After sending us into conniptions with partial information about Lord of the Rings Online’s newly announced 64-bit servers, Standing Stone Games’ Rob Ciccolini cleared the air when he sat down to give us the full scoop on last week’s studio livestream. While we still don’t have all of the details — including a firm opening date — we’re in a much better place to understand what’s going to happen and make plans for the future.
Ever since watching that stream, my mind’s been abuzz with thoughts about the implications of this move. It could well be one of the biggest changes in LOTRO’s entire history with potential to be exciting and oh-so-messy. Let’s dig into it today!
After absorbing all of the news and stepping back to look at the big picture here, I can confidently say — and I doubt SSG will rebut me here — is that the studio is rolling out these four servers to become the main LOTRO servers going forward. These aren’t a side experiment; these are the replacements.
This accomplishes a couple big tasks, as Ciccolini spoke about on the livestream. The first is to consolidate the spread-out population onto larger severs so that more people can be together. This benefits the community as a whole with more kinship options, a livelier world, a more robust economy, and more people with whom to group for instances.
The second, and probably more significant, is shepherding players off ancient and creaky servers plagued with issues and lag and onto new shards that hopefully will perform vastly better. As I suspected last year, the recent Angmar/Mordor legendary servers were kind of a test run for the 64-bit architecture, and it seems they passed this test.
So the Great LOTRO Server Transfer of ’25 (can someone make t-shirts for this already?) is to lay a much more solid foundation for this MMO’s future. I absolutely loved hearing Ciccolini share that Daybreak is financially investing into LOTRO with tech like this because it projects strong confidence in many more years ahead. That’s comforting!
There are additional smaller effects that these new servers will have. It’ll give Europe two new regular servers in its region for lower ping. It’ll allow players to rescue their characters from long-closed dead worlds (aka the dark worlds). It continues to safeguard roleplaying servers after a fashion. And it’ll give us all the opportunity to clean house, so to speak, by bringing together our characters, shared storage, and housing into one place.
The upsides of this are many and very welcome. If, in the end, all works out to plan, then LOTRO will bring its whole population together, settle these new servers, and forge forward with better performance all around. That’s genuinely exciting!
But I absolutely cannot deny that this is going to be a spectacular mess with a high chance of things going really wonky along the way. SSG is charging forward with this in the near future (before spring) and knows that we’re all going to be scrambling for our names and housing slots. That right there is going to spark some anxiety of varying degrees among people, compounded by kinships and couples who want to move together and stay together.
I think that the three-step plan laid out is the best that could be finagled under the situation. It lets VIP players reserve a few names, starts the server transfer process a day prior, and then opens things up to play while continuing the transfers. The name scramble is going to result in some hurt feelings, there’s no doubt, but having a shot at securing a few of them helps.
How well SSG’s transfer service will be able to handle thousands upon thousands of players slamming into it at the same time is anyone’s guess, but my guess will be “not good.” I mean, here’s hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. That’s a LOT of characters and inventory to be shuffled around, not to mention wardrobes and housing escrow and currency. Any of that lost in the process, and customer service is going to find itself overwhelmed.
The name and housing rush isn’t going to settle until the end of the first week, and the heightened emotions and very possible disgruntled reactions are the price that’s going to be paid. It’s probably best to have alternate picks laid out, as Ciccolini suggested, and be as flexible as possible. I think it’s a little eye-rolly how much he was talking about protecting famous players (i.e., streamers) from name poaching, but whatever. Preferential treatment is hard to justify in that, but I can see the studio’s reasoning.
And some players and kinships attached to their current server homes aren’t going to appreciate the choice here: Move now and get better names and housing slots, or we’ll move you later and you’ll have fewer options. Sure, SSG said it’s keeping these old servers open… for now. But let’s not kid ourselves: They’re all going to get shut down the moment the studio can justify it with population numbers. There would have to be a concerted effort by an entire community to hold out, and that’s simply not going to happen.
There are also several follow-up questions to this livestream that the studio’s going to need to address because people keep coming up with some issues that haven’t been clearly discussed with us.
Even admitting to a twinge of anxiety over staking a claim on these new servers, I do feel overwhelming optimism for this move. That’s simply me, and your results may vary. In any case, it’s going to be a wild and wooly early 2025 in Middle-earth, and I hope it all shakes out for the best!
Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at justin@massivelyop.com.
