How Many Mistakes Can You Find in this Picture?

By Shamus Posted Sunday Sep 23, 2018

Filed under: Random 64 comments

Way back in 2010, I did a write-up on Lord of the Rings Online for the Escapist. It’s since been added to the archives here on the blog, if you’re interested. At the time, someone from then-publisher Turbine reached out to me and granted a lifetime VIP subscription. This wasn’t as helpful as you might imagine. I’d already written the series and had pretty much burned out on the game by that point. Still, I really appreciated the gesture. I do have a soft spot for the source material.

This past week I got an email from Xsolla, the third-party company that handles payment processing for Lord of the Rings Online. We already knew that Xsolla are creeps, but apparently they’re also incompetent. Here is the email:

You wot?
You wot?

How many things are wrong with this email? Let’s count…

  1. Those broken image links / spacers are obviously a glaring (if harmless) shortcoming.
  2. The credit card number I’ve blacked out took the form of 123456***1234. Most places only show the last four digits, but Xsolla showed the entire number with just 3 digits masked out. Given that they did so in a message sent over regular email and which also contains the expiration date, this seems incredibly irresponsible. I don’t know if there are firm guidelines for this sort of thing, but I’ve never seen any other company send this much data over unsecured email.
  3. The message is warning me that my card is going to expire in the future… in 2012.
  4. A Lifetime VIP subscription does not need to be renewed. That’s what a lifetime subscription is. I assume they just mass-mailed everyone without paying attention to details like this.
  5. Oh no, my subscription will run out in 2038! I’d better act now!
  6. This message doesn’t make it clear that it’s from the LOTRO payment processor rather than LOTRO itself. Some links say “contact us” and link to Xsolla, while other links say “contact us” and link to the official LOTRO social media accounts.

Xsolla sent a email a few hours later apologizing for the erroneous email, but still. That is a lot of wrongness to pack into such a short message.

Conjecture: I wonder if the goal here was to warn users who have cards that are about to lapse. So maybe someone built a database query in the form of “get all users with an active subscription who have a credit card with an expiration date before next month.” This would probably work as intended for most people who meet that description. “Hey, your card is about to expire, please update your info so your account doesn’t lapse.” However, they didn’t realize that in the case of lifetime subscriptions it would produce a nonsense message.

That 2038 date isn’t random either. For systems using a 32 bit value to store timestamps, the highest possible date you can store is in January of 2038. When it says that my account will expire in 2038, it just means the system set my expiration date to the maximum valueTechnically the max is 19 January 2038, not 1 January 2038, so the system probably set it to the furthest MONTH rather than the furthest DAY. Either way, same problem.. I don’t expect LOTRO will still be running twenty years from now, so I don’t think this matters.

In more worrisome news, there’s a new AAA Lord of the Rings MMO on the way, built specifically around the idea of free-to-play. Yuck. I strongly suspect this new MMO will do to LOTRO what The Old Republic did to Star Wars Galaxies. An old, interesting, and quirky title will be shut down to make room for some ugly, empty trend-chasing monstrosity.

I know LOTRO is looking a bit dated and I’ve heard it turns into a grindfest at higher levels, but I appreciate a lot of the things it tried to do. Despite the cruel mockery I gave it, I think the authors did an admirable job of trying to adapt the difficult source material and give it the proper respect. I seriously doubt this next team will show the same care. Given how Shadow of War used Middle-Earth to sell a slot machine wrapped in an edgy bad-boy power fantasy, I imagine the license is now in the hands of someone more interested in maximizing profit than protecting the source material. For a long time the Tolkien Trust was very picky about where and how the material could be used, but I’m guessing the estate has passed on to the younger generation. That’s fine. The property belongs to them and they can do what they like with it, but it’s still bad news for me. I know I’ll be compelled to seek out each new adaptation, and I’m doomed to be frustrated and disappointed in the result.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Technically the max is 19 January 2038, not 1 January 2038, so the system probably set it to the furthest MONTH rather than the furthest DAY. Either way, same problem.



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64 thoughts on “How Many Mistakes Can You Find in this Picture?

  1. Zak McKracken says:

    Wow, tat sure looks hilarious — but I was very positively surprised to see that they noticed the mistake and apologized for it, in such little time. The standard “incompetend internet company” story would have ended with them doubling down and cancelling your subscription, just because.

    So at least someone in that place is trying, and is having some measure of success, and I think that person needs to be acknowledged. Whenever “a company” does something stupid, I think there’s usually a lot more going on behind the scenes than is visible, and it’s way too easy to just project whatever you don’t like about a company onto each employee.

    I once cancelled a newspaper subscription after moving home. I was late on the cancellation period, so I asked them if they could just send them to my mum for the remaining two months. The distributor just kept sending the newspapers to my old address and wanted to charge me even past the cancellation date. I went online to find tons of people complaining that that distributor regularly did this, and what greedy idiots they were. Wrote a letter to complain, and they responded with an apology, refunded me for the two months, and still sent my mum the newspaper for the next two months. Turns out they just had a really hard time dealing with their databse/processes and coordinating stuff, but had probably noticed the online backlash, and at least some people in the right places were at work to improve the mess.

    1. Coupla things . . .

      It is NOT TURBINE any more. LOTRO and DDO are now owned and run by Standing Stone Games. They split off from Turbine, who wanted to move into the mobile market. Which is probably why they use a rinkydink little payment service like XSolla.

      However,

      LOTRO and DDO are both going strong and expected to continue for a substantial time to come. I mean, SSG split from Turbine just to run these two games. We just got a big expansion early this year for DDO (Mists of Ravenloft) and they’ve announced one for NEXT year (Sharn: City of Towers). So, things are lookin’ pretty good. :)

      But, yeah, XSolla is kinda . . . myeh.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Unrelated but after one of your posts waaaay back that discussed DDO in detail every time you mention it I’m tempted to give it a spin, despite having nowhere near the time to manage another MMO…

      2. Boobah says:

        Paragon Studios, anyone? Although as far as I know LOTRO and DDO don’t have an NCSoft-equivalent to pull the plug, so there’s that.

  2. Xsolla says:

    Hello,
    We apologize as this email was sent in error. We are now confirming that your subscription is valid indefinitely and you do not need to make any changes to your account. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your understanding.

    1. Chris says:

      I don’t know whether youre a clever joker or youre some PR guy googling LOTR and Xsolla everywhere to put out fires where they pop up.

  3. Rich says:

    IT LIVES!

  4. InThane says:

    I was going to write something about how Christopher Tolkien was still in charge of the Tolkien legacy, but…

    http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2017/11/15/104426-in-historic-move-christopher-tolkien-resigns-as-director-of-tolkien-estate/

    Welp.

    1. Shamus says:

      Oh! I SORTA remembered hearing something about this, but I didn’t read the official work. So thanks for that. I’m going to add this link to the article.

      Man, Christopher Tolkien was good to the property. Sad to see him move on. Then again, the dude is 92. This was going to happen soon, one way or another.

      1. Nick Powell says:

        Man, Christopher Tolkien was good to the property.

        He was a good source of quality control but he never liked the movies much, which gives me mixed feelings about him.

        I understand why he didn’t like the movies – they weren’t particularly faithful to the tone of the books, but on the other hand they were fucking great as movies. I don’t know. Maybe if he was more strict they would never have happened, but on the other hand, maybe if he was less strict there would have been a lot more Shadow of Mordor-esque adaptations, and I don’t know if I could handle that

        1. Zak McKracken says:

          I absolutely loved the movies, but watching them again now, (particularly after the Hobbit movies) I would think they’re reasonably faithful re-tellings of the books but the thing I absolutely did not like about the Hobbit movies was already there, in the Legolas move, the skateboarding scene, and in some more subtle ways I find hard to pin down. There is some component of Indiana Jones and all those 1980’s “exotic treasure-hunt adventure” movies in there. There is certainly some light-heartedness in the books, but it’s done in an entirely different way. In the Hobbit it becomes quite obvious, and the child-friendly narration of the books is translated into self-deprecating jokes which the movie makes about the story. The movies have a constant undertone of “oh, this story is silly, but let’s just go for it”, but the books were more “the story is a bit brutal but don’t worry kids” a more child-appropriate vocabulary.

          Other things I’m not too keen about in the movies is I think there are too many spoken lines which are entirely for the benefit of the uninitiated audience. People explaining what they’re doing and what they’re planning to do, and what the lore of the place is. It feels like they violate the rule of “show, don’t tell” more than necessary. I wonder what Guillermo del Toro’s movie would have looked like…

          Meaning: Christopher Tolkien’s agreeing to the LoTR movies was a risk, and seeing how the Hobbit movies turned out, I don’t think he ought to have said yes more often.

          1. Agammamon says:

            ” I wonder what Guillermo del Toro’s movie would have looked like…”

            A lot more body horror. Or at least hands with eyes in them.

          2. Joe Informatico says:

            He didn’t agree to the LOTR or Hobbit films, and was pretty critical of them all from the beginning. But his dad sold those rights long ago, which is also how the Bakshi and Rankin-Bass productions happened. I think the studios still had to play nice with him because of the merchandising deals, and the LOTR/Hobbit rights apparently didn’t cover television productions which is what the Amazon deal covers.

  5. DGM says:

    >> “Way back in 2010, I did a write-up on Lord of the Rings Online for the Escapist.”

    Back when you got canned from the Escapist I pointed out that you needed to remove the bit about writing for them from your Twitter bio. It just occurred to me that you can put that back in now.

  6. guy says:

    Yeah, that’s definitely an automated/autogenerated message. The credit card bit is concerning, though; I’ve always only seen the last four too.

  7. Asdasd says:

    Noodling around in the links you provided reminded me how much I want to go and make a compendium of every ‘not the Millenium Falcon’ wish-fulfillment spaceship you get to fly across the extended universe of Star Wars games. It’s gotta be in the double figures at least.

    1. ElementalAlchemist says:

      Star Wars Galaxies let you buy and fly your very own YT-1300 light freighter (i.e. the same model as the Falcon). As I recall, you started off X-Wing Alliance in a generic YT-1300, but later got to actually fly the Falcon itself.

  8. Karma The Alligator says:

    I know I’ll be compelled to seek out each new adaptation, and I’m doomed to be frustrated and disappointed in the result.

    Am I bad for looking forward to the resulting article(s)?

  9. Gargamel Le Noir says:

    I’ve tried a few mmos and LOTRO was the only one to keep my interest for a while. I hope its good ideas move on to the next.

    Edit : someone else had the same fun surprise : https://www.reddit.com/r/lotro/comments/9heqw6/email_from_xsolla/

  10. djw says:

    Is the new Lord of the Rings MMO by the same company? If not then there may not be any incentive to just close Lotro down. What matters is whether there are enough people still paying to play to keep the servers up.

    Its been around for long enough that the grognards may be enough to keep it alive. Ultima Online is still up after all.

    1. MechaCrash says:

      Ultima Online doesn’t have a competing game using its IP looming in the future.

      1. Richard says:

        True, but a pretty sure-fire way to kill a new game is to screw over the existing fan base.

        On the other hand, This Dumb Industry…

      2. djw says:

        Didn’t Richard Garriot make some sort of MMO multiplayer hybrid set in the ultima world recently?

        Also, last I checked both EQ and EQ2 have their servers open.

        1. Unbeliever says:

          It’s called Shroud of the Avatar: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/

          It’s a pseudo-sequel to Ultima (Richard Garriott doesn’t own the rights to call it “Ultima”, but Lord British is still around, the main continent *IS* “New Britannia” and the natives still remember “Avatars” from the long-ago time).

          I wasn’t part of the kickstarter, but now that it’s officially released, I’ve recently started playing it.

          I’d always stuck with single player games previously, but since SOTA *CLAIMS* to be playable offline as a single-player game, I thought I’d give it a shot and play it that way.

          Word to the wise — don’t bother. The quest journal is flaky enough to ruin the offline play experience (the devs know full well and are working on an all-new replacement system, though it may wait for “episode 2” before it rolls out).

          But having switched to the online MMO mode, I can say that the rest of the game is a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s got an amazing, friendly and helpful community. Excellent skill trees for both combat and crafting, tons of amazing maps to explore. (And it’s not like the quests CAN’T be solved; it’s just that the journal and compass don’t always know when you’ve done something, and can lead you to running around in circles.)

          So yes, I highly recommended SOTA in MMO mode. (Though, umm, I don’t have any other MMO experience to compare with, so…)

          It’s completely free to play — never any monthly fee, and a free trial whose only restrictions are a level cap and a “no trading with other players” rule. You pay ONCE to buy the game and have full unlimited access. Though of course there are plenty of opportunities to pay money for add-ons and goodies, should you find yourself unable to resist… :)

          If you join or are already there, look up “Unbeliever Dragon” and say “hi”! :)

    2. It’s by a different company, and SSG has already announced that they have no plans to shut LOTRO down any time soon. SSG split from Turbine, they’re a little indie studio who only does LOTRO and DDO these days, so the sales decisions of the big industry leaders really don’t affect them much.

  11. Kdansky says:

    If copyright law wasn’t as ridiculous as it is, LOTR would be part of the public domain by now and we would not have to deal with official AAA LOTR games: Anyone could make great of bad games with it, and that would be great.

    But because of Disney being horrible, that’s not the case.

    1. Um, Tolkein’s writings will not become public domain until 2044. This is completely standard and has not one thing to do with Disney. UK Copyright protects an author’s works for their life plus 70 years. US is author’s life +50, IIRC. Tolkein died in 1973, so barring any claims of joint authorship or similar, his works will be public in 2044.

      1. Now, PERSONALLY, I think this is too long, and that no copyright should exceed author’s life +20 years. Why? Because 20 years is sufficient time for any surviving minor children of the writer to reach adulthood and earn their own living. I consider it somewhat silly to expect your parent’s works to support you well into middle or even old age. There could even be legal extension possible if and ONLY if any children of the copyright holder have a congenital defect or disorder that prevents them from being self-supporting. Sure, that makes sense. And 20 years is plenty of time for any publisher or distributor to make their money back should the author die unexpectedly.

        1. Matt Downie says:

          I don’t know if I want every greedy idiot in the world to be able to make their own shoddy Tolkien products. Without strict quality control we might get…

          OK, we already got most of the things I don’t want to see. But it could probably be worse. Somehow.

          1. Cubic says:

            Legolas porn.
            Legolas/Gimli porn.

            (OK, we already have Game of Thrones but still.)

        2. Agammamon says:

          Don’t even need that loophole/exception.

          Pullman Bonds would do the trick.

          https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bowie-bond.asp

      2. Zak McKracken says:

        The “life plus 70 years” law in the UK is quite probably a result of pressure by the US government, and Disney is at least one part of the global lobbying effort to give rightsholders (not creators!) copyright of everything, in perpetuity.
        And it is quite certainly also ridiculous (IMHO — but I think you’ll agree).

        But even if “life plus 70 years” was the one correct answer to the questions of how long copyright should last, I would still find it silly that it could be extended after the fact. If the aim of copyright was indeed to encourage creative works, then whatever the law was at the time when a piece of work was published, that was sufficient to make that particular piece of work, and that’s what should be applied. In other words, any change to the copyright term should only ever affect works that are published after the law changes. I don’t know what the term was when LotR or the Hobbit were written, but I’m fairly certain it was sufficiently short that the material would now be in the public domain.

        This might not be how Kdansky meant what he wrote, but I’d still say that he has a point.

        And although I realize I commended Christopher Tolkien for not just handing out permissions for everything Tolkien somewhere in these comments, but I’d like to think that there’d be some better movie adaptations out there than what currently exists, along with some much terribler stuff, of course.

        1. Water Rabbit says:

          No it isn’t pressure by the US government. The copyright laws were famously debated in England in 1774 by Lord Cameron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Common_law_copyright). Everything terrible thing about long term copyrights was predicted by him.

          The original US copyright law was 14 years and a possible extension for another 14 years — something we should go back to IMHO.

          Disney would not exist except for public domain works. In the US thanks to idiots like Sony Bono and his Mickey Mouse protection acts, we are in the silly mess we are in today.

      3. Richard says:

        When LotR was written, UK copyright lasted the author’s life plus 50 years* and so would have expired in 2023, five years from now.
        It was still author’s life plus 50 years when Tolkien died.

        In 1995 it got extended to author’s life plus 70, so LotR got a 20 year extension to 2043 (in the UK) – which will be long after all his children have died.

        This extension was of course entirely due to the lobbying of various corporations, because dead people aren’t very good at lobbying.

        Until the Berne Convention was widely adopted, most countries did not recognise copyright (and patent) of works (and inventions) in other countries, so of course there were many high-profile cases of actual copyright theft.
        The UK implemented that in 1956, while the USA waited until 1989(!)

        * Copyright Act 1911, 1956 and 1988. Previously (Copyright Act 1842) it was life+7 or 42 years, whichever is longer.

      4. Joe Informatico says:

        For works published in the US:

        Before 1923: All public domain
        Between 1923-1978: Up to 95 years (you used to have to actively renew copyrights, so some works in this period are already public domain)
        1978-present: Life of author+70 years. Although the likes of Disney seem to have abandoned lobbying for further extensions, and will allegedly rely on trademarks to protect their IP in the future.

        Here in Canada it’s still Life of Author+50, but it’s difficult for our local creative industries to exploit that when all our major trading partners are on Life+70. You get exceptions like this one “unauthorized” James Bond anthology a few years back, but not many.

  12. BlueHorus says:

    I’m surprised that that email was actually Xsolla – and that they then got back to you.

    When Ifirst read it, I assumed it was an inept scam. Though of course they already have your card number, so what would they be after?

  13. Alan says:

    It’s been a while since I was involved in credit card payments and took PCI DSS training, but my recollection is that the last four digits (and maybe first four) are not personally identifiable information and can be treated a bit less carefully. Anything more is definitely breaking the rules.

    1. Cubic says:

      Anybody want to bet they are PCI-DSS compliant? For example, in storing credit card information carefully.

    2. Taellosse says:

      I’m pretty sure the first 4 identify the card company. I think the last 4 are unique to each card (if multiple cards link to a shared account, each one is distinct, rather than different names being on the same card number), since they’re always used to verify a given card, but not sufficient in themselves to steal an account.

      1. Blackbird71 says:

        Not always; my wife and I each have cards with our names attached to the same account, and both cards have identical numbers. Of course, we have two cards on a different account with unique numbers (last 4 different), so how it is handled seems to vary between financial institutions.

  14. Dreadjaws says:

    I don’t know how much you care about this, but there’s a broken link in one of your old articles, (this article, about SWTOR’s Character Creation https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=16609)

    When in the article, the part that says “Unlike some of my other series” takes you to a “Can’t be found” page (this is the link: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=16499).

  15. Enno says:

    Having dealt with payments for an online service like this before, I am pretty sure that they are storing credit card information that they aren’t allowed to keep. The keyword here is PCI compliance, and it usually boils down to you can’t store more than the last four digits, and caards are identified by a token you share with the credit card processing company. Of course that makes questions like “do these two accounts use the same card?” impossible to answer, which would be nice to know for preventing certain fraudulent activities, or finding networks of accounts, which is a reason why someone might decide not to be 100% compliant…

    1. Lisa says:

      Actually, you are allowed to store everything except the CVC (CCV in some places). However part of PCI compliance is being able to prove that the place you store this is locked up tight. By prove, I mean you have to lower your firewalls for their machines, and they poke and prod the machines with (essentially) hacking tools.

      Banks (at least in Australia) are coming up with better solutions lately, where you store the CC information just long enough to get a ‘token’ out of them that is unique to the card and your company and you use that token for all future transactions.

      1. Cubic says:

        I think Stripe does something like that too. Probably a good idea, at least abusing the token seems more limited in scope.

  16. Joshua says:

    I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat here that I found it interesting shortly after you did your Let’s Play mocking many of the things in the level 1-6 Tutorial, almost every one of those things was changed. For example, you no longer make Bilberry Cakes to make Calder Cob talk.

    My wife and I played it off and on (mostly on) just to about the point where Mordor arrived, and we pretty much threw in the towel. Maybe we had just gotten as much enjoyment as were were going to get out of it, but I know one thing that had changed was the game was incredibly easy in the Landscape (instances could be a different matter) where the joy we had in creating different pairs of characters to team up diminished because there was no need for teamwork, almost everything was easily soloable. The Mordor expansion pretty much went the opposite way of that from what I heard, and then new Mirkwood expansion might be better balanced, but the thought of jumping into that kind of obligation seems exhausting.

  17. Misamoto says:

    Despite the technical reasons, I’d still be pretty miffed at my LIFETIME subscription estimated to end in 20 years. My health is not THAT bad, dammit

    1. Do you really think the game will still be up and running 20 years from now?

      1. Matt Downie says:

        2038 is officially the end of time, according to 32-bit computers. So that should be enough for anyone.

        1. Sleeping Dragon says:

          Hmmm… I can’t help but wonder if we’re in for another millenial bug panic in 20 years…

            1. Richard says:

              Some of the software I write will probably still be running then, given the hardware it’s replacing.

              I guess we should probably test what happens?

      2. Misamoto says:

        It’s the principle of the thing :) Don’t want them putting their bad mojo on me in that way :) I jest, of course but still…

    2. Rick C says:

      Back when MSN was an actual ISP, I wound up with an indefinite account. At one point there was an account site where you could see your account’s expiration date. Mine was sometime around the year 2834. If they still have any modems running anywhere, that’s because of my 800-year-account.

      1. Misamoto says:

        Now THAT would flatter me :)

  18. Nessus says:

    One of the “fun” things there to my mind is that this email basically looks exactly like a phishing scam, and thus would be ignored by someone like me.

    ESL grammar and/or unprofessional praising? Check.
    Company I’ve never heard of claiming to represent a company I have? Check.
    Clearly wrong and/or contradictory details? Check.
    “Your account will be limited/cancelled if you don’t update your info”? Check.
    “Click here to enter your info” hyperlink? Mega-check.

    If I got an email like this, I’d fire it straight into the spam folder, maybe report it as a phishing attempt if I was feeling generous with my time. Either way, it’d be burned and forgotten on sight rather than verified or taken seriously.

    Most companies take pains with their formatting to distinguish their legit notices from scammers, and scammers in turn deliberately make their emails sloppy in order to weed out the smarter marks who’d be too much trouble. But here we have a company that’s so incompetent that they manage to accidentally mimic a scammer? That’s rich.

    The only thing that distinguishes it from a scam email is the credit card number, and given the rest, that’d make me think my credit card had been compromised rather than that the email was legit. So their incompetence would actually end up costing me a canceled credit card (probably might want to do anyway, given how much of the card number the put in plaintext, so two different kinds of destructively incompetent there).

    Actually, that last bit would be enough to make me quit the MMO even if I knew the email was legit, So they REALLY aren’t doing their publisher clients any favors.

  19. Cubic says:

    “How Many Mistakes Can You Find in this Picture?”

    I can see one, a life mistake.

    1. evileeyore says:

      I saw one also: The room wasn’t on fire.

      1. Cubic says:

        The only known cure for IT hoarding.

  20. Carlos García says:

    That new LOTR game is going to the same guys that publish Warframe and I hear it’s not sure it’ll be an MMO.
    That it’s going to be set as a prequel to the ring saga doesn’t fill me with hopes. While it can have the advantage of giving them more room to do things without breaking lore, I’m afraid it can be not so much to lessen the dangers of stepping wrongly where they shouldn’t as to make whatever they want with the excuse “there’s nothing in the lore saying this couldn’t happen” and just have LOTR as flavour just like they could have given it Masters of the Universe flavour. A generic fantasy game with some LOTR names dropped here and there to pull the fans. Though I’d like to think in this case there would be more respect to the fans than in other instances where something like that could be tried to be pulled.

    Oh, Shadow of Mordor. I bought it in a sale in Steam and it was the first refund I asked, because the combat was so unchallenging. The challenge was actually getting killed. I stood still in a group and nope, not dead. Which reminds me to mention this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AV9W2ZdmjU for those who didn’t see it. It’s long but I didn’t regret watching it full.

    More edits: I would love if for the new LOTRO the devs did the leveling system I think would be interesting and fit it. That is, leveling up means being sent to harder missions. When you level it’s your enemies that level up. You don’t. You perhaps may find one magical weapon or armor piece. If you return to newbie zones and mop the floor with the mobs it’s because you as a player became better. Though that also goes in the way of the player identifying (?) himself with the character rather than looking at his/her story from outside, which is how I like RPG.

    1. Richard says:

      I dunno. Middle-Earth as ‘flavour’ – ie, use the lore and the setting but nothing else – could work very well.

      After all, Tolkien was first and foremost building a world.

      1. Carlos García says:

        You are right, you can do it just flavour and it work as a good piece of game. It’s respecting the themes and core ideas, even not featuring anything present in any novel. I was wrong with the use of the word “flavour” that would fall still in the good side. I think more like “brand usage” is what I had in mind when I was writing “flavour”. In fact, thinking as I reply, I think we could say “flavour” is the key to making it successful. Where perhaps “flavour”, in the way I think of the word now, would precisely be the most important bit and hence doing it in a period outside the written works by Tolkien is freeing work time to solve consistency issues to place it in solving thematical and philosophical “harmony” with the original work… Uhmm, am I mixing terms again? Either if I do or don’t, it’s the time to consider I need to have a look of what the word flavour entails in the media and take a look at it. It will be a good thing, to expand my understanding (currently quite shallow) of these narrative and fictional matters. And to be more precise with my wording of things.
        Thank you for the reply and correction.

  21. Smith says:

    In more worrisome news, there’s a new AAA Lord of the Rings MMO on the way, built specifically around the idea of free-to-play. Yuck. I strongly suspect this new MMO will do to LOTRO what The Old Republic did to Star Wars Galaxies. An old, interesting, and quirky title will be shut down to make room for some ugly, empty trend-chasing monstrosity.

    A LOTR Battle Royale game? Ambituous.

  22. That comment regarding 32 bit computers has me wondering if it’ll create a new piece of computer panic when that date rolls around.

  23. evileeyore says:

    Yuck. I strongly suspect this new MMO will do to LOTRO what The Old Republic did to Star Wars Galaxies.

    /thousandyardstare.jpg
    /head slowly turns towards Shamus
    /mouth opens and the sound of screaming issues forth…

    Actually, SW:TOR didn’t do nothin to Galaxies that NGE didn’t already do five years before…

    Also there are apparently still server running out there, brave souls still fighting the good fight.

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