I’m hopelessly out of date, but I’ve been doing my best to get caught up on the ’sphere and such. Here’s some stuff I think is worth following up on:

• LotRO Book 7 sounds a-maze-ing. The new player experience and the release notes are some of the finest work yet out of an amazing group of devs. Great work all around.
• Eurogamer’s “Ten Level Test” is some of the best MMO writing I think I’ve ever seen. No joke. Oli Welsh has a fantastic take on this. Check out the editorial laying the groundwork, then the first two rounds: EQ2 vs. Vanguard, Lineage 2 vs. FFXI.
• The new WoW TCG Loot cards continue to impress. I love how the ultra-rares continue to add alternate game mechanic elements.
• The end of Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Same day as my first at SOE. Weird world.
• Lauren revisits ‘bring the player’ vs. ‘bring the class’ with a look at Runes of Magic.
• Scott Brown proves NetDevil has a good grasp on reality: “We built this so that no matter how big it is, it doesn’t have to be a million-user game for it to be successful for us to run it for a long, long time.”