Let's take a break from all of the E3 crazy for a moment and bring it back down to Earth, as Turbine has announced today that they're putting a new man into the chief financial officer's seat.

Their choice for the position has been M. Beau Paradowski, an experienced 17 year financial veteran who has previously held the CFO chair for Optasite Inc. and Clearwire Technologies.

Paradowski is excited to step into his new position at Turbine, which will oversee all of the company's global financial operations and everything related to Turbine's three big IPs -- Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Asheron's Call.

SOE has Fan Faire and WoW has BlizzCon, but could a convention centered around Lord of the Rings Online (or all Turbine games, for that matter) evoke enough interest? Many fans seem to think it's about time they had their own company- or game-specific con as a place to meet others who enjoy the work Turbine has done with LotRO, DDO and Asheron's Call. Perhaps the biggest advocate is a blogger by the name of the LotRO Follower, yet the original idea came from Moormur at the LotROCast podcast. Other members of the LotRO Blogging Collective have thrown in their own two cents, like The Middle-Earth Adventurer who makes the point that it doesn't have to start off large, as in time it will grow.

So as the general MMO-playing public, we'd be curious to hear what you have to say on this subject. Have the success of the other topic-specific cons shown that it can be done with others, or should Turbine fans just get together at other major cons like Dragon Con, PAX or GenCon?

Server maintenance is common in many MMOs, and it's something we seldom report on at Massively. Usually, by the time a post would be written, linked, scheduled and posted, the server maintenance would be done, or the problem would be fixed. This doesn't exactly seem to be the case with Turbine lately.

For several weeks, many of Turbine's servers have experienced problems, whether it be with Dungeons and Dragons Online, Asheron's Call or Lord of the Rings Online. In today's latest downtime, the rubberbanding or "invisible wall" problem has been running rampant in LotRO, causing the servers to be taken down and curiously enough, the forums to be locked down with a special status message, according to a recent Turbine Twitter message. Rest assured though that the dev team is on the case, and hopefully these issues will be completely resolved soon. What can you do while you wait? Why, read our LotRO Lore articles, of course!

Players of both Asheron's Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online have until very recently been experiencing a significant amount of unexpected server downtime. Being right gentle- uh, developers (gentledevs?) Turbine is offering up significant compensation to players as a way of apologizing. While simply extending all player subscriptions by the time lost (one day) would've been enough, it doesn't end there.

Here's the breakdown of the additional goodies players are getting:

• Asheron's Call
• Bonus rare drops!
• +25% bonus XP

• Dungeons & Dragons Online
• +25% XP
• +1 bonus to loot
• A special in-game item when Mod 9 launches!

Those will be for the coming weekend, so if you were a lucky player who's been too busy the past 24 hours to even notice the downtime... lucky you! We envy your uncanny ability to receive wonderous gifts. Hey, can you hook us up with some four-leaf clovers?

News on the wire is that Ken Surdan has been appointed as Turbine's new VP of operations, and will oversee worldwide operations of Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Asheron's Call. His previous gigs include senior vice president for technology for TripAdvisor, chief operating officer at Smart Bargins and a member of the "Lord of the Rings: One LARP to rule them all" group. If we had to guess, we'd say Ken probably played as Gandalf -- because that guy managed just about everything.

Okay, in all seriousness, Surdan is bringing quite a lot of operations experience to Turbine. For a company that seems to be looking at expansion in the coming years, it's a very smart hire. The only thing we're not entirely clear on is whether or not he's replacing anyone or is filling an until-now empty position.

Of the many things that developers have to balance in MMOs, the economy is perhaps the least understood. Where damage over time and powers can be easily tweaked to bring them in line with the rest of the game, virtual economies can bounce around more than a hyperactive kid with a super ball. Even if you think you can find a "fix" or a "tweak" to bring your virtual economy to where you think it should be, the economy can throw you a curve ball and react completely differently.

Over at the Warcry Network, Jonathan "Ithelsa" Steinhauer has pitched the concept of going back to a barter economy, similar to the one that Asheron's Call accidentally stumbled upon. Instead of relying on money sinks and economic controls, the barter economy places the value onto items and craftable materials -- thus providing wealth that can easily increase or decrease over time and naturally sink out of the system as they are incorporated into other items.

The full article is worth a read, especially if you're interested in the tricky issue of virtual economies, or just general game design of virtual worlds.

We've seen a steady growth in the arena of microtransactions over the last several years, with more and more Western companies noticing the lucrative practices Eastern MMO companies have; offering item malls to their players. After all, you really can't ignore the growth of companies like Nexon who are raking in more and more money each year with their free-to-play microtransaction model games. Recently, we've seen Sony Online Entertainment testing the waters in EverQuest and EverQuest II by including a small number of items available for players in their pilot in-game item malls, with promises to add more in the future.

Now, it appears that we're starting 2009 with another Western company heading in the direction of adding microtransactions to their in-game landscape. Turbine, despite recent job cuts, has added several job postings in other departments. The one that caught our eye, however, was a recent posting for a "microtransaction/e-commerce manager" who will be in charge of "delivering and maximizing the revenue derived from Turbine's micro-transaction-based in-game store." They've kicked around the idea of adding microtransactions in interviews before, but this posting seems to support a definitive move in that direction.

Have you ever wondered how some current game studios were first created? Who started them? What was their initial aim? Many of these most successful companies were founded on the success of console games in the 90s. Take Blizzard, for instance. They started out in 1991 by three guys who had just received their bachelor's degrees from UCLA the year before. Ironically, they also created one of the early Lord of the Rings ports, as well.

With Turbine, the story is very similar. Jon Monsarrat, as the founder, CEO and officially Turbine's first employee, writes his narrative on the founding of the company back in 1995. Initially funded by some insurance money Jon got from a car accident, Turbine eventually evolved from the creator of Asheron's Call four years later, to the behemoth that it is today. This website is quite dated, and is listed in Turbine's official wikipedia entry, but the story is filled with some great tidbits that can only be told by the man who experienced it all, and it's certainly worth a read if you're a fan of any of Turbine's projects.

[Thanks Bam!]

The MMO genre is more than World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online. Here's what's going on in the rest of the world.

Secret of the Solstice gets new patch with new content
Outspark's Secret of the Solstice, the free-to-play fantasy MMO, has updated its client with a new patch. Available for both new players and veterans alike is a brand-new zone featuring new quests and a lush jungle landscape. Furthering the overarching storyline is a new initiative to pursue GM Alastor across the Emperonie Plateau and the Aserphel, Cretino, and Turmeit deserts. Finally, players can now view all of an NPC's available quests at the same time and choose which mission to undertake. Download the new patch at the SotS website.

New Warlock class available to Grand Chase players
KOG and Ntreev, publisher of Grand Chase, the side-scrolling fantasy brawler, has announced an update to the character class known as Arme. Arme, in addition to her Mage and Combat Alchemist jobs, now has access to a third: Warlock. The abilities of the Warlock job include summoning the spirits of earth, wind, fire, and water, to produce spectacular effects and fight with greater power than ever before. Before deciding if you want to switch jobs to the Warlock class, make sure to check up on the job's requirements on the Grand Chase website.

It's expansion season in MMO-land. World of Warcraft will of course see the Wrath of the Lich King, which will add the continent of Northrend, a prestige class, and numerous enhancements. The Lord of the Rings Online will open up the Mines of Moria -- a massive dungeon environment for levels 50 and up. There will also be two new classes, and yes, numerous other enhancements.

Then there's EverQuest II's The Shadow Odyssey, EverQuest's Seeds of Destruction, and Asheron's Call's just-released 100th update. If you've got long-inactive accounts with any of these games, the devs are trying to win you back! If you're still there, they're trying to keep you from leaving for Warhammer Online or from freeing yourself from the genre completely.

Are any of these expansions going to do the job for you? And if so, which ones?

A couple noteworthy things recently happened in the Asheron's Call neck of the woods. The official website got a much-needed make-over. The new design is easier to navigate and it looks much more modern. When we spoke with community manager Andy Cataldo at the GenCon 2008, he told us that modernizing AC is the development team's focus right now. While the website is obviously not part of the game, updating it is a step in the right direction.

But since AC is in fact a very old game (it's coming up on 10 years now), not all of the focus is on the future. Case in point: the second nostalgia developer blog has been published. All too often people in this genre and industry have only a short-term memory. Since it's good to look back at where we've come from, we enjoyed the first nostalgia blog.

This second one was written by Matt Eliot, who worked as an artist on the AC live team. Like the author of blog #1, he was just another AC player before he applied to work for Turbine.

At Gen Con, we spoke with Turbine's Andy Cataldo, the Community Manager for Asheron's Call, about the future of this historic game. Cataldo told us a lot about AC's epic 100th update. The update is coming within the next few weeks, and it's a doozy. According to Cataldo, AC players will get a whole new faction system, three land areas to battle over, tons of new loot and spells, and various other improvements to the game, particularly to enemy AI.

In addition to working its regular monthly event and patch schedule, Turbine is attempting to respond to player demand for a variety of new features in the 100th and all future updates. Particular emphasis is being placed on adding features common in modern MMOs, such as a quest tracking menu. AC has been around for almost ten years, so it has some catching up to do!

Learn more about Turbine's big push to modernize the game, add lots of new content, and more in the interview after the break.

Given that the game has been around for so long, do you see this addition of modern MMO features as something that the player base is really clamoring for, or are you sort of scaling that against what other games have right now?

Really, it's what the players are asking for. That's one of the things we pride ourselves on: listening to the players. Feedback and player concerns are very important to us.

Now that the Penny Arcade Expo is right around the corner, we're hearing more and more about these after parties held by game developers. First there was the news of ArenaNet's party at Gameworks Seattle, right across the street from the Washington Convention Center, and now we get news of Turbine holding a party at the same location, the night before.

The Turbine party will be from 7pm - 9pm local time on Friday, August 29th, 2008. Those in attendance will include Asheron's Call Producer Crowley, LotRO Executive Producer Nigellian, LotRO: Mines of Moria Producer Eldrad, the enigmatic Marketroid, Community Team members Patience and Frelorn, and more!