Landravol is up so I can play, but world chat services are down. Also I’ve stalled out on numerous occasions getting “stuck.” If it happens during combat I will die as no abilities work but the enemy still attacks normally. It’s weird.
I haven’t even started the midsummer festival yet, but I hope they extend it due to the server outages.
Found this guide:
Following the “Epic Book” quest line will reward a housing item and 1 skill point. Takes probably around 45 minutes to complete. Typical back and forth around Minas Tirith speaking with members of the fellowship and two instances that have to play out. (The wedding and banquet)
I have a vague worry that there’s some legacy code in the LOTRO networking/database infrastructure from Turbine that no one at Standing Stone games can quite figure out, and they’ve somehow bugged it and are trying to code their own workaround without much success yet.
(Which also explains why character transfers from archived servers are broken and have been disabled now for almost a year, despite promises throughout that time period that they’d be restored “shortly”.)
I bet on it.
They should opensource some of their code/engine so community could fix and add features to the game/server/client. I’m sure we’d see better performance and more LUA features.
I’m starting to get the feeling there’s something more going on here. The only message is a one per day tweet “Arkenstone and Sirannon are down for the foreseeable future, more information in the coming days” and nothing else.
And it’s not just those servers…reports of all the servers having major issues with lag and rubberbanding. Either they don’t have the resources to fix it or they just don’t know how.
Yeah. It is highly unusual, and not a great sign. Unless they genuinely have a real problem with the data centre infrastructure (which should not take this time to resolve) then we seem to be looking at a limit in their ability to address the issue.
And I had just got back into the game…
Yeah, they may have screwed up their database badly with some code push for an event or maintenance that went badly.
Right now a best case scenario might be if they’ve got backups (they SHOULD, for gosh sakes) and have to roll back progress a few weeks or a month.
Regardless, if the code is so old and they don’t have the people who understand it, this is a long tailed disaster. It’s hard not to see permanent decline if people start to lose faith in their ability to maintain the game, let alone progress it. I can’t recall a comparable failure in any modern MMO, if true.
Would be really interesting to see what the problem was. Do troubleshooting daily so would be fun to have a stab at it.
DDO is having some of the same issues.
I’ve been playing the hardcore server there. People have been dropping like flies at times, with world broadcasts on every death. Some of the bigger lag spikes get over a dozen. I lost my ability to do anything for 30s & watched my first high level character get eaten by a dog. (newbie monster)
Midsummer celebration in LOTRO now…
Argh! Wish I saw that post a couple weeks ago. :)
DTG
3970
They shut down all of the servers again this afternoon, not just the two that were down last night. This has been going on for 6 or 7 days now. Lots of speculation, but it does sort of coincide with the end of a temporary PvP server last week, and people transferring those characters to the regular ones.
Damn. Down again.
I managed to get one of my characters through the Wedding Epic to snag that skill point. The housing item is a wine table.
remaincalmalliswell dot gif
Jeebus, this sounds like an MMO player’s worse nightmare. :(
FWIW, the only reason I didn’t jump back in after customer support finally shook my account loose is that I couldn’t get the game to launch. Crash after character selection. Every. Single. Time. I spent literally hours trying to get it to launch. So goddamn frustrating. But I guess now I should be glad?
Anyway, I hope it works out. If LOTRO’s going to die, it deserves a more dignified death.
-Tom
How long has it been down for? A week? Must be a real Gordian knot.
Welcome to the new Microsoft Edge!
Seriously though, this sucks. I hope they can recover from whatever is happening. I like the Standing Stone Games crew, they’re small, and often seemingly overwhelmed (between customer support and now this problem), but they are friendly and they’ve done a nice job keeping things running and adding new content since they took over. This has to be some back end server or infrastructure update gone horribly wrong. As an IT professional myself, I can certainly sympathize.
Tom,
SSG LOTRO Support has an article on that here. Have you tried those steps?
Another thing I have seen work in the past (it fixed my issue with crashes at launch a couple of years ago) is repairing the game install and resetting the graphics options. In the launcher screen click the down arrow in the upper right corner, then select Options and Repair. Check the box to reset game display options as well. Once it has checked and confirmed all of your files, restart the launcher, then try to login to a server other than the one your characters are on. Once you are at the character creation/selection screen for the new server, exit the game. Restart the launcher again and login to your normal server, then select one of your characters and see if it works. This entire process pretty much refreshes all of the files used in launching the game, and somewhere in there is probably the file(s) that’s causing your issue.
Hope that helps. Are you launching direct, or are you launching through Steam? If you’re using Steam, there are known issues with the version of the launcher Steam installs, so you have to follow a multi-step process to replace it and all the game files with the ones from SSG’s website.
We got our daily “update”.
Wow… It’s turning into quite the amazing failure.
Andon
3979
Considering my history with LOTRO I’m willing to give them some time. They’ve been a great system with very little downtime in my experience.
All servers are back up!!
