LOTRO social network begins beta News

Turbine has opened its social networking site for The Lord of the Rings Online to the public for the first time.

The site, My LOTRO, is available for a very limited time as a "beta preview". The preview closes tomorrow, Friday 12th December.

At the moment, My LOTRO is run exclusively by Turbine, the developer of the Tolkien MMO, and so is only available to players on the North American servers operated by Turbine itself.

For the time being, it's not available to players on the European servers operated by Codemasters Online Gaming. You can browse the site, but you can't log in with your account details to use its features, or track events or characters on your server.

My LOTRO, which Turbine previewed to Japanese developers at the Tokyo Game Show, combines the character profiling and guild features of World of Warcraft's Armory with the social features of Facebook - live news feeds, media sharing, friends list management and communication tools.

Although access remains restricted to the American servers for now, this sort of thing is clearly the future of the life-sucking world of MMOs. We know that CCP is working on a similar site for EVE Online, and we'll be watching the development of My LOTRO with interest.