Lord of the Rings Online is about to get a lot more neighbourly. The trouble is that nobody seems quite sure how to be a good neighbour yet.
Massively OP's LOTRO Legendarium columnist has spent time with the new neighbour system that arrives with the Wolves of Mordor expansion. The verdict is mixed. The characters are charming, the missions are fun, and the system is ambitious. It is also confusing, poorly explained and, in the columnist's words, a "half-baked first pass."
An early arrival
The timing is the first surprise. Standing Stone Games (SSG) is shipping Wolves of Mordor later this month, even though developer previews are still rolling out and zone testing has only run for a few weeks. The columnist had expected an early December launch and calls the schedule "very premature." They suggest two possible reasons: dodging November's crowded release calendar, and the multi-month subscription price increase that is happening right now.
Anyone who follows Camelot Unchained knows how uneven its update rhythm can be. Some weekends, the early access build arrives with a handful of small tweaks and not much else. Then a week like this one comes along and drops a brand-new archetype, the first proper siege tools, and a pile of combat changes all at once.
This is one of the bigger builds. It matters whether you're logging in to the early access yourself or just tracking the MMORPG's progress from a distance.
Meet the Scout
The headline addition is the Scout, a mobile archetype built around utility rather than raw damage. Its toolkit mixes debuffs, crowd control, and general support abilities, which suggests a class meant to shape fights rather than simply win them.
The World of Warcraft Forever beta has moved into its next phase. Blizzard's test has been rolling out in stages, and this week another stage arrived with a higher level cap, more zones, more talent points and a handful of new places to fight through.
For testers, that means more ground to cover and more to report back on. The new content is also the best look yet at how far this version of Azeroth will stretch beyond its earliest levels.
Level 30 and Familiar Ground
The headline change is the new level cap, which now sits at 30. That is a meaningful jump for anyone who has been stuck replaying the same low-level content, and Blizzard has opened up zones to match.
Team Liquid's time with Kamil "siuhy" Szkaradek is officially over.
According to Dust2.us, the organisation has released the Polish player into free agency. That ends a 16-month tenure on Liquid's Counter-Strike 2 roster that never delivered what either side hoped for. It isn't exactly a surprise. Liquid had already benched him in July and handed the in-game leader role to Johnny "JT" Theodosiou. This week's news simply makes that separation formal.
What the release doesn't do is solve anything. The report names no replacement, so Liquid now has an empty seat in its lineup and, for the moment, no public plan to fill it.
Brazilian Counter-Strike just lost two organisations in one go, and neither of them lost a match to get there.
LOUD and Keyd Stars have both stepped away from Counter-Strike 2 after Brazil's federal government moved against online betting. Their exits are the most visible part of a much wider shake-up. Teams, sponsors and even tournament series in one of CS2's most passionate regions are suddenly having to work out how to pay the bills without the betting money that has propped up so much of the scene.
Two exits, two very different stories
The two departures took different paths, but they ended in the same place.
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