Under the Banner

The Preview Release of the Lorebook has been live for 3 days and here’s some of the things we’ve learned about it since.

The Preview Release went live on May 10th, 2007 with more than 20,000 entries. The Lorebook contains articles with information on nearly every quest, item, creature, NPC, class, race, traits, and more found in LOTRO.

Future Releases
What can we see in the future? Patience had the following to say. ¹

While this Preview release is not editable, the upcoming public beta release features seamless integration with player accounts. This allows active LOTRO subscribers to participate in future community development of the Lorebook. Players will be able to annotate the existing entries, as well as create entirely new articles sharing tips, tricks, background information, and more.

Lorebook Introduction
Later, Aylwyne posted a Lorebook Introduction providing some insight as to where they’re headed. One of the things he addressed were the posts reporting missing or lack of information.

Our approach for this first release was to get a breadth of pages defined in the wiki rather than a smaller number of pages with a depth of information. In other words, we tried to get a page defined for everything you might encounter in the game, even if that page does not have all the possible information about that item. We figured that this would give the community the framework to start filling in with their collective knowlege.

He also listed some of the things they’re planning for the near future. ²

• location information
• google maps
• item effects
• arda encyclopedia ‘official’ entries
• in-game access

Searching For Quests By Level
The question of searching for quests by level was brought up. Aylwyne responded by saying that better categorization and tagging are definitely in their plans. However, he did have the following tip to share ³:

In the meantime, you can do searches like ‘Quest Level 40‘ to help find what you’re looking for.

Dealing with Vandalism
When asked how Turbine will deal with vandalism and abuse, marketroid had the following to say. ⁴

Your Lorebook account will be tied to your game subscription and many of the same posting rules for the forums will apply.

By limiting contribution to paying subscribers we expect to decrease the level of vandalism often seen at completely open wikis. Additionally, as with the forums, bad behavior may result in bans up to and including permanent bans, so there will be a strong incentive for players to avoid vandalizing the content of the wiki.

Login Issue
There is currently a known issue for people with “_” underscores in their names attempting to login to the Lorebook. No worries though as editing is currently not enabled so you’re not missing much. ⁵

Miscellaneous
When asked about the reference in the manual to a button on the map for in-game web services and character pages, marketroid answers that they are both currently in development. ⁶

In Closing…
My impression from reading a number of posts from Turbine people, the Lorebook is something they are definitely excited about and are continuously updating. It sounds like they have some ambitious plans for the Lorebook and the community is definitely excited about the Lorebook.

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References

1. Lorebook Preview Released Today!
2. Lorebook Introduction
3. Search quests by level?
4. Ghost Bear and wiki punks…
5. Something is wrong with the Log-In for the Lorebook..
6. Will this be accessible in-game?