We’re on the seventh day of transfer chaos over at Lord of the Rings Online now and about to venture into week two. Here’s the situation if you’re just settling into the news after the weekend.
The servers did indeed open for name reservations last Tuesday, followed by the start of transfers on Wednesday, but it almost immediately went off the rails as Standing Stone Games’ infrastructure crumbled under the stress of piles of players trying to get through. What we initially called a “cheerful mess” quickly turned into a frustrating one as SSG pulled the transfer button up and down and many people who actually managed to put in for a transfer found it canceled. The situation led SSG to delay the actual opening of the four new 64-bit servers themselves until Friday, and housing is still turned off to prevent panic over the inevitable land rush.
That means the servers are indeed up right now, and players have been slowly rolling new characters and getting their characters to it in a trickle all weekend.
Moreover, since Friday, SSG has kept the transfer button up consistently, though there’s a little trick to making your way through, so more and more people are logging their characters into the transfer queue – which is causing people to wait upwards of two days for their characters to actually move as there’s clearly a bottleneck on the actual database. SSG’s Cordovan told fans initially that transfers could take as long as 48 hours, then later correcting that to longer than 48 hours – that’s how many people are in the queue right now.
SSG executive producer Rob “Severlin” Ciccolini apologized directly for the fiasco in Discord, suggesting that as many as 100,000 characters were in the queue. “It is my fault; I just underestimated the immediate demand to transfer, and for that I apologize,” he said.
There was also a lot of fuss made over whether or not it is safe to keep playing the game while your transfer ticked down, as there’s no way to really see where you are in the queue. Late on Saturday night, Ciccolini said the team had tested that and found players will simply be booted from the game when their ticket is up – meaning the devs believe it’s safe to keep on playing while you wait.
“We’re gonna make sure everyone gets their people here,” SSG’s Cordovan vowed during his stream on Saturday.
A few more tidbits:
- There’s no ETA on housing, just when SSG feels the community is “ready.”
- A kinship-renaming system is on the way (again no ETA) to alleviate the kinship naming problems on transfer (right now, you have to petition for a kin rename if yours is already taken when you move, and we’re guessing you won’t get a response for a while).
- There’s a small game update, 43.1, coming on Wednesday. We’re guessing the team will cut off transfers today or tomorrow to let the ones already queued up get through before the update and concomitant server downtime as so far server outages have canceled extant transfers. Stay tuned on this if you’re still in the queue. [Update – more on this in the updates below. In short, SSG says it can now pause the queue.]
- The spring festival is still on track to launch Thursday.
- The deed log crash bug is most definitely not fixed.
Second, we really must point out we’re still getting conflicting info on whether it’s safe to play the game while waiting for a transfer. Severlin said SSG’s testing showed the system would boot characters when their transfer time came up and that it should be fine to play, but now Cordovan is saying the official guidance is to log off. Consider it an at-your-own-risk thing still.
Unrelatedly…
