It’s patch day for the long-suffering Lord of the Rings Online playerbase as the patch originally planned for Wednesday is finally launching today. Update 43.1: Secrets of Utug-bûr, Patch 1, most immediately reinstates the old deed log, which was replaced just two weeks ago with a new version that has unfortunately been crashing player clients.
“We have reinstated the original Deed Log while we work to correct a crashing issue,” Standing Stone Games says.
The patch also brings back the Spring Festival – yes, with new cosmetics and a new mount – tweaks hairstyles, addresses animation issues, and nullifies outstanding issues with the Temple of Utug-bûr itself, as well as lays the foundation for the tier 2 raid release coming on March 20th.
Meanwhile, we are now on day 11 of LOTRO’s Great Server Migration, which as we’ve been covering has turned into a bit of a calm catastrophe as SSG has struggled to manage the massive number of players all trying to transfer at once to the game’s brand-new 64-bit servers.
As of yesterday, SSG’s Rob “Severlin” Ciccolini once again acknowledged players’ right to be frustrated with the situation, which has seen some gamers waiting over 100 hours for their transfers – or news that their transfers had failed and must be restarted. Yesterday afternoon, the devs said they had “added more capacity” to improve the rate even more, perhaps as much as 33%, telling players they’d gained at least an hour in pace.
Perhaps most interestingly, Severlin finally answered a question players have been asking for most of this week-and-a-half span: How many people have actually moved? A lot. Over a million characters, in fact.
“We have now transferred over 1 million characters since transfer opened. This much higher than anticipated,” he said late last night. “The number of people who started a transfer increased more and more as the weekend went on. In other words even as we sped up the transfer rate the queue kept going up. Mordor and Angmar almost hit queue when they opened without issue. On these, however, characters will take longer to migrate as they move from place to place because people will be playing elder characters will lots of stuff so loading although faster from the normal servers, will be slower than for new characters; but we haven’t seen that at high queue levels.”
