Weekly MMO news round-up: LOTRO rumors, ex-Blizzard artist creates LAW, APB refresher course

Yes, we know. It's not Sunday. It is, however, Monday, and that makes looking at all the MMO news from last week even more sensible.

We think so, anyway. Read on.

• Frogster's added a new horse racing minigame, called Windrunner, to Runes of Magic. Race against seven others in an obstacle course on horseback, but be careful: traps full of magic with slow-down effects, spider webs or even speed boosters can keep you from winning.

• Loads of LOTRO stuff went down last week. The April Fool's event in the Ettenmores had to be canceled due to the extra load on the servers. That's a good thing, because creeps were griefing freeps at respawn points during this quest - not cool guys. That same night, the servers borked and were down for hours, until the tech team finally fixed the issue. Rumors that the game's next book expansion will be called Riders of Rohan were all over the place. Seems Turbine purchased the domain name, which auto-forwards you to the official LOTRO site. Further,shots of the new crafting quests popped up, and the EU finally got Book 7: The Leaves of Lorien. Phew.

• In other Turbine news, players of Dungeon & Dragons Online and Asheron's Call have been plagued with abnormal amounts of server downtime. To calm the savage beasts, Turbine is awarding rare bonus drops and and extra 25 percent bonus XP for Asheron's Call. D&D Online players can expect to be compensated with the same XP bonus, a one-point bonus to loot, and a special in-game item when Mod 9 launches.

• Iron Will announced that Dungeons of Dransik, the next expansion for the Ashen Empires, will utilize a free, downloadable editor called the Ashen Empires Content Creator. Players will be able to make their own custom dungeon-crawl adventures and share them in game. Sounds cool.

• The alpha beta was completed for L.A.W (Living After War), the new MMO set in a post-nuclear 2350. It's created by Jang Wook Lee, who was the lead artist at Blizzard north Entertainment USA. Read more about it in the press release.

• Linden Labs announced changes to the "open-source Second Life viewer program that would enable the fast-tracking of user-contributions to the code-base". We have no idea what that means, but Second Life players do, and apparently so does Massively.

• Forgot what Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin is about? Not to worry. Massively has posted a bit of a refresher course for you. Thanks for jogging our memory, guys.

• GamesRadar has a look at Global Agenda, the laser shooting, energy katana-wielding and espionage-thick 'spy-fi' shooter. Sounds interesting, and a bit refreshing to be honest. Check it out.