Hopefully many of you were able to reserve your names yesterday on Lord of the Rings Online’s four new 64-bit realms, but there’s something even more important happening today. As of this afternoon, players can take advantage of free servers from all of the current 32-bit worlds to move onto the two NA and two EU shards in preparation for tomorrow’s grand opening. You can’t actually play, but you can begin the great migration.
Readers might remember that the kick-off for transfers was supposed to be noon EST, but there’s been a last-minute delay as the legacy servers are still offline.
But when the servers do go live, “free transfers from 32-bit to 64-bit worlds will be available to all players,” SSG said. “The new game worlds themselves will remain closed, but the transfer tool will be enabled to allow for transfers to these worlds.”
While these transfers are available for the Treebeard legendary world, that’s not the case for the more recent Angmar and Mordor shards. Players should note that this is a first-come-first-served situation for any non-reserved names, so it behooves you to get your characters onto your desired worlds ASAP. However, SSG said that transfers to and between the 64-bit worlds will remain active for a while to come, so there is plenty of time.
If you’re still waiting for a ride from one of the Dark Worlds – that is, the servers closed in 2015 – your chance will come starting March 12th, when SSG begins a staggered reopening of those servers for transfer purposes only.
The four new worlds, Glamdring (NA), Peregrin (RP-NA), Meriadoc (RP-EU), and Orcrist (EU) are going online for play on Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. EST and should offer better performance while being capable of larger populations. They are also clearly where SSG would prefer all players migrate. The studio said that it will evaluate the 32-bit server populations later this year to determine whether they will be closed.
LOTRO is also pushing out a small patch today to fix a crash error that was introduced with last week’s new deed log.
More from Cordovan:Â “Once we know more we will let everyone else know. We are working through this process in real time. We do apologize for the delay, but we did work to make sure the system was as robust and ready as it could be while also planning to do things like we are doing now, which is to make adjustments as necessary. I guess what I mean though is pausing the service to allow backups to resolve – was – part of the planning process, and sadly became necessary.”
