Can I be real with you right now? I really don’t want to write this column. I wish I didn’t have to, not just because I don’t feel like piling onto an already bad situation but also because I’m exhausted from it. Last week was one of the most tiring weeks ever for Lord of the Rings Online fans and devs and engineers alike, and I think most of us would rather put it well behind us and move on.
Yet not commenting on it would be ignoring one of the most insane and notable weeks of LOTRO’s lifespan. There are probably lessons that should be learned and history to be preserved, especially as we enter into a brand-new era of the MMO continuing adventures. So let’s bite the bullet and get into this.
Because I love a tortured analogy, last week felt like a childbirth gone wrong, the kind where you spend months excited about the outcome yet worried about possible complications. And then when the event happened, it went sideways in a way that blindsided you completely. After a whole lot of pain and struggle, at the end of it come the cries of a quartet of baby servers and a hopefully happy and long future life.
Whew. I should not make analogies. But that’s really what it felt like. I think we all had concerns mixed with the excitement over the transition to these new servers, but what happened went beyond most imaginations. I anticipated the new servers being delayed or down for a good portion of the week, which indeed happened, although my fear was more for the realms themselves and not the actual sticking point: the transfer service.
We joked on the podcast that never before in LOTRO’s history has so much attention and discussion swirled around the transfer wizard. Every “you shall not pass!” meme was in great effect as the service wasn’t able to handle the crushing load of thousands of players trying to be first to get their characters (and names) moved over to the 64-bit worlds. While we don’t know the full story yet, Rob “Severlin” Ciccolini alluded to something that broke on the back end that made the transfers work far worse than anticipated, as well as his own underestimation of how many people would want to move right away.
In any case, what should’ve been a chaotic 24 hours of frantic transfers ended up becoming over a week of long waits, inadequate information (even as the studio kept talking to players the whole time), and rising tension in the forums – and especially the official Discord.
It got bad, really bad there for a while. People were camping their computers around the clock hoping for one of the incredibly brief transfer windows to open. Misinformation was being passed around at the speed of type. The studio didn’t have all of the answers to some very critical questions. And while some remained chipper, others turned their frustration onto their fellow players. It got snippy.
I just felt bad for everyone. I felt bad for all of the players who were promised an orderly transition and got this hot pile of flaming insanity delivered to their tables. I felt bad for SSG’s small dev team that clearly dropped the ball on this but not in a malicious way. And I felt bad for myself, my guildies, and my fellow LOTRO players at MOP who were suddenly spending the week trying to stay on top of this bucking bronco of a news story (never mind trying to wrangle their own characters!).
As I write this, the situation has gotten a little bit better. Transfers are going through (albeit with lengthy multi-day waits), the new servers opened on Friday and are by most reports functioning well, and SSG is finding success in gradually speeding up the rate of character moves. Now that more and more people are able to play on these worlds, a lot of that frustration is melting away as we get back to normal. For a growing number of players, the only anxiety that remains is for some kinships to reclaim their names and for a lot of us to scramble to grab houses at a future unknown date.
I have no doubt of a few more things to come. We’ll probably be getting a more informative post-mortem and several more “official” apologies from the studio. Compensation? I think it’s warranted for the distress and delays, although I’m not agitating for it. And then there are the dark world transfers that are coming in a few weeks that should be interesting (though we know to expect delays for those as well).
For the studio, I would say this. When you fail and fail hard, you can choose to spend the time that follows beating yourself up, or you can use it as a painful learning lesson and grow from it. I have no doubt that this pressure cooker of a situation actually benefited the game’s transfer system and flushed out some key problems. And if nothing else, the huge influx of players is an encouraging sign that a whole lot of people genuinely care about and want to play this game well into the future.
So we pick ourselves up from a painful week, dust ourselves off, and then start molding these new servers into our collective likenesses. Hopefully the worst is well behind us and the best is to come.
Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at [email protected].
