My LotRO

I am quite impressed with what Turbine did on My LotRO, and I wanted to take a minute here to make a note of it.

They do a few things I consider odd, like using WordPress as (what looks like) the starting point of the whole thing, but overall it's impressive in its polish and thoroughness. I can't say I'm surprised they have so much data about their players - Darius Kazemi got his start in MMOG metrics at Turbine - but that's just one more thing to be jealous of. Kinship event calendars, event logs going back at least to March of '07 (that's the earliest I found in a brief perusal), lots of AJAXy interactive bits all over the page and (by-and-large) good clean URLs¹.

Initially they chose (mistakenly, in my opinion) to show all the characters that were tied into a single account, but it looks like they've done a quick hack to hide that while they go back and reconsider it. Hopefully, they'll take it out of the site design completely. We often have a lot of different virtual identities, and it feels like an invasion of privacy to show the links between them. What if I'm avoiding letting an annoying friend know about the character I usually play as, but I keep around another character so we can play when I'm up to it? Busted. It may have also been a security hole, if the player names being displayed were the actual logins.

The journals are great, and it's clear they got a lot of benefit out of WordPress here; it looks like the event calendars are a WordPress plug-in as well, so that probably saved them quite a bit of effort on the web development side. Using WordPress also meant that the journals are easily exposed in RSS format, something I had to hand-code on Dungeon Runners for the character blogs².

Still, I think it would be more awesome if players could add to their journal from in-game - I'm pretty sure this is not the case, but can someone correct me if I'm wrong? "Balrog has killed me three times in a row! Getting frustrated" would be a lot more likely to show up - and less likely to disengage the player - if they didn't have to log out to type it. Also, I'm curious about whether links are allowed in the journals? I haven't seen any links yet, but perhaps no one has had the urge yet. The ability to link to other players' journals, and comment on specific journal entries, might be enough to render official forums obsolete³.

And my final question... where's the raw data? It looks like character profiles, guild rosters, and so on wouldn't be too hard to screenscrape, so someone is probably already starting on it. Is Turbine working on providing this data?

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1. Should something go terribly wrong with WordPress (and it's happened before), "replace it" is a reasonably valid option. Implementation independence is a big win!

2. As far as I know, this still isn't actually live in Dungeon Runners. I hope it is one day, but it's out of my hands now.

3. Maaaaaybe. I haven't really given it much thought, but it seems plausible and is worth discussion, I think.