursday but should be back on some sort of a normal schedule for the next couple of weeks.  I will have quite a bit of time this weekend and hope to not only get my warden and captain to 65 but get in some serious instance time.  I know my kin is running DG this weekend so I’d at least like to be able to run it – even if they’re full-up.

As with any launch, some things don’t quite go as planned.  For now, the Barrow Downs survival skirmish has been disabled as it isn’t working as intended.  In addition, one of the Expedition quests “Lost in the Fray” where you have to save various soldiers is broken, kindof.  Essentially there are some issues with the mob spawns in the area that are causing issues.  Now there are ways to get it back up and running but it takes coordination from the entire area, which can be tricky at times.  Here are some posts talking about this – Vastin’s explanation of the problem and the impacts to deeds.

I’ve been trying to capture more videos as I go forward in Mirkwood and will do so with my alts whenever I get to them.  I will post them here, but you can also just follow my YouTube Channel.

For those of you who are crafters and are wondering how all the new relics work, there’s a great explanation over at Nerf the Cat, so check it out.

Over the years I’ve always been confused which material Turbine has the rights to use for LOTRO – this post on the live boards confirms that they have the rights to not only the LOTR series but the Hobbit as well.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was looking for a way to pull skirmish data (or any data) from MyLotro.com and either found (or I might’ve been sent) the link for the LOTRO roster, which will help certainly when I get a chance to look at it in more detail.

For those of you who haven’t seen the news, there is a contest running tied to Turbine trying out new hardware – the details were posted by Sapience, but essentially you need to download and install the Bullroarer client and log in for at least an hour.  Even if there wasn’t a $250 gift card as a possible reward, I would highly recommend folks try this out to help Turbine test out new stuff.  It will only help us out in the long run, and since Char Copy is live you can grab one of your toons and just run a couple of skirmishes to mess around for a bit.  This contest is open until Friday at midnight Eastern and I believe is only open for us in the US (sorry to everyone else as I know I have readers from across the various ponds).  I’ll be on some, and will send out a twitter note if anyone wants to join for a skirmish or 2.

A couple user interface related news items.  First off, Turbine is soliciting feedback on the UI in an effort to improve on it – if you have thoughts or suggestions (snaps from other games always help too) I’d highly suggest hopping on this thread on the live boards.  Also, for those of you (like me) who love custom UIs in LOTRO there are quite a few new and updated ones to incorporate all the new things with Mirkwood.  I use the LOTRO Interface to find them, and here’s a link to the recently updated UIs. For my warden, I definitely am going to check out the Divine UI but I’m not sure I’ll use it for all my toons, we’ll see.

Sorry for all the combined notes, but I had a lot to get out and I was working this on the plane last night so I could just copy/paste into a post and didn’t want to spam everyone with tons of updates.