Perhaps this is the cause? The switch to F2P means they have to focus resources on getting money into the company and anything that doesn't, in their view, accomplish this obviously has to go. They are running a business after all.

What we need to do, and I have no idea how, is to show Turbine or their taskmasters that giving a little time to LUA, Skin and Data would benefit them financially.

Could be. Financial benefits ? Well I would imagine an active UI community would be enough to keep at least amount of gamers interested in Lotro that it would pay the salaries of one or two dedicated devs. Better community > better results > happier end-users > more players

Not instant cash but in time it could matter.

Or they could gate mods from free-players via the store and to enable the feature by spending some TP. In that case they would need to provide us more resources - but in that case they would need to support mods officially however for the end-users.

more likely the cause is Turbine S.O.P.

roll out a great new feature....

give it some support at outset....

and then pretty much ignore/abandon

examples....hobbys....housing....kinships....Lua.. .UI skins

:(

Perhaps if we can put a petition together from concerned players such as ourselves?

Thanks all, I appreciate your candor. I had figured this was the case, but I wanted to double check with the community first in the chance that I had just missed something. I plan to start up my videos centering on plugins again because they're still a very active part of my play style, but I first wanted to explain why I had stopped in the first place; which was that I was disappointed in Turbine's attitude towards Lua (and they were a lot of work). But I'm over my laziness and I'd really like to start showing people how awesome Lua (and skins) can be.

Thanks guys and gals, and of course any more feedback is readily welcome.

I'll be fascinated to see which plugins you do next!

And, on a more serious note, thank you for raising this here. For all the many, many things Turbine do right - I think this is one area where they really need not to drop the ball.

As a USER of LUA plugins I'm very disappointed in the way its shaped up. The UI still needs more options, many more options. Skinning and the existing permissions (or what ever they are) just dont cut it IMO. I want options, I want authors to be able to use the creativity they obviously have and run with it.

When the API launched it was a nice start. The dev talked a big talk. But its obviously been scrapped and the dev/s responsible has been let go, moved to other projects, or lost interest.

I hope one day we'll see some cash thrown towards this feature.

After seeing the six months of the broken inventory event handling, without so much as a word that they acknowledge the problem is there, and they're working on it....

With Update 2 I had some hope for further improvements, however, the lack of communication and complete absence of anything Lua in Update 3 killed what little hope remained.

Be very careful on those both subjects.

After somes posting on the official forums concerning UI and asking to know Turbine's decision and the futur of UI, some members have been either frorum banned or received forum warning infractions.

This is definitivly a touchy subject for Turbine.

*raises hands*

i have had 2 accounts banned since update2 went live.
one ban was for posts about the ui/lua
posts deleted...threads removed etc.

the head forum mod uses their position to go after folks whom they take a dislike to and will FIND a interpretation of the rules to use against one.

this kinda of thing never happened under the previous head forum mod.

the forums are a sad place...many good voices have been silenced since he took over.