This past week has seen the release of the new free content for Lord of the Rings Online. Entitled, Book 8: The Scourge of Khazad-Dum, this update brings several new instances and one new raid to the game, as well as revamping the earlier content (in the 15-22 level range). That’s all great right? Well… a mini blog-o-steria has been raging on the LOTRO forums and blogs as Turbine has made perhaps the biggest launch screw up since it released the game.

All that new content everyone was looking forward to? It’s all bugged. The boss encounters are easily broken and server lag had been rampant (on the bright side there has been no Conan-esque crashes). As rage built on the forums, Turbine released an announcement saying the patch to hotfix these major issues would be released later in the week.

Here’s the kicker about this bad case of the usual patch-day-flu MMOs are prone to, almost all the issues were noticed in testing. There are no documents to show it was caught in the QA stage, but the public test server has been reporting these bugs for weeks and has the links to prove it. This, added with the fact that the hotfix is so soon after release, is indicating to the player-base that Turbine was well aware they were releasing a broken update and did nothing to stop it.

The forums are now rife with the flame-wars which occupy so much space on the “interwebs”. Between the doomsday callers and the loyal fans with stars in their eyes, there’s really not much room for a cohesive argument. But the question remains: Why did Turbine release the patch rather than postpone it for three days?

There are three “theories” which have been thrown around. The first is that some executive simply wanted it out by said date and gave the developers very little leeway. Second, some players are assuming there was some mistake on the programming side of things, and the fixes implemented in QA accidentally did not make it into Book 8. And lastly, people are jumping onto production rumors and are saying that Turbine’s A Team is working on their console MMO (mockingly called the Harry Potter MMO), and the B-Team has less experience in polishing content.

Either way, the release was botched, and the question remains: Would you rather have a Free Content Update released quickly, with a fix patch a few days later, or wait it out for a near-perfect release? Also, why do you think Turbine dropped the ball?

Feel free to post any comments, or LOTRO hate (yes, I know it’s coming), below.