Turbine has unveiled its Live Beta for a new Social feature of the Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria Community – My.Lotro.Com.
Basically a site where MySpace meets LotRO (once I stopped shuddering and checked it out I was relieved to find it wasn’t as bad as the first name mentioned); This site not only acts as a social platform for players, but it is iteration #2 of Turbines move towards web services for the game – the first iteration was the character signatures on the forum (where game data is pulled to form the signature), this one pulls full character data (a la WoW’s Armory – but different still the same) from the game servers and also offers blogging (based on WordPress – with various ‘identities’ tied to a persons characters).
This site is, in my opinion, the first step towards one of Turbines Launch promises – to have interactive data (XML Web Services) available for players to ’show off’ their characters. Next I think we might see API’s to export XML data for characters to third party sites / custom Signature sites / etc.
Keep in mind that the site is still in Beta – there are still some quirks here and there, but overall the site is a good step towards something good.
