LOTRO Server Issues
Monday’s datacentre migration has unsurprisingly proven problematic for Turbine. As a result major issues continue to affect LOTRO players with faults such as severe lag, bad rubberbanding and random crashes to desktop and server disconnects being common place. Players have also had to endure loss of housing items, loss of friend lists and disconnection from chat servers. Five days later, despite hotfixes and continuing maintenance many players still find the game “problematic”. Turbine are naturally trying their best to keep the community informed but the longer this problem persists the more damage it potentially does.
A side issue that has emerged from this situation is the fact that the five remaining European LOTRO servers will now not be relocated to Amsterdam. Instead they will be joining the five US servers in New Jersey in the new datacentre. Naturally players based outside of the US have already voiced concerns as to whether the increase in latency and exacerbates the ongoing technical problems. Furthermore Turbine have not yet confirmed a revised date for the proposed EU server move bringing in to question whether it was ever a genuine proposal.
Turbine have struggled in the past to make good on some of their promises and commitments. Like many businesses those dealing with the public are not necessarily privy to policy decisions being made at senior levels. It has been suggested by some more canny industry commentators that perhaps the company is reticent to move infrastructure to Europe in light of recent changes to consumer protection legislation, which are more robust and customer friendly than its US counterpart. Whether this is the case or not is uncertain at present but certainly both the change in decision regarding the servers and the impact that the migration has had is pause for thought for all concerned.
Downtime and login issues impact ultimately on the bottom line. A player that does not log in to the game is a player that is not spending and I have suspicion that LOTRO is a game that survives purely because it hits a specific financial target each quarter. Despite what some gamers may think there is seldom any sentiment in business and the moment the numbers aren’t favourable then hard decisions are made. Let us hope that the folk at Turbine can find a speedy solution to the ongoing issues currently affecting LOTRO. I cannot help but think that given the reduced size of the production team that they may have overreached themselves. Let us hope that is not the case.