Q: What is Middle-earth Revenge?
A: Middle-earth Revenge (MER) is a project dedicated to preserving MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online, forever.
Eventually a game's servers are shut down. Writing an emulator for a dead game takes an enormous effort. Why not seize the opportunity and write an emulator while servers are still active?
MER is a community dedicated to LotRO servers reverse-engineering (hence the name - RevEnge). It is a public library for all knowledge, code, tools and whatnot concerned with LotRO server emulation, and a workshop to create more.
Information and code published here is for educational purposes only. MER isn't, not going to and never will host any private servers without explicit permission from LotRO developers and/or publishers. If at any moment an unauthorized LotRO private server will emerge, MER will deny any liability in that respect.
Q: Is this legal?
A: Yes, this is perfectly legal. We're not interfering with official LotRO servers, we're not hosting any LotRO servers of our own, we're not modifying LotRO client, we're not using licensed assets. We're merely analyzing client-server packet exchange which is public information anyway, and prototyping using the information gathered.
Is it illegal to write code and share it with other people? I don't think so.
Q: Isn't this dangerous?
A: Are WoW emulators dangerous to official WoW servers? If WoW is unharmed, how could LotRO be harmed, granted how minuscule its entire community is compared to WoW?
Q: How can I help?
A: 1. SECURE. CONTAIN. PROTECT.
- FORK. DOWNLOAD. SAVE.
Around 2010 there used to be a working emulator prototype, a little more advanced than what we have today. It was lost entirely. We had to start from scratch.
What happened? The people simply abandoned project, and the repository went down for whatever reason.
Preserving knowledge and code is our first and most important responsibility. We never know if and when copyright owners will try to strike as down or any other trouble befall us. We must be always ready.
- CONTRIBUTE.
There's so much more then analyzing and coding that has to be done to keep the project alive. FAQs and instructions have to be written, packets have to be captured and stored for future analysis, roadmaps have to be charted out… For more specific tasks and jobs please refer to Project boards (those have to be filled with issues, too!)
- SHARE.
You are under no legal obligation to share your own analysis and code, based or not on materials provided by MER. But please, please if you have anything, please share it with other enthusiasts at MER. Remember, we are working together to make LotRO forever.
Q: Is MER somehow related to EoA?
A: No members of EoA project are involved with MER.
Q: Some repositories are missing commit history. What happened?
A: I have solid reasons to believe that people behind some of our code prefer to remain anonymous. To that end I squashed commit history under my credentials. It was never my intention to steal anybody's credit.