Scheduled Server Downtime: Monday, December 12th

    The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Monday, December 12th from 6:00 - 10:00 AM Eastern (-5 GMT) to launch the latest game update, Update 5: Armies of Isengard. Patch notes will be available during the downtime. Thanks for your patience, and we'll see you back in the game soon!

Source

The new 12-man endgame raid should be with us before Christmas. This is a poll to determine whether members prefer Mondays or Tuesdays for the second kinship raid day of the week. The first raid day will be Thursday, which remains unchanged. Please vote only if you intend to take part in the kinship endgame raid, either regularly or on an occasional basis (i.e., an average of at least twice every month); if you don't intend to raid with us, please don't vote as that will distort the results! Mostly for the benefit of new members, I will post details about participating in the raid, priorities, loot rules and the like closer to the date.

I will close the poll one week before our first attempt on the raid.

Attention Attention!

Due to hardware and network upgrades at the service provider (we'll be getting IPv6 among other things) our server will be moved Wednesday 7th of December, causing the website and Mumble to go down for a short while. Work will be done overnight, starting at 23.00 GMT and downtime is expected to last 2 hours at most. Note that I'm not exactly sure when our server will be shut down, it can be considerably later at night. Although you probably should just get an early night sleep, I'll try to make sure the backup Mumble server is up and running that night , I'll get the details for it later.

Oh and naturally they're very sorry for the inconvenience!

Coming soon:
Dargnákh Unleashed [3-person]
Enlist as part of a covert mission to sabotage the inner workings of the Isengard war machine. Cause widespread destruction by turning a wild troll against its would-be masters and uncover clues about Saruman’s nefarious plan taking shape within the shadows of Orthanc.
Fangorn’s Edge [3-person]
Scout out and disrupt one of Saurman’s lumber operations on the outskirts of Fangorn forest. Eliminate Uruk foresters and guards and contend with their violent overseer but beware for when Fangorn forest is involved not everything is as it seems.
Pits of Isengard [3-person]
Descend into a forgotten laboratory in the caverns beneath Orthanc where twisted experiments still roam. Face terrible abominations, discarded as Saruman endeavored to perfect the monstrous Uruks. Make haste as you delve deeper into the pits and discover the truth about Saruman’s plans.
The Foundry [6-person]
Powerful and mysterious weapons have been appearing in the hands of soldiers under Saurman’s command. Infiltrate the Foundry, the sprawling subterranean heart of Saurman’s war effort, and disrupt the supply of the dangerous weapons to deal a fateful blow to Isengard.
The Tower of Orthanc [12-person]
Saruman of Many Colours has been laboring for far too long within Isengard, unimpeded and unseen. What terrible plan has he set in motion? Swing wide the gates of Orthanc and enter the dangerous and shadowy tower to confront the powerful traitor himself. Gather together your eleven most powerful allies and steel your resolve for, should you fail, all hope may be lost. [Multi-boss raid on the same pattern as OD]

If the following currency conversion table is correct (lifted from Bullroarer), then the price of the four non-raid pieces of Draigoch armour will go up significantly at the update. So if you are still short of any of these pieces, get cracking with raid skirmishes and get your S4Ms in time to complete the set! Personally, though nothing has been said about them yet, I plan to sink any spare S4Ms I have into legacy upgrade scrolls before the update.

New Currency Conversion Rate [B2]
    At Skirmish Camp :
    1 S4M = 2 Seals
    1 S4M = 50 Medallions
    1 Seal = 2 Medallions
    1 Medallion = 3 Marks

    Draigoch Armour
    Live : 30/18 (S4M)
    B1 : 83/55 (Seals), 1 S4M = 3 Seals
    B2 : 141/94 (Seals) or 725/570 (Medallions)

    Last edited by GrandCru; Nov 22 2011 at 12:00 PM.

As you may already know, Turbine has very stupidly decided to have OD reset twice weekly, early in the mornings of Monday and Thursday. This means that in order to complete a run, we have to go in twice between either of those two days. Unfortunately, experience has shown that scheduling anything over the weekend is a non-starter, which leaves us with the Monday to Thursday slot.

With council's agreement, I am setting up the following weekly schedule, at least until the next major raid arrives. In effect, OD will run on Mondays and Wednesdays, with the open skirmish raid and Draigoch alternating between Tuesday and Thursday.

Monday: Ost Dunhoth 1
Tuesday: open skirmish raid or Draigoch
Wednesday: Ost Dunhoth 2
Thursday: Draigoch or open skirmish raid
Friday: possible second open skirmish raid

Draigoch says hello!

It seems there's been a security breach at Turbine's forum. There is little confirmed info at the moment, rumors suggest it might be rather substantial, Turbine so far calls it a potential issue and precaution. However, since forum and game accounts are tightly integrated, I would recommend an 'hope for the best, assume the worst' attitude and change your account password at https://myaccount.turbine.com . For the finer details, we have a thread discussing the issue and there's been some discussion over at the LOTRO-Community forums.

Update: It seems Turbine is following our example and now also recommending to change your passwords!

Quote:Recently, we were made aware of an issue with the security of our LOTRO community web applications.  Protecting player accounts is a top priority and we take any potential issues seriously.  As a result, we closed all of our forums as we investigate the situation.  We are continuing to investigate and the forums will not reopen until this work is complete.

As an additional precaution we recommend that all players change their passwords by visiting http://myaccount.turbine.com. Please remember to use unique, hard-to guess passwords that are not associated with other online services or sites, and always look for and report unusual activity in your account to Turbine customer support.

Remember to update your characters. All you have to do is click on the [edit] button in the "Your Characters" window. At the moment, it looks as though half the membership has yet to venture into Dunland...

As I already mentioned in a previous thread I've been working on getting Mumble on the same server as our forum. After some proper preparations I've taken the big leap to turn the switches tonight. Fortunately for you there's no big change in settings, except one: the log-in. From now on you get to log in on Mumble with your forum username and password, that saves some people the hassle of having 3 different names around and should automatically grant officers access to the officer channel. Alternatively, mostly for our guests, you can log in with a non-existing username and the old server password for limited 'guest access'.

The old server is still available with the address old-mumble.thewesternalliance.org in case there's some unexpected trouble...