"Speaking at the Tokyo Game Show this morning, Turbine chief Jim Crowley revealed that Lord of the Rings Online is to get a full-featured social networking site late this year, reports our sister site Eurogamer.net.
Crowley showed a site that featured character profiles, friends lists and other data uploaded live from the MMO's game world, and YouTube-style video-sharing features.
He described it as "a version of Facebook or MySpace that sits directly on top of the gaming world. This is a fully-featured, rich, robust social network. It has every single feature that you would find in the major commercial social networks such as Facebook and MySpace."
The site will have live news feeds from the game world, with profile pages for all user characters. It will also feature friends lists, communication tools and the ability to upload and share screenshots and videos.
"A key element here is the face that the game engine needs to populate all of the game data directly into this social network, so you can share that across the world," Crowley said.
He said it would launch "at the end of Q4 this year".
He added that similar sites would launch for Turbine's other games, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Asheron's Call, in late 2008 or 2009.
In his presentation at the TGS Forum, titled "The collision of virtual worlds, online games and social networking," Crowley argued that MMOs were in an ideal position to take advantage of online social networking trends, and that a new generation of web-literate players would "demand" the openness and convenience of Web 2.0 networks attached to their games.
"Turbine believes that a closed eco-system will have to become an open eco-system," he said. "The MMO needs to learn... to adapt itself to the 'born digital' generation. The MMO needs to step out of its shell and start reaching a much broader and deeper audience."
Crowley argued that social networks like LOTRO's would solve a "business model problem" for MMO developers; how to take advantage of advertising revenues when in-game advertising wouldn't be appropriate.
"It allows you to inject advertising in a way that's not in conflict with the game world," he said. "It's natural to it, something you see across the web 2.0 space."
He also said that he expected the social network would help Turbine make more money by "extending the lifetime value of the customer" by involving them more closely in the game, and driving "viral customer acquisition". "
Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/lord-of-the-rings-online-to-get-social-networking-site
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MMO Facebook anyone?
Fixing thier very broken LFG system would be better than trying to achive "Viral Customer Aquistion" LOTRO dosen't need gimicks, it needs a Mentoring system and or the ability for a group of three or more to hire a Henchman NPC to round out the party.
Mon Oct 13 2008 4:09AM ReportI dont like the idea of henchies, but i agree a better lfg system would make this game much better.
On the other hand the guys that can make a lfg system will probably not be very much involvee in making the social site, they are probably working on mom or getting drunk because they are done making it and have till release to party
Mon Oct 13 2008 7:38AM ReportThey are right to do that, even I agree with Todeswulf, they should first enhance the LFG system.
It should be like you can checkmark your quests and either set you as LFG for theses or browse people LFG and immediately see what quests you have both.
Also I really miss the ability to parse a quest link in the chat channel with level and descriptions.
Most of the time I'm clueless when someone LFM a quest as :
- I don't know if I have the required level
- I don't even know if I have done it or not
- I don't know in what zone it is!
Mon Oct 13 2008 9:51AM ReportI think i'd enjoy this, as long as it'd done very well. Like if it pulls and parses what profession my character is and all the recipes i have for it.
Mon Oct 13 2008 3:02PM ReportWell, it's a start, but I think I'd like to see that open group system borrowed from Warhammer. Finding a group in this game can be a major pain, given how few lower level characters there are and how many group quests there are.
Mon Oct 13 2008 3:18PM Reportthere is actually an Open Fellowship feature in the game already, but for some reason nobody knows about it and so never uses it. Badly implemented I guess.
Mon Oct 20 2008 7:34PM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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