Crash, Crash, Crash, Quit - Turbine are doing...what?

[Bizzielizzie]

Ok, so plenty of threads talking about this. I read the forums again today, I was struck by the lack of official response/solutions to various key problems a lot of players on my server are talking about and it seems many servers are having the same issues. Lots to love about this particular MMO (man! it LOOKS so gorgeous!) but all is not well - cannot play for long without problems, therefore cannot enjoy what it has to offer.

* Clientcrash - for me the primary, but not sole, trigger is being in the vicinity of a warband when it spawns or dies (but I can also include opening a dialogue pane with a questgiver/vendor, entering a mead hall, dismounting when still moving slightly, etc)
* Rubberbanding - in towns mostly, but lately "galloping across the plains of Rohan" on my warsteed has become a goal rather than a reality
* Slow loading screen after character selection - combine this with the first point and you return to a Rohan stone circle because the WB respawns and kills you whilst you're still waiting at the loading screen to arrive back in game
* Forum login fails - not much point in trumpeting the provision of a player forum if its so user-unfriendly. I was logged in, hit "Post new Thread" and was told I was not logged in. Logged in again, clicked for forums and was told the "page does not exist" or some such nonsense. Clicked forums again and was logged out. I'm also manually saving this reply every minute to notepad, because the auto-save function is a lie and last time I posted a reply it forgot what I had been saying and then logged me out

I might also mention that my mini did not experience even once the "persisting minstrel instrument sound" bug that was allegedly fixed recently until AFTER the fix was announced. Running round with her cowbell equipped, she can sound like a manic ice-cream van or old-skool Brit police car. (It was very entertaining for about a minute the first time it happened, then it just peed off everyone in the group!)

As has been mentioned in other threads, the lack of communication from official sources has been deafening on various subjects which surely require the attention of any well-run business. I can only assume that Turbine has become massively understaffed and can spare nobody from the attempt to make the Store every player's first resource (Unfair comment? maybe...) In the current economic climate, this approach WILL fail - people are too worried about making house payments, feeding the kids, paying the bills for house/car/college/whatever to endlessly throw money at a game. It will also alienate and ultimately drive away the host of new F2P players who will have begun to see that anything is available if you have deep pockets. I do not, and have cancelled my sub until such time as either the chronic failings are addressed or there is a definitive statement on what is being/will be done to address them.
I love playing in Middle Earth, but it has to actually WORK or I'll have to find a game that does, even if it means returning to WoW :-o I mean hell, I can always turn off the moronic Trade Chat channel and spiteful General Chat name-calling there if I want, I guess. Please Turbine, save me from this dread prospect, or at least can you come and tell us all what you have in the pipeline to fix those problems that are spoiling this lovely game?

[Cindir]

Good post.

Turbine are doing...what? :

1. Not saying anything.
2. Hoping people will not notice the problems.
3. Maybe trying to fix some of these ... maybe not trying to fix some of these.

I would not be surprised at all if they have given up and decided to do nothing about faulty game optimization, the memory leak, and the buggy forums.

[Thalimir]

What are you doing about the crashes? There are a ton of people playing the game with no issues, and given that there are literally thousands of different system combo's out there they aren't going to be able to fix everything for everyone if people don't take steps themselves.

Have you got the latest video drivers, defragged the hard drive, run a memory check etc etc.

RoR run's perfectly fine for me on Ultra-high settings, therefore there is nothing wrong with LotRO obviously..... /sarcasm but if this effected everyone playing then it would probably be a whole lot easier to fix, as it is when different people with different system specs see different issues that's going to be very hard to nail the problem.

Thali

[CRUSHUC]

There are still issues with 32 bit OS and memory allocations causing client crashing. Granted, for me, it only happens in Rohan, and at locations/events the OP describes.

There is a work around using the 3GB switch, but it may not solve everyones problems (didn't for me). Upgrading to 64 bit OS may fix the issue in most cases.

So yes, crashing for some people is still a persistant issue.

[Dvorak1970]

My family and my friends have the same problem on the dwarrowdelf server and my lotro client crash all the time between 3 to 5 min.... And thata problem is anywhere in the middle earth... that's not funny.... I tried many thing to resolved that about the registry and other things in the forum but nothing work for me... I resolved my problem when I installed windows 7 64 bit with 6Gb of memory... until, lotro client never crashed and smoother. This is a good solution but for a lot of people, maybe too expensive.

[Bizzielizzie]

What are you doing about the crashes? There are a ton of people playing the game with no issues, and given that there are literally thousands of different system combo's out there they aren't going to be able to fix everything for everyone if people don't take steps themselves.

Have you got the latest video drivers, defragged the hard drive, run a memory check etc etc.

Thali

Done all of those things Thali, multiple times to make sure I missed nothing. Defrag on a regular basis in fact, as part of routine PC housekeeping - just as I check for new drivers weekly, disk cleanup, etc. I've been the whole round of "is it me? is it my PC?", asked kinnies with much more PC savvy than me, disabled or removed all plugins, checked out forum suggestions for possible solutions. There are enough people both on my server and on others that, given all I am doing to reduce the in-game problems via settings and still they persist, I'm as sure as I can be that I'm not responsible. I wondered if it was my connection for a while, there have certainly been occasional issues with Virgin Media locally, but these are occasional and temporary, not frequent and persistent. I appreciate the suggestions though, they may help somebody else who hasn't gone that route yet.

[Abiyah]

What are you doing about the crashes? There are a ton of people playing the game with no issues, and given that there are literally thousands of different system combo's out there they aren't going to be able to fix everything for everyone if people don't take steps themselves.

Have you got the latest video drivers, defragged the hard drive, run a memory check etc etc.

RoR run's perfectly fine for me on Ultra-high settings, therefore there is nothing wrong with LotRO obviously..... /sarcasm but if this effected everyone playing then it would probably be a whole lot easier to fix, as it is when different people with different system specs see different issues that's going to be very hard to nail the problem.

Thali

Why, oh why do folks want to jump on "it's your fault not Turbine's" bandwagon? Why would you assume in the first place no one has all the proper upgrades needed? Turbine is supposed to be a professional game-programming company. They should have a pretty good idea, if they are indeed professionals, of what different system combinations there are, and should be able to effectively provide a program that enables all those systems to play their product. Do other games have the persistent problems Turbine has shown us in the recent past? Do they take as long to address them? Do they provide company/customer interaction to let the customers know the issues are indeed being addressed, and aren't either on a back-burner or being completely ignored? Turbine has already been paid by a rather large number of people for a product they have not yet delivered to the satisfaction of a rather large number of those customers. They should start acting like a professional company instead of a group of high-school or to be fair perhaps college kids playing around in their garage with their computers.

[Bizzielizzie]

I didn't actually read Thalimir's reply that way Abiyah, I saw it more as someone offering some possible solutions that unfortunately do not apply in my case. Nevertheless, I think you have a point when you say that this game should be playable on a wide range of systems. It will have a pretty short lifespan if it has been tailored only to the fastest, most expensive setups and I for one could not afford to replace my whole gaming sytem every 6-12 months just to keep up.

[Acasta]

Mmm...

I wish Turbine would feel a greater desire to be much more accountable to their customers, especially those who are actually paying for the services via subscription or store purchases.

The memory leak as far as I can tell only affects those with Windows XP 32-bit, I don't have the statistics of how many of them are in the game, but I do know, I am one of them.

I recently talked to a friend of mine, who is a professional graphics and software designer and told me that memory leaks are tough to find, when they are really small ones. I asked them, how long do those take to manifest themselves, he said, about a month of uninterrupted use. I asked how about a client crash after an hour, he gave me a smile and said, that is a huge memory leak, and should be rather easy to track and identify where it is; but the fix to it, maybe another problem all together. I then asked how about 2 months and no luck? He then told me, that did not appear to be consistent with present practices, but complex code made by many different poeple, with different generations of coding technology is difficult to overcome, and thus 2 months may not be all that bad, but from a business perspective it would certainly be a very bad mark.

For myself, I am allowing my subscription to expire, and downgrade to premium until Turbine gets their act together or I find a game offered by a company that treats their customers in a professional manner. Traditionally, I prefer to pay for my playing a game, even when offered free, for I feel an obligation to pay for services rendered and to assist new material development; of course as a paying customer, I do have an expectation for a refund when the service was not provided with the agreed to quality.

Sue

[ChromiteSwiftpaw]

This Crash to Desktop thing has been happening since Rise of Isengard.

I posted a thread about this way back then (just a few days after release) and it is still valid today. It's needed more than ever now for people running 32-bit Windows.

Thread: Workaround for Client Crash to Desktop in 32-bit Windows

The memory leak as far as I can tell only affects those with Windows XP 32-bit, I don't have the statistics of how many of them are in the game, but I do know, I am one of them.

Not necessarily. It can affect 64-bit users as well. It just takes a bit longer to reach 4 GB of commit size than the 3 GB max you can set 32-bit Windows to.

[wolfgarde]

I'm running on a win 7 64bit system. Lots of memory. There has DEFINITELY been a memory leak which I noticed in the last 6 weeks. Lo nger I play the harder it is to shut down..and./...if I play for over 4-6 hours...I sometimes crash. Memory usage is rediculous.


Fix this please turbine or employ the technical people who understand the problem.

[Maiden_of_Gondolin]

I might also mention that my mini did not experience even once the "persisting minstrel instrument sound" bug that was allegedly fixed recently until AFTER the fix was announced. Running round with her cowbell equipped, she can sound like a manic ice-cream van or old-skool Brit police car. (It was very entertaining for about a minute the first time it happened, then it just peed off everyone in the group!)

In the same vein I did not experience lag and rubberbanding in Rohan until after a supposed fix to the issue.

[cwew]

I'm running on a win 7 64bit system. Lots of memory. There has DEFINITELY been a memory leak which I noticed in the last 6 weeks. Lo nger I play the harder it is to shut down..and./...if I play for over 4-6 hours...I sometimes crash. Memory usage is rediculous.


Fix this please turbine or employ the technical people who understand the problem.

This is pretty much the reason for crashes in my view. Buy new computers. Memory is cheap. 8GB of RAM is $35. and upgrade to 64bit. 32bit version of Windows can only process 2^32 bits of info. 64bit can do 2^64. That's astronomically bigger. You will need to make the switch soon anyway.

[Celestrata]

Unfortunately, while I'd love to give you specific help to fix your issue, I am both not a technical expert nor am I knowledgable about your current system set up.

What I can do, however, is point you to the places where we are offering some help for these types of issues.

• If you have not submitted a ticket to the tech support team http://support.turbine.com, please do so. They may be able to assist you with your particular crashing issue.
• Make sure all of your drivers are up-to-date. Sometimes older drives cause issues. I know this is true for some of my personal gaming.

Those are excellent places to start, and we're sorry to hear that you're having issues.