Suffice it to say, this hasn’t been the triumphant week that Standing Stone Games was hoping for Lord of the Rings Online. What was supposed to be a one-day transfer period to get the bulk of the population over to the new 64-bit realms has stretched into three days with no end in sight, with the normally cheerful community growing anxious and upset.
After a Wednesday marked by fraying nerves and no new transfers, the studio announced that it was moving the opening of the four realms to Friday at 1 p.m. EST — this time for good. The plan is to open the realms but keep the housing system locked up tight until a future date to be determined so that there won’t be a land rush while most of the transfers are still happening.
SSG cited “exceptional demand” for the server transfers, which it acknowledged “has been too slow.” The server transfer button became available once more this morning (and almost immediately closed again – SSG’s Cordovan says it took only “a minute for things to fill up”).
“The new 64-bit game worlds will open on Friday, March 7th at 1:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT). When the game worlds open, all player housing will be unavailable. We will open player housing at a later date and time to be announced,” the studio said. “By opening with premium housing unavailable it should hopefully cool things down a bit in terms of anxiety over the length of time transfers are taking, since when we do open for the so-called ‘land rush’ there will be more opportunity for players to take part.”
It went on to to note that it’s shifting around the schedule for future intra-server transfers and dark world ports.
While MOP’s Justin finally got a successful transfer mail this morning after a full day of wait, other LOTRO-playing members of the MOP team report that either they haven’t been able to get a transfer going at all or (perhaps worse) that their activated transfers from Tuesday are still in limbo and no confirmation or failure emails have been received even after 36 hours. We have no guidance from SSG on what players in that situation are supposed to do; Cordovan has said it seems likely that transfers waiting that long have failed, but there’s no explanation for the lack of fail email and no clear instruction on whether players should simply try again. He did say that “starting a new transfer with one pending will fail the original transfer,” however.
The latest from this morning:
“Transfers are much slower than we would like, and we are doing the best we can to get as many transfers completed as possible. We’ve done a lot of work over the past 48 hours to speed things up, but the demand remains overwhelming at the moment.”
The only silver lining to this mess is the creation of a glorious meme archive devoted to this week’s events.
It also is now clear that in spite of developer comments this morning, the team is indeed canceling some transfers; some transfers made even as recently as 8 a.m. this morning were knowingly lost when the servers were intentionally taken offline at 2 p.m.
That last one didn’t really help the mood in the Discord, as nerves are already frayed, but even on day three, the LOTRO fanbase is relatively chill compared to where most MMO playerbases would be on day one; there’s a lot of complaining about toxicity, but not very much actual toxicity – mostly just frustration and astonishment that the studio is offering no better solution to this disaster.
