Server Downtime - 9/16/10

[Haruthgar]

I want 50 free Turbine points to spend at the Crack dealer, oops I mean Turbine Store.

Or maybe it now cost 50 TP to get into MG

[Thaygar]

That may be but I am in Portlan Oregon and have only had problems logging into LOTRO the last few days and the problems are massive at times.

^-- consults several maps.
^-- nods sagely while stroking his long flowing beard.

[Hygilak]

Yeah this kinda sucks. I used to play another MMO called EVE. Played it for 5+ years. Daily there was a 1 hour downtime. Often they had to restart the server (only one server) after dt because of whatever. During a patch (usually 3-4 per year) it took 24 hours to do if they did it right. Forget playing the week after because of so many days like the one we're experiencing here.

My point is, this sucks, but I've seen so much worse. And there was no F2P in EVE, nothing was free ever. Don't get me wrong, I loved EVE, but I actually started playing LOTRO so I'd have a game to play during EVE's many updates and dt's.

[Psycopup]

While we're working on the server issue, I thought I'd update you all on an earlier issue regarding connectivity. We've confirmed with our vendors that there is a widespread disruption in internet traffic and connectivity along the East coast. This is a seperate issue and completely beyond our control.

This is unacceptable. I am not accusing the admin who posted this of creating a lie, but whoever passed that reason for the downtime has just insulted the intelligence of the customers who play this game. This is the age where the ability to check for the facts behind such a statement is simple enough that even a school kid could research this.

I myself have 2 servers hosted in the Atlanta hosting center with Internap Network Services (which is the same location this site, lotro.com, is hosted) and am having no latency or other issues with those sites, so it is NOT a "disruption in internet traffic and connectivity along the East cost", or even an issue dealing with their hosting center, but one specific to the specific servers hosting the site and game.

In light that it seems to be Turbines (or Warner Brothers) policy to blatantly lie to their customers they will from this point on receive no revenue from me or any of our employees at my company who have received turbine point cards as bonuses since July of this year.

Not that I think this will make a difference to a company who has a policy of lying to their customers.

[Karioki]

Maybe shut down Minas Gil and bring the servers back up while a MG patch is worked out, tested and confirmed Ready to Roll Out. A bummer for the 3% looking to hit MG, but a boon for all the rest of us. Then, once the MG patch is solid, install it some morning (6-7 AM EDT perhaps). Just saying...

I could not agree more. This is what I logged in to say. It seems overkill to me to take down all the servers to fix entry to one area in a rather hige world. As stated it is a bummer for the players who want to go to Minas Gil but only to those players as opposed to the entire community.

[Kaarnyj]

Ridiculous. Not Turbine, but the users on this forum.

I understand you're frustrated, but sh- happens. The servers aren't down THAT much and when they are it's understandable considering this F2P thing just launched. One thing I've noticed, is that users here will flip from being all praising to right down hateful when there's a downtime. Sad.

Find something else to do in the meantime or at the very least, act a little more mature and respectful regarding the situation.

Q! F! T! !!!

As for the servers being down all the time? COME ON! I'm currently off work, so I have a little time to devote to my hobbies. I've spent 42 (that's FOURTY-TWO) hours in game since launch. I guess I'm just lucky in that my play time must be in the only up-time? (Now, granted, there was around 7 hours of that where I only crafted because the lag was unbearable (Saturday night and Sunday Afternoon) But still?

PS...thanks for the specific update on what's causing the problem (even though there was a whine half a page after that about Turbine not being specific ) Hope it's resolved quickly!

Oh yeah - and for the person wondering why the forums become worse (if that's possible ;P ) during a downtime? Well...all those thousands of people who would be playing, are trying to figure out why they're not. I'd imagine we're sucking up bandwidth and processing power at a nice rate right now !!

[Al-Kamen]

Yes, it is ridiculous - even to ask.



Maybe this is skewing my point of view, but I've never had a problem with in-game money. Dying sucks, I agree, and when you die multiple times, the bills can get pricey. In all reality though, money is easy to come by if you want it. There are many avenues to make money, and all that is needed is for one to be picked. I sympathize with you for dying at no fault of your own, but I think there are more valuable things for Turbine to work on that reimbursing the small amount of money repairs cost.



The problem here is that you were convinced that it was all Turbine's fault to begin with and weren't going to allow anything or anyone to convince you otherwise. It very well be a problem on Turbine's side, but as of now, I don't have any evidence as to where the problem lies, so I am not going to make any assumptions.

I see the frustrations as a desire to have some guarantee of satifaction for a product paid for. We all expect that. The Love for the subscriber went out the window when a large publicly traded company (WB) took over. It's no longer about love of the game and lore of middle earth created by Tolkien. Now it's about increasing revenue to increase shareholder value. That's how corporate officers keep their jobs. And if loyal fans of the game have to go by the wayside, that's ok as long as revenues increase. Simple as that...

[zachhope]

*snip*

Can you please stop telling me that i should be doing other things. I do not want to go to Starbucks, nor do i want to go outside and get some sun, and no i don't want to go to mars. I want to play a Game that i pay for.


Thanks for listening

We all want to play the game that we pay for. But guess what? They have to do work on it. They have to get it working. They need a few minutes, some co-operation, and some patience.

We're merely suggesting that instead of sitting here and bit--ing over something you cannot control, you do something proactive and different until they can fix the problems, and get you back into your escapist paradise.

But, by all means, feel free to sit here and whine. You pay for forum posting as well. Just don't expect people to collymoddle you and light torches and pitchforks over something that's extremely insignificant, compared to the uptime we have.

Kthxbye

[Sapience]

There definitely are problems on the east coast. I have been getting random disconnects in WoW as well as this game and even when just browsing the net for the last few days. I'm in upstate New York and my modem loses connection and then comes back after a minute or two. This however, has nothing to do with all of the LOTRO servers being down for most of today. I wasn't having any problems with the game itself before the "hotfix". I'm sure they'll get it fixed but it's annoying to not be able to get in at all so far today.

Whoa, I just checked the server checker site where it has been listing all the servers as being down and it now lists them all as closed. Maybe Turbine just went out of business and shut everything off lol.

We're seeing reports from players in DDO also confirming this. Apparently several corporate IT departments have sent emails to their users. It seems to have resolved itself somewhat, but they still seem to be having issues. You're seeing the servers as closed because we've brought them back up for internal verification. So they are 'up' but not available to players until we finish validating our changes.

[Haruthgar]

Turbine just got burned!!!

[site400]

As others have said...relax. Go play outside with your action figures and nerf guns before summer is completely over. You know nothing of the server architecture, game code or any other technical functions of the LOTRO worlds. MMO games are undoubtedly complex beyond your comprehension, so your "just turn off Minas Gil" solution is likely no solution at all.

Oops, i just shoot Dnadz74 in the nadz with my nerf gun!

[Kept]

While we're working on the server issue, I thought I'd update you all on an earlier issue regarding connectivity. We've confirmed with our vendors that there is a widespread disruption in internet traffic and connectivity along the East coast. This is a seperate issue and completely beyond our control.

Yeah, going to join in and call this Corporate PR bull*stuff* as well. I can't believe there's no one on Turbine's IT staff who is capable of doing an independent Traceroute or Ping on their own. But then again, that might not produce results that could be spun...that is, finding out it's more of a highly localized issue rather than a widespread issue. A lot of pointing to a "vendor" problem as of late. Just not buying it at this point. And for the love of mike.....get a Valid Security Certificate in place already, will ya?

[CadenBasteal]

Problems happen. I'm a developer too so I get it. I just resubscribed 2 days ago and while I'd like to be playing right now I can accept the fact that I am currently unable to. My only negative comment is directed at the developer responsible for the login server.

You're not failing very gracefully. A stack trace with a System.ArgumentNullException is being generated by your authentication processing code. It looks like you need a try/catch block to handle your stream parameter in the case of a null value.

[Darkheart06]

A Great Barrows instance (which is required to be completed before doing another GB instance) experienced problems, so Turbine shuts it down and sweeps it under the rug (and we probably won't hear about it for a while). And it's funny because I initially thought this downtime was being used to fix that instance. But, some obscure area of the map that 3/4 of players haven't even heard of and even less has any reason to go to has a few people that cant get into so Turbine completely shuts down all the game servers?

[gildhur]

Barely any new content
plenty of issues with the new content
plenty of issues still outstanding that should have been addressed long time ago
Server downtime and serious lag issues since going f2p
Subscribers sitting in login queue for almost an hour
Forums (enough said here)
etc. etc.

There is a new zone, two new rep factions, twelve instances newly playable at the level cap, a new epic book, new deed-based exploration dungeon, new festival events for next month. If that is "barely any new content" then Books 9-14 were minor hotfixes, and MoM was a small book update.

Most of the lag was caused by internet outages and networking issues in the region of the country where Turbine and the servers are located. Login queues were increased for a couple hours one evening in order to lessen the impact of those network issues on the people already on the servers.

Let's not confuse things too much here re: terminology. This was a patch. Hotfixes will be applied to servers while they are in use, the servers went down, therefore a patch. Stop making communication so hard Turbine, call a spade a spade.

Quoted for Truth. Hotfix is a fix applied while the servers are still running (hence the use of "hot"). Servers down equals patch. That's all there is to it.

False. A "hotfix" in Turbine terms is a small patch rushed out ahead of normal release schedules in order to correct critical issues. Sapience defined the relevant terms for new players earlier today, but that has always been the case for the last four years.

Enedwaith is a bunch of non-repeatable solo quests with onerous rep-grinds for useless cosmetic rewards.

Having done it once in Beta, there is zero reason to do it again.

Good for you. That doesn't mean it's not content. There is also a decent amount of small fellowship content in Enedwaith, some of it repeatable. Not to mention the twelve new cap instances. There is no objective lack of content. Your personal opinion on that content is irrelevant.

That may be but I am in Portlan Oregon and have only had problems logging into LOTRO the last few days and the problems are massive at times.

Your location is not the issue, the location of the servers is.

[madmonk777]

hmmmmm lets see now i have no internet problems I am a lifetime member and when i ask why when i go into the vault at the so-called new faction town i sometimes get stuck to the point of shutting down the game and have to wait in line to get back in and my kin member's from england and canada and other parts of the world are having the same problem i am told not in person but through a forum that it is due to the east coast .....so i am to assume that everybody in the world goes thru the east coast ....ok i have a bridge in fla. that crosses into a beautiful beach front hut that i will sell cheap .

[Elkazar]

Let me guess, for most of you this is your first MMO?

The reason I say this, is because if you've played any other MMO, you'd know that every MMO since the beginning of these games, has had these problems. Hell, EQ that's been out for 11 years, and still has these patch/server problems....ELEVEN YEARS people!! No MMO hasn't had these problems, and with most of them, when they notice a problem right after a patch, they error on the side of caution, since it 'could' be an isolated problem, OR it could be major coding problem that if left alone might crash/ruin the entire system. Which would you rather happen?

/sarcasm on
Yes, they are doing this to get your your money (for those that P2P) without actually having to let you play.
/sarcasm off

SERIOUSLY? You pay ([$15/mth * 12]/365 = $.493150685, let's just call it) $.50 a day to play, OR ($.493150685/24 = $.020548945, let's just say) A whooping 2 CENTS per hour.

Let them do their job, fix the problem, and have some good cheese with that whine.

[echoed]

On the subject of misrepresenting the truth:

Does anyone else find it funny to get the "forums down for scheduled maintenance" screen instead of the timing out screen... I have a hard time believing they schedule maintenance intermittently at 3 minute intervals.

[weyoun]

This is unacceptable. I am not accusing the admin who posted this of creating a lie, but whoever passed that reason for the downtime has just insulted the intelligence of the customers who play this game. This is the age where the ability to check for the facts behind such a statement is simple enough that even a school kid could research this.

I myself have 2 servers hosted in the Atlanta hosting center with Internap Network Services (which is the same location this site, lotro.com, is hosted) and am having no latency or other issues with those sites, so it is NOT a "disruption in internet traffic and connectivity along the East cost", or even an issue dealing with their hosting center, but one specific to the specific servers hosting the site and game.

In light that it seems to be Turbines (or Warner Brothers) policy to blatantly lie to their customers they will from this point on receive no revenue from me or any of our employees at my company who have received turbine point cards as bonuses since July of this year.

Not that I think this will make a difference to a company who has a policy of lying to their customers.

Zing!! /qft

[Shjade]

Its laughable listening to all of you kids complain. Compared with other games I've played, LOTRO has almost *no* downtime...even after a major expansion. Any Everquest players out there remember when the Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious, Planes of Power and other expansions were released? Do you remember being able to log in and stay online for more than 10 minutes for several weeks after the patches? Do you remember getting up-to-the-minute status updates on the problems and ETA for server uptime? Me neither...because it didn't happen.

In the time I've been playing - a little over a year as I recall - I'd agree with this assessment. LotRO's uptime is pretty good compared to the average MMO. Granted, when it does go down it appears to go down pretty hard, but those occasions are the exception rather than the rule.

That said, I'm not sure comparing LotRO's uptime to one of the first big MMO's to come out is all that fair, really. You'd expect progress with stability after this much time, so the fact that there has been progress shouldn't be surprising, ne? At this point it seems like there are pretty much two routes for successful periods of uptime: lots of it with sporadic periods of crashing and burning, or lots of it interrupted by periodic and predictable maintenance downtime.

Either way there are going to be a lot of people complaining whenever the game goes down because that's what people do. Not that they're wrong - it's a paid service that isn't available and that's always distressing - but the attitude doesn't help.

[fateHibari]

for all you turbine apologists out there. Are you kidding me? You're a paying customer (mostly), you're not getting what you're paying for. You're not getting good service. You're not getting what you were promised when you ponied up your money. And frankly you haven't been for weeks. Turbine has been screwing the pooch for several weeks now b4 the launch and since f2p launch many things about the game have been brutally horrid. Lag spikes, rubberbanding, skills not wai, bugs to instances they supposedly tested and tested and tested. I've been here through ever major launch and this is by far the worst. I never had lag and wait times to get in like this with any other launch, even at ridiculously odd times of the day. And that's just here in america. From what i've read there's been tremendous delays of the launch overseas. Why? Because turbine can't get their **** right.

As paying customers we have every right to be unhappy and gripe and complain about the poor service and bad product. And we have every right to expect answers to what's happening and not lies about phantom internet issues.

The game was working just fine b4 they dropped the worlds and there's no reason, like others have said, not to just turn off that one area and leave the rest up and running.

And btw, this company isn't cryptic so stop being so damn cryptic about what's going on. Just admit you fubared things, tell us what's going on, apologize and let us know about how long the system will be down so we can go do other things.

Get your **** together turbine!! We're paying you to give us a good game!

a-freaking-men!

[chrismilly]

so how many turbine points will it cost to get the servers back.

[DaVinci42]

I'm just happy to finally be able to post in the forums. Not a good idea to update both the forums & game at the same time. Seriously though, they need to fix the forums so we have a place to be while servers are being fixed.

And a few extra days of VIP would be nice to replace the VIP time some of us are losing.

[Fortinobrand]

I can just imagine the meetings at WB this week. Forget about the disregard for the existing player base since that was a calculated business decision. Look at the push for the new players -- WB spent how much on advertising and marketing in an effort to draw in multitudes of new players? During this push Turbine has completely failed to deliver a playable game (much less a positive experience worth repeating) and I know I've interacted with a number of new players who have laughed at what they see here and wandered back to where they came from to spread the cautionary tale.

You can't tell a new customer to relax things will get better. Test drive a car that breaks down, it's going to taint your impressions. Eat at a new restaurant where everything on the menu is out of stock and what's left tastes like old left-over fry oil and it's going to taint your impressions. Play a game that is either not available or lagging/freezing/crashing plus buggy when it does almost work and it's going to taint your impressions.

The person who decided to do the F2P change, make the huge media push, AND completely change the forums and community sites all within a few days of each other will be unemployed by the end of the quarter. The person responsible for overall product deliverability will be unemployed by the end of the quarter. Hopefully decent devs and designers don't get caught up in that, because this is NOT a dev issue, it's not a design issue, it is 100% a management issue.

[Sunni]

I have had internet connectivity issues too and I am East Coast. I can't believe people feel it's okay to come out here and call someone a liar. If it's down for whatever reason, let them take the time to straighten it out so we can get in and play w/o interruptions. Nothing is going to run smoothly 100% of the time especially something that's just hitting the week mark. People just have no patience anymore, it's all about instant gratification.

Thanks Turbine, I appreciate all your hard work and am enjoying the new content.