It turns out to have been a bad week to start subbing to Lord of the Rings Online.
As we’ve been covering, LOTRO is now on its seventh day of issues now. The outages and severdowns began last week and continued into the weekend, when many of the servers were taken offline for the better part of a 48-hour period. Standing Stone Games finally brought them up yesterday evening, though some were promptly taken offline again, while those that stood firm saw players (and us!) reporting extreme lag and unplayability.
While Arkenstone and Sirannon are still offline as of this morning, most of the servers are technically up now, though when I poked my nose in, it was evident that the chat system is still largely non-functional. It’s not clear right now whether that state will hold into the afternoon, which at least last week seemed to be the time period when the outages began.
SSG’s last messages to the community came last night, when it tweeted that (some of) the game worlds had reopened. The studio has promised “more information on event and other scheduling in the coming days,” and we assume that’ll mean extra time on the Midsummer events and potentially compensation for VIP players. But SSG has not explained the reason for all the outages at all, save oblique references to investigating issues at the data center.
“Small or not, no MMO studio should ever go nearly a week with servers being down without releasing an informative statement,” MOP’s LOTRO columnist Justin Olivetti opined. “This definitely is serious and it needs to be communicated better than one-line ‘servers are down’ notices.”
