It seems that Standing Stone Games has wasted no time in showcasing their newly minted African avatars. For the second time, they have featured their newly minted woke avatars in their updates. For this new update, two African males riding horses are featured in the promotional graphic for the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Gondor Renewed update/patch.
Interestingly enough, no sign of white females with beards or Asian avatars in this update. I’m sure they’ll be in the next update along with some obligatory LGBTQ Pride propaganda. At this point, the race-swapping nitwits at SSG are capable of anything.
Using real-world minorities to virtue signal via the odious practice of representation is shameful and despicable. If they will vandalize Tolkien and get away with it, there’s nothing stopping them from destroying other intellectual properties. Both Standing Stones Games and Daybreak Games are directly responsible for this outrage. They care more about their ESG scores than being faithful to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Africans and Asians did not exist in Middle-earth. Standing Stone Games knows this but puts them in anyways. They think they know better than Tolkien. They don’t.
It’s not Standing Stones Games’ world, it’s Tolkien’s world. If SSG wants to make a multi-racial, multi-cultural Utopian virtual world, they should MAKE THEIR OWN instead of desecrating worlds that others have created. But they can’t and won’t make their own. They are a bunch of talentless, woke, hacks who couldn’t get a job cleaning dog poop for a living. Luckily for them, the video game industry has low standards.
Meanwhile, the horrible lag has not been addressed, the user interface has still not been revamped, and the combat is clunky.
Conclusion
The good news is that Amazon Games has announced that they are taking another stab at a Lord of the Rings-themed MMORPG. Although I do not trust Amazon, I trust Standing Stones Games even less after this catastrophe. I’m hoping Amazon Games has learned their lesson from the Rings of Power debacle and a new version of Middle-earth will hopefully destroy SSG’s horribly dated and woke version.
What we tolerate today, becomes the status quo tomorrow. I urge all devotees of Tolkien to continue to fight the good fight. This desecration of Middle-earth must not be allowed to stand.
–Wolfshead
The African character is in the front, in the middle, has the fanciest armor, the fanciest mount, made to look even more important than King Aragorn Elessar riding next to him.
He should be the king, he should be the one in the middle protected by others on both sides. Instead a random nobody is taking the spotlight? Why? Who even is that?
They did the same thing in a previous update – it showed an African woman, an Asian man and a Caucasian man in that order I believe. Above the African woman it said something like Luxuriant, above the Asian man – Enhanced and above the Caucasian man – Simple. Here’s the image – I uploaded it so in case they remove it it’s still accessible: https://i.ibb.co/5FbXSLW/image.png
It’s from this news piece: https://www.lotro.com/news/lotro-housing-coffers-en
The way I see it, it shows being an African woman is Luxuriant, being an Asian man is Enhanced and being a Caucasian man is Simple. I can’t possibly imagine them adding a Caucasian in any of the first two positions and doing something so unwoke and non-virtue signaling like putting anyone “of color … lol what a stupid name” to be in the Simple position.
It’s obvious that Africans and Asians are Luxuriant and Enhanced and Caucasians are only Simple, if possible they would be removed from the game or made the bad guys.
Maybe Standing Stone Games’ ideal vision for LOTRO is to never update the POS engine or the POS servers or the POS UI that can’t scale, but they will make all Caucasian characters be Angmarim or Southrons and servants of the Witch King and Sauron and will make Orcs, Trolls, Goblins and Warg part of the good guys. So everyone can kill the evil Caucasians.
Good catch! I didn’t see that, but now when I look at it, you are right. The African character has no business being in the middle let alone even being in Gondor.
This is not accidental. This is pure woke virtue signaling. The left is obsessed with using blacks as pawns. I’m working on an upcoming article that discusses this insanity.
This is ridiculous. The woke bug has bitten them, hard. Also, African and Asian people are in general not interested in Tolkien stuff at all. It is simply not their heritage, culture, background, mythology.
But tell that to a woke bloke…
I really would like to know when that “woke” switch got fully triggered at Standing Stones Games and who or which group was the driving force.
It is on purpose where they destroy one thing, even if profitable and beneficial, they raise up as a phoenix. They won’t fix LOTRO at all, in the purpose of making it bleed money enough, perhaps as a shorting, but to make room for LOTRO to die off and have Amazon make the Lord of the Rings MMO. They might put the New World MMO to pasture once that new MMO has launched, because to save money. They’ll still be ESG-DIE, unless it gets so bad in finance that they can’t afford to do those policies. Depends how it goes for the next few years.
If I was being realize in being evil, and I am the evil one, I wouldn’t allow one iota wire linking to that. Why the rush? Why be brash?
Pride methinks?
I think time is running out somewhere….
It is very clear that Standing Stone Games cares more about being woke than they do about being faithful to Tolkien’s lore. Using a beloved IP as a vehicle to disseminate a Satanic worldview is despicable.
SSG is teaming with pure evil. I would love to get a Roman Catholic priest into the studio at SSG and to do an exorcism.
Or an Orthodox Christian priest… Either way, a priest can’t fix them.
Their whole team has to be fired and completely replaced with new people, which won’t happen. They have to keep the old people who know how to work on that engine to train new people or if there is a plan to port the game to a new engine – to again keep the same old people long enough until the port is done before they can be let go. And they have to be under constant supervision.
It’s unfeasible in any way, shape or form to cleanse SSG from the woke disease. And I don’t think all these decisions are coming from them. A lot of this is probably coming from above.
Remember, LOTRO was doing OK before it got swallowed under EG7. It was after that moment, when things went downhill for LOTRO. Probably the only good thing that came out of that was to make the content level 1 – level 95 completely free, but when I thought things were starting to look up for LOTRO, they come up with this woke trash.
At this point, there is no saving for LOTRO – it will only get worse and worse, I don’t think they will ever do anything about the client performance or server performance or the UI or the graphics. If we ignore the woke propaganda, this character (avatar as they call it) update was supposed to make characters more detailed and better looking, the problem is that it made everything worse. Faces became uglier and more child-like, there were issue with helmet pieces clipping into faces/heads, hairs clipping into heads and so forth. The update was a disaster no matter how you look at it.
I would be genuinely surprised if they actually do something about the technical issues with the game. So far they seem to be focusing on releasing their next expansion about Umbar at the end of the year and that is 100% contradicting with a notion that they plan on addressing the technical issues – just ignore them long enough and maybe they will go away. The irony is with every update they add some kind of content into the game, the game becomes more and more bloated and slower to load.
At the end of 2022, there was a project about a LOTRO private server that used the client from 2008 with content only up to Angmar and I was curious to try it for a few reasons:
– to see if the game was more difficult
– how exactly the game was difficult back then
– how is the perfromance
And on the performance point, I must say, the performance was night and day compared to the retail LOTRO – loading screens were almost instant like in Vanilla WoW, FPS was stable and always above 60, no stuttering, no problems at all. But the retail LOTRO is so bloated it’s a miracle the game isn’t constantly crashing or causing memory leaks.
AGS has enough disposable income that they can keep New World running until the Third World War even if they are operating at a loss. The game is part of their woke propaganda – the game has no genders, only body type 1 and body type 2, you can put beards on women and female hairstyles on men, you can have a magenta pink hair in this so-called “dark fantasy” world. More like a clown world.
The AGS LOTR game will also be drenched in woke propaganda – anti-Caucasian, anti-Christian, pro-woke, pro-color, pro-transgender, pro-gay, pro-mentally insane. The game will exist in tandem to spread the woke brain rot disease far and wide.
Then there are Blue Protocol and Throne & Liberty – also about to be published by AGS in the West.