It is time again for the Russian LotRO players to use a community-wide petition as the last resort to address you. You probably remember the previous petition signed by 1,200 people, requesting you to take direct control over the Russian localization of The Lord of the Rings Online (http://www.petitiononline.com/LotroF2P/petition.html).

Now the hype has subsided a bit and we are only two-three months behind the global servers. We came to appreciate the fact that the current Turbine sublicensee, Mail.RU Games, is dedicated to this project to the full extent, subject to this project’s priority among (many) others. This, if you wish, can be described by the following statement: small but very brave localization team in Russia is doing titanic work to timely translate game content, fix localization errors, organize in-game events, among a bunch of other tasks they perform on a daily basis. In our opinion, they’re left with no time to propagate the interests of the Russian players – OUR interests – in the global community, that’s why we have decided to address the community and you directly.

This situation when we are artificially isolated from the global community and developers, and most bug discussions result in a “we can’t do anything until the developers fix it” dead-end (it should be noted that on multiple occasions it turned our localization team was just not aware of the features that existed on the global servers) can be deemed acceptable by some, but not by our community that is in love with your game. Your administrators are surely aware of the Russian players’ feats on the Bullroarer test servers, world’s first boss kills. Oh yes, we do have well-organized, talented, dedicated players who would adorn the worldwide Player Council!

Please support our initiative and select as many Russian players as you feel necessary to participate in the Player Council, considering the server counts: three out of 32 official servers in the World. We will not enclose actual player names here, since each one of them applies to the council in the same manner as any other player, as specified at http://www.lotro.com/playercouncil. For most of them the main concern is your requirement to be an “active” player for at least the previous six months, and we hope that your pretty generic definition of this “active” status includes the activity on the Russian LotRO servers.

With sincere hope to see you in the Player Council,

Yours respectfully,

Russian LotRO community