One of the unfortunate side effects of Lord of the Rings Online’s population boom amid its 15th anniversary celebrations is that all of the players have put increased strain on already shaky servers. Performance issues are no new thing for this MMO, of course, and permanent improvements have been a long time coming.
To address this subject, LOTRO’s producer put up a post on the forums to explain, exactly, what SSG is doing to fix up the game’s backend. “Lag continues to be a problem, and we continue to work on it,” he vowed. “Overall, performance is in a better place than when Gundabad released, despite larger player concurrencies and overall player population. ‘Better’ doesn’t mean good, but it’s nice to see that the months we spent working on various improvements over the past six months have borne some fruit.”
He revealed that things got pretty dicey for the MMO over the last month: “With Update 33, we saw a huge influx of players, the likes of which we haven’t seen in at least six years. This has led to worsening performance across all worlds. We even thought we’d lost a Landroval blade — someone’s gonna use this to try and argue we are or aren’t virtualizing, we still are, but VMs still gotta live somewhere — but it went down temporarily and was successfully revived.”
Apparently SSG has “several initiatives” in the works, including 64-bit servers, creating tools to identify issues more quickly, improvements for the 64-bit client, and features designed to address the lag with the game’s databases.
“A significant portion of the engineering effort that is being done and planned for the coming year is focused on continuing to improve the performance of the game for everyone,” he concluded.
