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We're not entirely sure what happened here, but perhaps this explains why we haven't seen as many Lord of the Rings Online shots lately. Wookadan from the Meneldor server writes: There must have been some sort of glitch that I ran into, because all of the water was glowing white. [It] made the screenshot look like I was being abducted by aliens or something! We suspect it could also be Gandalf playing pranks on people, too.

Do you have some odd or interesting screen glitches that you have taken snaps of? Perhaps you just like the look of a certain world. Whatever the case, we want your screenshots. Just toss them into an email to oneshots AT massively DOT com. Yours could be next!

Kill pathfinders and windtalkers. Forge a new blade. Look in an old library for a man's son. How many quests have we done in our careers in MMOs? Too many, right? That's usually the answer. But when I ask you, "Well, how many quest texts have you read?" Well... that's another story entirely.

We complain about many things... the grind in our favorite games, raids and endgame content, nerfs... People are more than willing to spend time reading patch notes and outside guides for their favorite games, but there's one thing that apparently most gamers don't want to take the time to read. And, ironically enough, it's one of the few few things that spends the most time in front of a player's face - quest text boxes.

Developers, you spend alot of time making sure your content is perfectly tuned into your lore and your history, but be rest assured, very few of your players will take the time to read it or care.

We're sure you've heard the exciting news and most recent information on Lord of the Rings Online: Book 13 Doom of the Last King, which was released last month. You've probably also heard about the recently reduced pricing for the game, which was announced for the first anniversary of the game's launch. But we have some even better news for you.

This upcoming weekend, from May 8th through the 12th, you'll get to experience everything Middle Earth has to offer for free in a special Welcome Back Weekend. You can fire up your old characters that you may have forgotten about or create some new characters to test the most current changes. During this time, the anniversary celebrations will continue, so you can participate in those as well!

One of the biggest problems an MMO developer faces -- after successfully launching their game and achieving a healthy bases of subscribers -- is keeping their game fresh. In some cases, developers have attempted a sequel, but the problem with that lies in getting the player base to move over.

EverQuest 2, Asheron's Call 2 and Linage 2 all faced seemingly lower subscription numbers than their predecessors. It would seem that sequels -- while able to be successful -- don't live up to the same success that the original games had. It's possible there could be an exception to the rule someday, but so far there hasn't been.

If you missed out on the lifetime subscription the first time, and you live across the pond, then do we have a contest for you! Eurogamer MMO got their hands on some tasty Lord of the Rings Online special editions, one of them being the Exclusive Collector's Edition, which you can't get in stores anymore.

This hefty, and beautiful, edition of Lord of the Rings Online comes with more features than you can shake Gandalf's stick at, but most importantly, it comes with a lifetime membership to LotRO. It use to retail for a whopping 150 pounds when it was in stores (which it isn't anymore) and it can be yours by entering the contest!

Speaking of shaking Gandalf's stick, Gandalf just so happens to be the topic of this contest. Simply answer who played Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and submit it to Eurogamer. The first person who's drawn at random with the correct answer will get the Exclusive Collector's Edition. 10 others will be winning LotRO Gold Editions, which aren't anything to scoff at either!

Plus, with Book 13 just recently hitting servers, now's a great time to pick up LotRO for yourself. So what are you waiting for? Get going! Just remember though, this is open to Europe only. Sorry North Americans, but we already had a contest for you.

It's been a big week in massively multiplayer games, and to keep things interesting we have a few brand new screenshots of two of the biggest games on the market. The folks at Turbine sent over a fresh batch of Lord of the Rings Online images, further showing off the fantastic new Forochel area that was added in Book 13. Check out the gallery below to see ice skaters, more Mammoths, and a bigger image of that fantastic clan halls shown above.

Then head down to our Age of Conan gallery, and take a look at two of our new and exclusive screenshots sent over by Funcom. They highlight the game's fantastic architecture, and the sense of place that the designers have evoked in the world. Creepy crypts and aging ruins are the norm in Hyborea, and our screenshot gallery will take you everywhere in between. For details looks at the two new shots, click on down below the cut.

The website Private Equity HUB is reporting on a big development for Turbine, the makers of MMO titles Asheron's Call, Dungons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. The company has acquired a new investment of $40 million from Granite Global Ventures and several other previous investment groups. According to the site, this makes a total of $90 million at Turbine's disposal. The company has only 'pulled down' $25 million of that money.

peHUB goes on to speculate that the company will soon be announcing some major shift in business strategy. It offers up the possibility that one or more of its games will be making the jump to a console platform. Another possible future for the company: mobile gaming somehow tuned to the MMO marketplace. Whatever the news, Turbine's strategy is expected to be unveiled within the next two weeks.

[Via Gamasutra]

One of the things that really struck so many of us as being cool when LotRO started out was the concept of being able to put the smack down on those creepy Ringwraiths. So we were glad to see this screenshot that came in recently from Wookers, that featured his party doing just that. Of course, the thing that really made us giggle about this is that it looks like this Ringwraith has been suffering one heck of a beatdown lately -- look at it! It's hunched over and looking pretty sad. If they weren't so undeniably evil, we'd feel bad for it.

Do you have a screenshot of some righteous smackdown from your favorite game? If so, send those bad boys (or screens of bad boys and girls getting owned) to us at oneshots AT massively DOT com! The more screenshots the better, as we're soon to be left to digging through the screenshot folders of our new columnists.

In the header blurb to this column, I state that "Running Boot Camp or Parallels is not an option here." I stand by that still. I don't think that dual-booting or loading XP within a virtual desktop is the solution any of us want. Dual booting takes up valuable hard drive space that I could use to store large media files of consenting adults. Running Parallels throws another layer of processor overhead when I run XP within Parallels within OS X. Not to mention Parallels' DirectX support is poor. Note: I haven't tried VMWare's Fusion, which is the competitor to Parallels.

A week or so ago, our own Mike Schramm wrote up a little piece on TUAW about CrossOver Games. CrossOver Games lets you run some Windows games within an emulator. It's not a pure virtual environment like Parallels, so you don't have the overhead of running two OSs. When I read Mike's piece, my first thought was, "huh." My second thought was, "Huh, I wonder if there's a middle ground here somewhere." At the risk out sounding like I'm eating my own words, CrossOver might be enough of a compromise that doesn't involve buying a copy of Windows to game on a Mac.

Today's One Shots is another mystery shot we got from a reader. We know it's from Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online, and we know it's a lovely scenery shot, but beyond that we can't tell you where in the game it came from. Since we know we've got oodles of One Shots readers who love LotRO, maybe you all can help us out! What area do you think this screenshot was taken in? (Or perhaps Adam who was nice enough to send this in will let us know in comments?)

Do you have a screenshot of a lovely location? How about an absolutely horrifyingly scary one? Whatever your flavor of screenshot, we'd love to see it. Just toss it into an email to oneshots AT massively DOT com!

Ahh, the Old Forest. Lord of the Rings Online players have mixed emotions about this area: fear, respect, probably a very healthy portion of loathing as they stumble around in circles for far too long trying to get through it. It is here that you may stumble upon Goldberry, who has just been given her own page in the Lorebook.

Goldberry is a River-maiden, but no one really knows what a River-maiden is. Appearance-wise, they resemble the races of Man and Elf, but much about them remains a mystery. Goldberry is married to Tom Bombadil, but only after failing to capture him once and having him come back to her later on -- if at first you don't succeed, hey? Bombadil is all kinds of crazy, so a visit to these two in the Old Forest is sure to yield some fun quests. You can view Goldberry's new lorebook page to find out a bit about the tasks she has for you, and also see the map of her location, if it's any help at all in the unforgiving forest.

Over at New York Comic-Con 2008, Ten Ton Hammer assembled a group of respected MMO developers to answer questions about the future of the industry, and just to talk shop in general. The members of the panel were: Age of Conan Game Designer Jason Stone, Warhammer Online Senior Producer Jeff Hickman, Turbine Vice-President of Product Development Craig Alexander, 38 Studios Vice-President of Creative Development Scott Cuthbertson, and EVE Online Game Designer Matt Woodward -- phew, that's a lot of capitalization.

There are two videos to watch, one in which the questions come from TTH, the other being an audience Q&A. Combined, the videos take the better part of an hour to watch, but you'll find some interesting and differing viewpoints on various topics, such as business models, world-altering events, product placement, sci-fi versus fantasy MMOs, winning market share from World of Warcraft, and community features in and out of game.

If you've been wondering where Jeffrey Anderson, former CEO of Turbine, has been lately, wonder no more. He's acquired $5 million from New Enterprise Associates, Inc. to fund a new start-up casual sports games site called Play Hard Sports. While it's still unsaid why Anderson left Turbine in the first place, one could hardly think of a more antithetical genre for him to tackle than sports. In addition to casual sports titles, Play Hard Sports will also offer sports-themed MMOs.

In a side note, the referring article mentions that Turbine is expected to announce its future plans in a couple of weeks, and that speculation around what they'll say is based on their job listings, which mention "Experience with UI development on a console platform, e.g. Xbox 360, PS3 or similar", among others. This, of course, is not a smoking gun by any stretch, but as fodder for excited mutterings, it's not bad.

Anderson says the first game to come from PHS will arrive in the Fall.