With the release of The Lord of the Rings Online™: Mines of Moria™, players will be able to advance their characters up to level 60 and gain access to new traits, virtues, skills, and class quests. We're excited to present the first three developer diaries describing character advancement past level 50 - check out these Burglar, Lore-master, or Hunter diaries for more information! 

I just finished scratching off another mmorpg from the list of current games released that promised to make crafting better, revolutionize it, make it more innovative, yada yada yada. You would think by now that I would have stopped hoping, but alas, if it is my one weakness, I always have hope. Seriously though, what is it with crafting that these game developers just can't get right? It's either too big a grind, worthless, boring, too complicated, or not complicated enough.

I'm looking back at all the mmorpgs I've played over the past decade+ and thinking about each one of their crafting systems and what went wrong. I'm not going to make a complete list, but the ones I list and rmble on about incoherently will suffice.

There are also five impressive new screenshots released from Lotro Gold's expansion, Mines of Moria: