World Transfers

[arnorman]

I would be perfectly happy with a -1 after my character's name if it came to that. I would rather see the name I'm used to, but with a -1, than something like Gandalf having to be renamed to Ganndalff. My question is if I encounter a naming conflict and I end up with a -1 added, can I keep it that way. Do I have to do a formal rename within a certain amount of time?

[maartena]

Vyvyanne,

First off: Thank you for taking the time to clarify things and answer our questions. It is much appreciated.

I have a few additional questions to add to your answers, if you don't mind:

2. Does the Kinship disband when the Kinleader moves? Yes, it does. This means all messaging to players should be through in-game mail and forums before leaving the world. We can set mail to last longer on the closing worlds (6 months) so that those who log in after the kinleader moves, but before the worlds become unavailable can receive mail on destination target.

When the new kinship is made on the target server, will the join dates be kept? I take pride on being the FOUNDER of my kin in January of 2013, and me and a number of officers have always take pride of our join dates reflecting the start of our kinship. It gives us a sense of history, and it would be a shame if that were to go away when the migration is done. Also, will NOTES be kept? So when I re-join the kin, will I have the same note as before?

6. Can you grant more character slots? We are now looking into adding 2 free character slots to all Premium and VIP accounts. We will also have a sale on character slots.

This is going to be appreciated by many. As someone with 21 character slots, and most of them filled with alts of some sort, I can surely use the extra 2, and I will most likely buy some more too.

7. Why not do names purely on seniority? A few posters have explained the complication of this already. We had to come up with a solution that would work for Transfers going forward. Going off a seniority based system would result in active players always risking that their name could be changed at any point, not just when they transferred. No solution was perfect. We went with an option that will help free up a number of names for players transferring in, while not disturbing the players who are already there and actively playing the game.

-Vyv

A question relating naming. I believe Turbine's approach is the right approach, however I have become worried about "name trolls". There was a lively discussion on Riddermark last night, and several people said they were going to go log on to all possible servers and reserve as many names as possible. I believe that might not be a fair situation. That person may move to say.... Gladden, and has his name reserved on Landroval and Arkenstone as well, but subsequently does not remove the reserved names leaving others to lose their names to characters that may never ever be used again.

I would like to suggest, and I don't know if this is hard to implement, that if your character is still in the intro, it would lose the name to an incoming character. If you therefore want to reserve the name, you should complete the intro and be of "Novice" rank. This will prevent trolls from name-grabbing everywhere, because they wouldn't want to play out the intro for every name they are trying to get. With the beorning intro, it takes around 15 minutes to do, so people that are serious about a name, will want to do that work.

Additionally the following question: If I join a new server and am renamed to "Name-1", but I notice after adding "Name" to friendslist that this character has not logged in since e.g. Nov 9th 2014 (presumably 2014 because it would be considered inactive if an earlier year), if I wait till November 10th 2015 to use my free rename token, can I re-claim my original name for that character is now considered inactive?

[maartena]

What will happen with available housing? When people start moving servers, it's quite likely that we'll run short quickly on housing - are there any plans to open new neighborhoods for people?

Vyvyanne has stated that they looked at the available housing and they expect to have enough.... and that if it is determined more are needed they can address that with a future update. The introduction of foreclosures to prune inactive houses has surely helped clean up a lot of housing.

[lost_fool]

Hmmmmm…. Well I think that’s a pretty complete dev diary to explain the upcoming changes. Not sure why everyone is panicking, I thought it was pretty obvious that Turbine would try their hardest to make sure we lost none of our in game items. With the limitations of the game coding, I think this is probably the fairest way to do the renames etc.

What I disagree with is this is an exciting time for the game and servers closing down has been dressed up as a good thing with all these benefits, in my opinion there are only two, firstly that it’s going to be easier to get groups for group content, which there is loads of and is often neglected (Tomb of Elendil!) and secondly that Turbine have obviously calculated that there will be reduced hardware costs, which in theory should mean more resources are put towards awesome new content, and that is at least a point, they do deserve congratulations on continuing the content updates (New PVP FINALLY) while also waiting and awaiting this big change. Also credit that the EU servers are back in the EU really would have been easier to leave them there in the first place…… but looks like Turbine finally do learn from their prior mistakes – only took them 4 years. So that’s only another 2 till they fix Big Battles!

The negatives unfortunately far outway the positives, there is clearly going to be some griefing and it’s not going to be pain free for everyone as much as that experience may be streamlined. And as such there are indeed going to be unhappy players from the forced transfer, and I think we will probably lose some on a permanent because of it.

Obviously the game is now over 8 year old so it could be argued that that is naturally player decline and as far as I am aware player levels seem to be around the same as the pre free2play announcement, which in that case, that was good work by Turbine, who were one of the first (or at least to get recognised) as making the free-mium model and turn it into a success as they have extended the life of the game effectively ever since then.

However Turbine still needs to wake up, they have had ample opportunities to boost player population and not bothered, leading directly to this current situation. Someone at the Turbine marketing department needs to get on the line to the parents at Warner Bro’s and say you know that Third Hobbit Film and the extended edition DVD that will be coming out shortly, could we put an in game flyer and bonus code in that? It will cost us pennies and could give us a big boost in income over here, so what do you think? They are sitting on THE strongest fantasy IP with a film that is directly linked about to be sold in the millions worldwide, they failed to do it with the cinema release and this is the final chance as the films are over now. The large new audience that would gain exposure to the game by that simple bit of marketing would mean we would be adding new servers, not going the other way and causing all this pain.

Everyone knows these two items go together, i.e. a film and a game based in the same universe but even though it’s the same company (Warner Bro’s) it’s like they are completely separate. Coffee and Doughnuts go together (a good one for our US friends. :P) Currently it’s like walking into the doughnut store buying some then asking for a coffee to go with that only to be told they don’t do those, you have to go to our other store for that. So why don’t you do it here, erm……. So as long as this continues the object is self-defeating, server mergers lead to people leaving which eventually to more server mergers and finally a dead game unless Turbine actually wake up and market the game and I really really wish they would, cause it’s brilliant.

Finally as a pre open beta EU player (who rarely posts here unless it’s like this a rather weighty issue.) I am very interested in what EU servers are to remain open, I believe Evernight and Laurelin are a given. To my knowledge the German servers have been generally busier than the English EU ones so I would not be surprised to see 2 (yes two!) German servers kept open, one being Belegaer the German RP one, along with the one French server. If that was the case I would echo the sentiments of some further back in this thread that could the English EU servers take that load. Equally the same applies if the above situation is incorrect and it ends up being 3 English EU servers only 1 German server, could that take all the German players. I have a feeling their probably should have been at least 1 more server for the EU (and by the sounds of it for NA too) to avoid the upcoming lag fest.

One must seriously question why Turbine have not announced the servers to be closed with this latest Dev diary, I have narrowed it down to 2 options:

1) Vyvyanne said that’s she’s not prepared to release those names yet and so it’s yet to be finally finalised in stone. If they were finalised then it wouldn’t matter releasing them now as confirmed by another dev today transfers aren’t currently active anyway so no one could do anything about it. So in that case they decided they want another week of data and forum posts to have a look what’s going on with the servers. So by all means those people who want to save ‘their’ server go for it and make those posts, maybe the most passionate post will change minds and hearts with the blue names and you will manage to save it.
2) There is going to be a few surprises and there are going to be a lot of people seriously unhappy, and right now they don’t want all the additional grief from the community, which doesn’t really say much for them considering WE are an award winning community, glad you trust us Turbine!

If it’s not one of these two then……. Then please provide the names….

[maartena]

Many of my kin want to transfer to snowbourne but one of our ex-kinnies set up a kin with the exact same name as ours over there to stop us from being able to go there in the server merge. His kin is almost empty, maybe 1 or 2 people in. Ours is big and active. If our kin leader transfers our kin over there, what happens with our really well-known kin name?

You will lose your kin name and it will become "Kin Name-1" instead. You could just leave the -1 on there to point out how foolish this other person is. He would need to log on to the kin at least once every 30 days to prevent loss of leadership so you may count on him not being active. If all else fails, you can always add the word "real" to your kin name. In any case, kinship renames is a GM option only, so you will have to file a ticket and see how things go.

[Skelos0102]

You will lose your kin name and it will become "Kin Name-1" instead. You could just leave the -1 on there to point out how foolish this other person is. He would need to log on to the kin at least once every 30 days to prevent loss of leadership so you may count on him not being active. If all else fails, you can always add the word "real" to your kin name. In any case, kinship renames is a GM option only, so you will have to file a ticket and see how things go.

yeah he has not logged in since Jan but the kin hasn't been disbanded unfortunately:-(

[Capt.Hunor]

This might turn into a disaster and drive even more people away especially if they are forced to play on foreign language servers. Someone from UK may not have a problem with a U.S. based server because they speak the same language (mostly ) but try to get a Frenchman to speak German or English. They will not be happy...

Also with todays virtualization options there is a decreasing need for bare metal in data centers. If your server is able to run 10 virtual machines now it can still run these virtual machines in the future especially if the capacity requirements of these virtual machines decrease together with your player base.

I'm agree with that. The german RP player on Belegaer will stop to play the game. I'm very sure about this, they was always very sensible of language matters
ingame but also outside in the forums.

I don't understand why Turbine is not able to make a simple equation:

1. EN-RP
1. FR-RP&non-RP
1. DE-RP
1. EN-non RP
1. DE-non-RP
Everybody happy.

Even if RP Servers will need to accept the fact that not all non-RP players can join a single non-RP server and they will need to accept a big amount of non-RP players,
they will be not a mixture of nations like Babel. That's definitively a NO-GO, even for non-RP servers.
To mix a RP server with three nations is the catastrophic idea.

[elvenes]

yet the EN servers have been able to integrate people from many different languages together. And it did not end in chaos. En servers have more than just purely english population in them

[peachykins]

snip...

Turbine/WB needs to wake up to allot of things. This game had so much potential & they totally blew it.

[Halgoreth]

I would like to suggest, and I don't know if this is hard to implement, that if your character is still in the intro, it would lose the name to an incoming character. If you therefore want to reserve the name, you should complete the intro and be of "Novice" rank. This will prevent trolls from name-grabbing everywhere, because they wouldn't want to play out the intro for every name they are trying to get. With the beorning intro, it takes around 15 minutes to do, so people that are serious about a name, will want to do that work.

While I don't relish the idea of needing to do that much work to keep my name reserved, having such a barrier to frivolous name grabbing might actually be welcome. However, I think we're too close to announcement date for folks to act on it.

Perhaps make it so that a never-played name holder will still prevent the creation of *new* characters with that name and also prevent others from *changing* to that name. Incoming transfers with that name would be given the choice of a rename token or taking over the name. If, on the other hand, the name-holder was Novice or better, whether an incoming character has the option of taking over a name would depend on the priority rules.

[Fratonia]

I'm agree with that. The german RP player on Belegaer will stop to play the game. I'm very sure about this, they was always very sensible of language matters
ingame but also outside in the forums.

I don't understand why Turbine is not able to make a simple equation:

1. EN-RP
1. FR-RP&non-RP
1. DE-RP
1. EN-non RP
1. DE-non-RP
Everybody happy.

This is the solution I'm still hoping for. Closing Belegaer would be the worst decision. I can live with my home world dying (not really ) but the only alternative is Belegaer. If that is closed as well then it's "Bye Bye Lotro!" for me.

[ertr]

I'm agree with that. The german RP player on Belegaer will stop to play the game. I'm very sure about this, they was always very sensible of language matters
ingame but also outside in the forums.

I don't understand why Turbine is not able to make a simple equation:

1. EN-RP
1. FR-RP&non-RP
1. DE-RP
1. EN-non RP
1. DE-non-RP
Everybody happy.

Even if RP Servers will need to accept the fact that not all non-RP players can join a single non-RP server and they will need to accept a big amount of non-RP players,
they will be not a mixture of nations like Babel. That's definitively a NO-GO, even for non-RP servers.
To mix a RP server with three nations is the catastrophic idea.

It is very possible that is exactly how it will end up since it looks like the Top 5 EU servers at the moment are:
Evernight (EN)
Gwaihir (DE)
Laurelin (EN-RP)
Sirannon (FR)
Belegaer (DE-RP)

[ADUCE]

Ok here goes

I have 60 toons, with 2207 lvls xp spread over all servers. 46 on US and 14 on EU. Now I'm not going to keep 3 or 4 champs or whatever on the same server, so when I start to consolidate these guys are you going to change all boa to bind to account so we don't lose this gear ?. What about our mounts ? I have a lot of special mounts on these guys. are we just going to lose them too ?

[Birol]

Servers will be announced in one week. This is as much info as I am willing to give at this time.

RP world rules will remain as they currently are for each region.

i can only beg for not giving us only 1 server for all 3 eu languages. as a rp player and belegaer i can only hope that this is just a rumor and we will keep our beloved belegaer server, rp on belegaer is one of the few reasons why this game is so special (for me and amny others).

So plz dont shut down Belegaer!

[Xhiu]

Why is that?
I have said and quoted Turbines text on the matter that RP rules in any form are NOT mandatory for other players if the "others" end up on a RP server...

Then there are no longer any RP servers. Naming protocols were only on RP and Rp encouraged servers. Well unless you had a really really offensive name, or a GM on... er.. a bad day.

That seems pretty simple to me. With this they piss off the rp community. Bad enough you can't get text actions that assist rp but now you even have Renamethis running around flaunting the ability to annoy rp'rs? nice.

[Fratonia]

Ok here goes

I have 60 toons, with 2207 lvls xp spread over all servers. 46 on US and 14 on EU. Now I'm not going to keep 3 or 4 champs or whatever on the same server, so when I start to consolidate these guys are you going to change all boa to bind to account so we don't lose this gear ?. What about our mounts ? I have a lot of special mounts on these guys. are we just going to lose them too ?

If you delete a character everything that is bound to him will be lost. It has always been that way.

[Itoo]

Vyvyanne i have commendations and destiny points on different german server if i transfer them to one server to they add up? and go over cap or do my commendations just cap at 15000 and the rest is lost?

[cat301]

Greetings Citizens of Middle-Earth!

We are finally ready to reveal the details on the new World Transfer process, the consolidation of LOTRO's worlds, and their movement to a brand new data center. We appreciate your patience as we have worked to make the new transfer process as well-rounded, simple, and effortless as possible. The first part of this article will discuss our timeline and the second part will go over the details of the new transfer features themselves. So grab a goblet of Elvish Wine and kick back, because this will be a long one. Read more.

when will the new servers be online ?

[The_Jagannath]

Does this mean that "less than 10%" figure that was being tossed around was spread out across 2/3 of servers? = |

[Shanbwa]

Ok so catching up on the thread since I headed out last night. Here are some additional clarifications:

5. Can I transfer to multiple worlds while in the free transfer period? Yes. There is no limitation to the number of transfers you can do. Once the transfers between the remaining 10 are no longer free, however, you will have to pay to move between them.

6. Can you grant more character slots? We are now looking into adding 2 free character slots to all Premium and VIP accounts. We will also have a sale on character slots.

-Vyv

these 2 points will do alot of good
i was gonna buy 3 char slots, as i have Minstrel,Warden,Guardian,Hunte r,Rune Keeper, but wanted the Lore Master, Champion and Captain, too
Burglar looks kind of complicated for someone whose brains dont function well (mine), so i was gonna buy 3 char slots, but me (premium account)
now that i may get 2 slots, i may aswell buy 2 for the new class (sorry, always forget its name) and the class itself, slowly, as my income is low, so i can collect money slowly and buy it

then when people have to choose a server to transfer to, they'll need some time, and to see what server is best for them, so being able to switch as many times as we want, will be great to see what we wanna do

also, am i the only one who thinks it'll be this (below) in EU?
1 EU EN
1 EU EN RP
1 EU PvP
1 EU DE
1 EU FR

could be me, but having 2 RP's and no PvP's will probably make people being annoyed, and makes less sense
since english is the language most know on this world (reallife world), RP fits EU EN server best, same with PvP

lets count "EU EN" as "EU international"

.... be happy german and french people, that you have an OWN server, the rest doesnt have that

anyway, i'm starting to think turbine is more than people give them credit for..... giving away 2 character slots to those who actually use their accounts in a paid way, thats great advertisement

ok, some people will say: meh, its not even for others, those who use the free to play model on its fullest
but free to play = money through ingame store

also, i even bought moria expansion when i was new in lotro, just to get all classes and character slots, but that wasnt enough, so if we really get 2 free character slots, i'll buy more, just to enjoy the game to its fullest
if not... i'll be disappointed for it being mentioned and not done, and less likely to buy more

heck, maybe i'll try burglar anyway, with 2 free slots

and again: i wont be the only one thinking like this

these 2 points will have a great effect on the playerbase

[Tuco]

Ok here goes

I have 60 toons, with 2207 lvls xp spread over all servers. 46 on US and 14 on EU. Now I'm not going to keep 3 or 4 champs or whatever on the same server, so when I start to consolidate these guys are you going to change all boa to bind to account so we don't lose this gear ?. What about our mounts ? I have a lot of special mounts on these guys. are we just going to lose them too ?

Ooh, +1 on the special mounts! There are some cosmetics I'd rather not lose, but hopefully there will be enough closet space for them. It didn't occur to me that the horse thing would be possible, and I've already mulched one character that I don't play but who lucked into a Steed of the Dusk-watch that year. I have half a dozen others like him whom I'd like to strip of their stables before they take the long walk.

[Tatharil]

also, am i the only one who thinks it'll be this (below) in EU?
1 EU EN
1 EU EN RP
1 EU PvP
1 EU DE
1 EU FR

could be me, but having 2 RP's and no PvP's will probably make people being annoyed, and makes less sense
since english is the language most know on this world (reallife world), RP fits EU EN server best, same with PvP

Please describe what a PVP-server should be like for lotro and why they should be created after 8 years without pvp-servers?
In RP especially in midleearth words have power and it is important to be able to use the correct word. There are many words with rather similar meanings, but many don't know the difference in foreign languages.

1 example: big/tall. would you call tall woman "big woman" and in which way will she react if you call her big woman? If english isn't your mother language ... well the english vocabulary learnt at school is rather limited and simple.... not good enough to fit the required nuances for RP.

btw: german is the most common motherlanguage in EU (Germany, Austria, Switzerland- yes i know they are not part of the EU, but they play on EU-servers)

[ADUCE]

If you delete a character everything that is bound to him will be lost. It has always been that way.

No, this is different. This is a force consolidation of my account. I'm a lifetime founder. I've already paid to have access to all my toons all the time. Not to buy more character slots or have my toons in storage and/or lose gear because of it.

[Mar-Evayave]

I live in Sweden and I don't know my latency either but thankfully I have no lag at all A little bit at Weatherstock, but mostly just when moving the camera rapidly over the crowd while zooming out, and when I first rode up the hill. The only way to know how it will be after the move is to wait and see... and hope

In theory you'll be roughly the same. Landroval will still be US-based. The 5 EU servers would likely have increased connection speeds for you, though.

I agree with the naming issues/. I already spotted a troll last night telling someone he was going to go to multiple servers and make a toon with their name so if our server closes they lose the name. Yes majority of the community is full of awesome good players but the players who want to grief and or troll others by doing this should for 1 be punished and 2 not be able to reserve the name.

So my suggestion would be

Use what you have in place But also have a second check

If 2 players exist on the same server and are both active, the player created MOST RECENTLY will have the forced name change.

So for instance if this troll was to create a kickman on every other server and I was forced to move, He would recieve the rename because he sis the newer toon and I have been more active

I don't know if this is possible, but perhaps remove any and all priority for characters created since this thread was opened? That would, in theory, eliminate the troll name-griefing possibility.

7. Why not do names purely on seniority? A few posters have explained the complication of this already. We had to come up with a solution that would work for Transfers going forward. Going off a seniority based system would result in active players always risking that their name could be changed at any point, not just when they transferred. No solution was perfect. We went with an option that will help free up a number of names for players transferring in, while not disturbing the players who are already there and actively playing the game.

Is there anything that can be done to mitigate the above potential name-griefing?

[maartena]

Re: the EU servers: I think there is much more need for English speaking servers than there is for German and French.

If there are to be 5 servers, it would make sense to do it like this:

1 EN RP
2 EN Regular
1 FR Regular
1 DE Regular

Even though a server is not labeled as RP, it does not mean RP is therefore prohibited.