Originally Posted by
Valamar
When Turbine, the independent company, launched LOTRO, they entered into a separate contractual agreement with Codemasters (similar to what exists today with the Russian servers) whereby Codemasters would implement LOTRO on their own servers using their own technology. It was a licensing deal, pure and simple. There were two separate Game Clients, just as there is today for Bullroarer. NA players could not see, let alone access the EU servers and Vice Versa. However, the Internet being what it is, punched holes in that structure.
When WB bought turbine, they wanted all aspects of the Toliken IP "in-house" -- Plus, the Internet technology had matured sufficiently that European players playing on hardware in North America was a very reasonable thing. The Internet was still in its infancy and traffic volumes much lower than they are today. Until recently, there was not an "Amsterdam" to move the EU servers back to! I have not tracked the explicit dates and times of the Internet expansion since I retired, but the chances have been rocket-propelled! When I retired in 2003, it was NOT feasible to move things back, but those of us in the Internet Backbone community expected that it would only be a matter of time. Today, "The Cloud" is all about that capability. Are you running on hardware located in North Carolina? Colorado? Amsterdam? or ??? you simply do not know... nor care, most of the time. It is all pretty transparent.
Back when Codemasters and Turbine were developing LOTRO, and yes, they were duplicating efforts, Turbine chose one Database solution and Codemasters another.
In the Spring of 2012, Turbine realized that they had "made a bad choice" and needed to upgrade their database. They planned a repair/migration-whatever they called it for the spring of 2012, and wham-bam, promptly fell flat on their face. LOTRO was down for almost 2 weeks because the database upgrade planned for 6 hours, failed miserably. And that was when Turbine was fully staffed working hard on Riders of Rohan!
Today, I have no idea where things stand. From what I have been able to tell, there WERE significant efforts being made via Bullroarer to deal with the Conversion issues -- but then apparently another round of layoffs last year brought that to a screeching halt. Such a conversion effort is extremely labor intensive and when you have a situation where the documentation does not match the "hot-fix" changes... you get Giant Avancs or Toads running amuck in Bree. All because the people who knew about them are now gone. It's called "Loss of Institutional Memory."
Sadly, as players, there is nothing we can do about the issue except sit back, take it on the chin and roll.
Grand Poster
