Hello all!

January has been an exciting month for us on the dev team! We’ve wrapped up our plans for 2013, and I’m very pleased to announce some new big initiatives for LOTRO you can expect in the coming year:

Player’s Council – We are doubling down this year on the conversation between Turbine and you, our players. We are going to start a Player’s Council, a group of players who participate in more regular & structured feedback sessions with the dev group. We want to make sure that as we grow and extend this game, that we are incorporating your likes and dislikes about what we are into what we release. The Community Team will be releasing more information about how we’re going to construct and run the Player’s Council in the coming weeks.

Western Rohan – I am at this moment standing on the parapet of the Hornburg, looking out over Helm’s Deep as devs populate the landscape with hundreds (soon to be thousands) of Saruman’s Uruk-hai & Orcs. We will be bringing you the rest of Rohan in two installments – Wildermore, a northern region between the Wold and Fangorn, will be released this spring, after our 6th anniversary, and later in the year, you’ll be able to see Western Rohan, Edoras, and participate in battles of epic proportions. Much more on this to come…

Housing – I am extremely pleased to say that this year we will be tackling a major revision to the Housing system. In February and March we will be gathering information about how Housing should change, and then we’ll be releasing revisions to the system in the latter half of the year. We look forward to leveraging our new Player’s Council to help shape and guide the extension of this feature!

Class Adjustments – Later in the year, we will be making some significant changes to the skills and traits of the Free Peoples classes. We’ll be pruning out skills that just feel disappointing in play and increasing the potency of others. The end result will be fewer skills, but a more profound impact on moment-to-moment play. How you choose to specialize your class will make a real difference!

There are plenty of other things happening this year, and we’ll be doing more dev chats via Twitter to keep getting the word out, so stay tuned for more details and more news in the coming weeks.

Na lû e-govaned vîn.

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