A second period of server instability in the past month is plaguing Lord of the Rings Online, even as Standing Stone Games said that it is trying to resolve the issues. Frustrated players have taken to Twitter, Reddit, the forums, and even Change.org to make their voices heard.
One player started a petition to “Ask SSG to make better servers,” an effort that has garnered 252 signatures as of the time of this writing.
Issues appear to be continuing on Friday morning, with some people unable to log in at all. One player, who logged in to do tasks, had this to say about the experience: “10+ times disconnected from server, rubberbanding, lost connection in under 10 minutes.”
Another player summed up the mood of the room with this statement: “Please get it together. It’s been a really frustrating month with you guys! You offer no compensation to your subscribers and vague explanations.”
Yesterday, SSG issued a statement on the problems, saying, “The game worlds are experiencing periods of server instability due to external issues outside of our control. We are taking steps to mitigate these environmental and infrastructure challenges, and apologize for any issues you encounter.”
When asked to deliver more transparent reports of the issues, SSG Community Manager Jerry Snook said that it was a bad idea: “Besides opening yourself up to all sorts of issues as a business entity, you are then committing to that level of detail every time you have an extended outage. Let’s say a technical answer along those lines would throw an employee specifically under the bus, or a valued contractor you intend to do business with long-term. Even if technically accurate, it would be bad precedent to set.”
Later in the thread, Snook went on the defensive, saying, “This is not my first rodeo. If people don’t like me, fine. I may be incompetent for a million different things, but if I am not saying something, there is probably a reason. I assure you that we would like this resolved as quickly as possible. We do care, and that is why we are here.”
