On the dawn of a day that was supposed to be the next great era of Lord of the Rings Online’s history, a week of botched transfers and scattered communication has left this normally upbeat community stressed and angry. While SSG is committed to opening the four new 64-bit servers that will comprise LOTRO’s main worlds going forward, many kinships and players are left waiting to see whether they can grab a transfer or see a transfer complete.
The studio opened up transfers once on Thursday morning for an extremely limited time before closing them once more, continuing to relay to the playerbase that work is being done to optimize and improve the rate of character migration. Players were also disheartened to hear that some earlier transfers actually flopped after 40 hours of waiting without any notification. By our accounting, the last transfers that actually happened were those begun at 8 a.m. EST Thursday morning and made it through before the server downtime at 2 p.m. EST. As of 9:15 a.m. EST on Friday when we are typing this, transfers have not yet resumed, but the servers have gone down for a restart.
Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini revealed that “the back end changes [the devs were] testing failed testing,” and so SSG has been “looking at options to fix [that] if people are wondering what is going on” (of course people are wondering what is going on). He also shared that “there is a specific piece of the [transfer] service that [SSG] underestimated load in [its] testing.”
“You are right to be annoyed, and I apologize,” he told fans last night. He took up the refrain this morning:
The key announcement for today: “We have temporarily disabled character transfers while we work to optimize our transfer process. We will open our new 64-bit worlds on Friday, March 7th at 1:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) with purchasing of classic and premium housing disabled. This will allow players to continue name reservations and play on transferred or newly-created characters while transfers continue. We expect character transfers to resume on Friday, and we will have more information on timing in the morning hours Eastern time.”
- Cordy reiterates that the team will eventually put in a system for kinship renames, as the team knows kinship names are one of the major outstanding issues with the transfer situation.
- He suggests that name conflicts aren’t as big a deal in practice as people believe and fear they are, but his example is the three forum name conflicts that were big enough drama to make it to his attention. Obviously, thousands of people are going to run into name conflicts here, they just won’t be actionable. (And yes, the chat pushed back hard on that.)
- He acknowledges that emails post-transfer have been “exceptionally slow” this week.
- No ETA on when housing will open. It’ll be when SSG feels the community is “ready.”
- Cordy says he simply has no idea whether it’s safe to play on your account while your characters are transferring. He cannot guarantee it’s safe. Theoretically, the transfers are supposed to happen quickly, so this shouldn’t matter anyway, but of course we know that isn’t how it’s been working. You are entitled to follow the community’s advice, but don’t expect it to be binding in LOTRO court* if it doesn’t work. (*not a real thing)
- Expect a small game update on Wednesday – 43.1. It’ll fix a raid issue and a Hard Tack event issue, plus some work ahead of the Spring Festival, which launches Thursday morning at 10 a.m. EST. Yes, the festival has new rewards, including dresses, cloaks, tunics, leggings, a lily pond, fountain, flowering hedges, hedgehog minis, a goat, and so forth. The devs have extended the new raid deed (Leading of the Charge deed) to be acquirable through the end of May.
All that said, it took us about 15 minutes from transfer to email this evening. Also, don’t follow advice to close the launcher when the servers go down if you have a transfer button. It does indeed continue to work, as we learned first-hand.
Players have also put up a helpful flowchart for how to get through transfers. This is actually accurate, as ridiculous as it looks.
More on whether it’s safe to play – in short, it’s (probably) safe to play as long as you’re not close to your turn in the queue, but since you don’t know when it’s your turn, it’s (probably) not safe and nobody who should knows for sure is talking :D.
