It’s been a crazy couple of weeks between the Book 8 launch and the DDO Unlimited Beta launch (did you sign up yet, by the way?. It occurred to me this morning that I’m way behind on Whiteboard Graffiti. To make up for this, today will be a double feature. ;)

Someone stole the phone from the Zaxxon conference room! We need triage, stat!

Look, here’s one of the bugs we’re squashing with today’s hotfix. Sure, he LOOKS cute, but clearly there is evil hidden under that happy little face.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

I’m out of the office for most of the day tomorrow, so Whiteboard Graffiti is a little early!

While some of our whiteboard graffiti relates directly to something in our games and I can tell a little story about what goes on behind the scenes here, often the graffiti is unrelated. I have no idea what led to this one, but it’s pretty awesome, so feel free to make up your own story and post it in the comments. ;) Enjoy!

Whenever we launch something at Turbine, whether it’s a major update to a back-end system, a patch to one of the games, an event (like the Bullroarer load test or the kinship contest, most recently), or any other significant work, we hold what’s called “Mission Control.” It’s usually held in our largest conference room, Star Wars*. It’s a very high-ceilinged space filled with rows of computers and an entire wall of screens on which we project** server status or anything else we need to monitor during this period.

A Mission Control has representatives from just about every team in the building; the dev team, project management, network operations, engineering, QA, customer service, community, and anyone else who might need to be involved. This makes communicating MUCH faster as it enables decisions to be made on the fly as needed. During the launch of a major milestone, like a game or expansion pack, this room is staffed 24/7 with everyone working in shifts and meals provided (it’s typical for those working Mission Control to gain a few pounds during this period. :) ). It’s recommended you dress in layers, because Mission Control can get HOT with all those computers and people, especially if there’s a problem in which case it becomes standing room only. Portable air conditioning is occasionally brought in to supplement the normal AC. Community is very often required in the room, just in case we need to start messaging something, and so we can monitor the forums for reports of issues and relay them back to the group.

I found this whiteboard graffiti on the board behind engineer Ragtop’s desk. He’s awfully cute, and I love the pun. Hope you do too. :)

*The game, not the movies - our conference rooms are named after classic video games. Well, except for Margaritaville.

**When the room was still new, until we finally got them mounted to the ceiling you had to shield your eyes from the blindingly bright projectors when walking into Star Wars during LOTRO’s launch. Retinal spots were common symptom of being involved in the launch :P.

In honor of the 20+ pages of Book 8 patch notes Sapience has passed to me for proofreading (he already did most of the grunt work - hey, I did my time!), here’s some new whiteboard graffiti courtesy of, no doubt, someone in our QA department. :) So sorry for missing last week’s WBG, but I was in Seattle all last week catching a plague! To make up for it, I’ll post more tomorrow if I can get through these patch notes. :)

Happy Friday and First of May! It was beautiful this week and the trees are in bloom all around Turbine - just the perfect time of year to hop on a bike at lunch and get some sunshine. Things are hopping inside too, but spring fever has definitely set in!

I tried finding some whiteboard graffiti that might go along with the Moustache May theme, but alas, all I could find was this Watcher. :) Enjoy!

This can be found on one of the whiteboards in the LOTRO area. As someone who plays a hobbit and is accused of looking like one in real life, I choose to be amused rather than offended. :D What I like most about this is the raw talent that shows up around here - I can’t draw a stick figure with a whiteboard marker, much less a great-looking hobbit holding another one’s cloak!

I’ve worked at Turbine for going on 4.5 years now* and during this time, I’ve been in countless meetings in one of our many conference rooms, all of which have whiteboards. Most people don’t erase the whiteboards when they leave the room, so you’ll find all kinds of interesting tidbits on them - but by far, the most entertaining ones are the doodles and drawings left behind by our talented artists - and not-so-talented everyone else. :)

Right from the start I thought it would be so awesome to preserve these and make, oh, I don’t know, a coffee table book or something. How I wish I had taken a picture of the heart with “Balrog + Gandalf = BFF” before it was finally erased weeks later! My dream of a coffee table book was always complicated by thoughts of “I’m too busy” and “Who else would possibly want to see this?” and other thoughts of this nature. So I’ve scaled back my dream, but not given up; armed with my Blackberry I walked around the Turbine offices the other day and took pictures of the interesting things I found on the whiteboards. I’ll continue to take pictures of the new things that pop up from now on.

So in light of this, I give you the first two installments of “Whiteboard Graffiti.” Hope you enjoy them. :)

Random philosophy:

The Fellowship:

*I started on Jan 3, 2005; coincidentally, Jan 3rd is Tolkien’s birthday!

Fight me! :D

http://lalalalalemon.mybrute.com

Not to mention it’s Friday. :)

It’s been a big week here in the Turbine offices, or at least it feels like it. This week we had a LOTRO patch, a hotfix, a my.lotro.com update, a close race with Bethesda in the Escapist’s March Mayhem, a bunch of new content on lotro.com and ddo.com, the Spring festival, new DDO wallpaper, plus lots of other stuff I’ve either forgotten or am not at liberty to talk about (yet!).

Remember that all of our websites are down during Monday’s datacenter move. We’ll keep you updated through a page on lotro.com, and though AC and DDO will be down, the LOTRO game servers will still be up.

One thing I wanted to talk about in particular is the voting at the Escapist. Our players turned out in force all three times to vote for us. I thought for sure that Bethesda, with the still-newish hawtness of Fallout 3, and on console to boot, would thoroughly trounce us in Round 3. As of this writing we have held our margin of ~+130 votes since last night and I think we we might actually win it! Even if we don’t, the overwhelming support you folks showed for us, and the wonderful things you said about us, has been incredibly amazing and gratifying. Lots of you commented that you love our games, but almost as often, it seemed, you mention the community and the fact that you all feel like you’re part of one, with each other and with us.

THAT is what it’s all about for me (and everyone else on the community team!). The fact that you feel this way is what we work toward every day. We’re not perfect, by any means, but we do our best to foster that sense of community and hearing it expressed by our players makes it all worth it.

I’m going to stop here before I get even more gushy, and just leave it at this: Thank you for voting for us, thank you for participating in our communities, and thank you for playing our games. Regardless of whether we win or lose Round 3, or make it to the end, just having gotten this far on your support is awesome. So thank you.

And before I forget… Have a wonderful weekend too! :)

Since we’ve been spamming the launcher and forums with Brasse’s latest maps I thought I would round them up for y’all here. :)

Caras Galadhon
Silvertine Lodes
The Waterworks (check out the related comic too ;))

And today, Brasse has uploaded a map of the Spring Festival’s hedge maze!

I’m really glad Brasse has started mapping again in LOTRO; her hand-drawn maps are sheer awesome. And if you ever get to meet the most talented dwarf this side of the Shire, don’t hesitate, as she’s equally as fantastic in person! :)