I've been a fan of Middle Earth and The Lord of The Rings since I was a kid and I went to see The Fellowship movie in 2001 and I was enthralled. I was gifted the trilogy, read it and enjoyed it immensely. I began playing LOTRO seriously in 2021 and bought all expansions and leveled a Human (or men) Guardian all the way up to level 140 and actually began to level an Elf Lore-master when this update took place and when I went to the forums to express my concerns how these changes are lore-breaking, because Tolkien never specified that women have beards, it can be some anomaly, but not anything that warrants in-game customization options and Asian and African nations in Arda don't even live in Middle Earth, they are so far away and they aren't on good terms with the folks of Middle Earth. The Easterlings in the Far East may have attempted to conquer Middle Earth in the past, but where thwarted, they are under the rule of someone evil under the command of Sauron or Morgoth before him. The Southrons from Harad are also far away from Middle Earth and under Sauron they were lead to attack the folks of Middle Earth. So both nations have no business in Middle Earth simply because they are too far away and are enemies with the people of Middle Earth and they would not be welcome there.
When I expressed my opinion about the female beards, I was permanently banned from the LOTRO forums. It appears that if you express an opinion that is negative towards the change, it falls under "discussing politics", which they conveniently announced will result in a ban right after the update hit the test server. If your opinion is positive towards the change, even as far as to openly and directly insulting and mocking those not sharing the same opinion, it's not considered "discussing politics" and is totally fine.
The developers of LOTRO are practicing double standards and obviously don't care about upholding the true lore of the game or care about respecting the players who support them by buying content into the game. The icing on the cake is that they release questionable updates like this, ban people all the while the game client is struggling and barely working with low FPS and poor performance and their servers are in a sorry state causing widespread lag, making the game at times impossible to play and making some players outright avoid group content because of the lag.
Brandon McFinn1 year ago…I've been a fan of Middle Earth and The Lord of The Rings since I was a kid and I went to see The Fellowship movie in 2001 and I was enthralled. I was gifted the trilogy, read it and enjoyed it immensely. I began playing LOTRO seriously in 2021 and bought all expansions and leveled a Human (or men) Guardian all the way up to level 140 and actually began to level an Elf Lore-master when this update took place and when I went to the forums to express my concerns how these changes are lore-breaking, because Tolkien never specified that women have beards, it can be some anomaly, but not anything that warrants in-game customization options and Asian and African nations in Arda don't even live in Middle Earth, they are so far away and they aren't on good terms with the folks of Middle Earth. The Easterlings in the Far East may have attempted to conquer Middle Earth in the past, but where thwarted, they are under the rule of someone evil under the command of Sauron or Morgoth before him. The Southrons from Harad are also far away from Middle Earth and under Sauron they were lead to attack the folks of Middle Earth. So both nations have no business in Middle Earth simply because they are too far away and are enemies with the people of Middle Earth and they would not be welcome there. When I expressed my opinion about the female beards, I was permanently banned from the LOTRO forums. It appears that if you express an opinion that is negative towards the change, it falls under "discussing politics", which they conveniently announced will result in a ban right after the update hit the test server. If your opinion is positive towards the change, even as far as to openly and directly insulting and mocking those not sharing the same opinion, it's not considered "discussing politics" and is totally fine. The developers of LOTRO are practicing double standards and obviously don't care about upholding the true lore of the game or care about respecting the players who support them by buying content into the game. The icing on the cake is that they release questionable updates like this, ban people all the while the game client is struggling and barely working with low FPS and poor performance and their servers are in a sorry state causing widespread lag, making the game at times impossible to play and making some players outright avoid group content because of the lag.
