World Transfers

[guitarguy12410]

I'm not sure if this question has already been asked because i wasn't gonna take the time to look through all 18 pages of this thread to see :P

But I was curious about the name issue. I've heard of many cases where say you have person A and person B. Person A is a lvl capped player person and person B is a troll. Person B makes a toon on another server with the same toon name as person A so that person A has to change their name upon coming to the server, even though person B's toon is only lvl 5 or 10. I would hate to have to change the name of my main due to some troll who decided to make my name on another server and logs in after seeing this current naming solution purely to troll me and make me change the name of the toon I've had for years. I'm not sure if this has already been brought up but I was curious about this aspect of it.

[Macroscian]

I'm not sure if this question has already been asked because i wasn't gonna take the time to look through all 18 pages of this thread to see :P

But I was curious about the name issue. I've heard of many cases where say you have person A and person B. Person A is a lvl capped player person and person B is a troll. Person B makes a toon on another server with the same toon name as person A so that person A has to change their name upon coming to the server, even though person B's toon is only lvl 5 or 10. I would hate to have to change the name of my main due to some troll who decided to make my name on another server and logs in after seeing this current naming solution purely to troll me and make me change the name of the toon I've had for years. I'm not sure if this has already been brought up but I was curious about this aspect of it.

The name can't be challenged at all unless the character on the target server has been off for a year.
https://www.lotro.com/en/game/articles/world-transfers

"Naming Priorities
With the new transfer process, when you transfer your character to a new world, the world will check to see if there is a naming conflict. If there is, it will grant the name to the incoming character if the character existing on the world has not been active for one year or more. The less active character will have a -1 added to their name and a rename token granted to the character. (Rename tokens have no expiration date.) This should prevent the majority of unnecessary renames for those transferring from the impacted worlds."

[camenecium]

EN does not mean english enforced but preferred. On EN servers (all en servers, us and eu) there are people from multiple cultures and languages, german and french too, and you will likely see that multiple languages pop up in world chat. English is not enforced, and EN servers does not mean that only people from UK or NA play on them.

Some games don't even have separate servers for regions or languages. Given Laurelin will be the de facto only RP Supported server, it'll be interesting to see how many residents of the DE-RP and FR-RP servers go with Laurelin as RP versus their non-RP language-specific worlds versus none of the above. I hope Turbine publishes transfer stats as things unfold.

Hopefully the RP world compression doesn't mean /world chat changes from occasional kinship or fellowship ads in various languages to people talking over each other in separate (and to some, incomprehensible) unrelated conversations (which isn't great even in the same language). EN does not mean English is enforced, but a language tag brings an expectation that you can fully participate in the game, including public conversation, in that language. Maybe we end up with language-specific world chats to compensate for the RP compression, and maybe that includes a separate one for English out of fairness if Laurelin really becomes the global rp-supported world and if what EN signifies is no longer true.

[LauraHolt]

I'm curious if characters that have been created within the time frame considered "active" will be considered "active" if they never logged in after character creation or if "active" will only mean characters that have entered or (preferably) finished the tutorial. I hope it's the latter because that would solve a lot of griefing issues and since I see others have posted similar questions, I hope we get a response from Vyvyanne or Frelorn on this...

Also, I'm still unclear regarding housing chest items transferring - personal AND kin house items. Will Bound items transfer if they are in a house chest or do they need to be in their individual owner's Bank Vault? Will unbound items in house chests (personal and kin) transfer and just go into escrow on the new server until a house can be purchased? And what about items on hooks? Will hooked items transfer or do they need to be in a chest? I don't want to end up leaving anything behind if my server is unlucky enough to be demolished... Sadly, in my kin house there are items bound to characters that have been transferred or deleted or whose players just quit, so I already know I won't get to save them for my kinnies if my server is toast...

Finally, I'm curious if Turbine has considered (if it's even possible), making houses upgradable - so that if someone buys a standard house they can just pay a few more gold to "upgrade" it to a deluxe? Any house that was upgraded that later got foreclosed would, of course, revert back to being a standard house... That might encourage people to buy the standard houses so neighborhoods aren't ghost towns. Well, that and neighborhood crafting areas with discounts for homeowners...

[camenecium]

I don't know the exact numbers. But I do know that the English speaking servers are more likely to be used by Netherlands, Danmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and possibly countries like Australia and New Zealand, and even Americans and Canadians that didn't know there was a US/EU server difference.

And Americans/Canadians who choose Laurelin because it's the only EN-RP server now and apparently the only RP Supported server in the future.

The french are definitely way under represented, but one of the English servers alone has twice the logins as the next busiest server. So yeah I don't know what needs to happen and how/why/where/what.

I don't speak Spanish, but that population seems wildly under-represented since I don't recall there ever being an ES tagged world. Not a big market for LOTRO? Assumption that the majority is also ESL? Very strange.

[Gardhik]

We (French player) used an external forum to discuss this kind of thing (that's why our sub-forum is empty). It seems that if Estel closes, most players will go to Sirannon (They RP too). The only issue is the loss of RP rules and names enforcement.... that is, when Turbine enforce it. We have seen severals trolls in the past, who never got rename... So in the end, I just think french players will go to Sirannon in order to avoid language barrier. We will do a poll anyway at the forum I spoke of.

[Belriana]

How many times will we be able to transfer between live servers before October 1st? Let's say I moved my character from a closing server to one that's staying open but then want to change to a different server. Will I be able to make as many server transfer as I want until October 1st without having to pay?

[Gardhik]

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...79#post7410979

Answer 5.

[zolander]

1. How many times are we able to xferr for free per "toon"?
2. Will there be problems like with the BR server copy?

[Gardhik]

Really... answer 5. Hit the link above

As for issues when transferring. It's always possible. I never had the issue myself. When you have, usually, Turbine fix it by doing it manually.

[Derquin]

I really do feel for you. I've been playing MMOs since 1995 and I've been through my fair share of RP servers closing and merging with others. It's just awful, all around.

The problem is, I'm a roleplayer, I don't speak German, I refuse to play on Landroval (since I do not consider it to be an RP server with people with names like "Cheetos" running around). I refuse to play on a non-RP server.

If you get your way, where does that leave me and all the EU roleplayers who don't speak German?

Any surviving RP-Server should not have a language specification at all (EU-RP), that is more what I mean and that should be made clear by Turbine. A specific label often leads to the impression that that is the one and only language allowed. Making players behave like that at least.

Call it a personal wish for Belegaer to remain (perhaps as 5th server) due to experiences / concerns which makes the choice of server (international RP or still officially supported native language non-RP) a real choice to be considered with all consequences that come with that choice. I do not think it will. Even if, it would (have to) change due to the number of servers going down so much.

I do not have a solution to handle it since roleplay often means using far more than just a world chat (which I turn off almost immediately with all nonsense spread there) - and emoting with own emote texts has a quite long range (far too long in some cases). A selection of different languages will make chat not easier to read at closeup locations. Getting old I guess *sigh*

No matter what it will split up the existing RP-communities on the closing worlds (go to international RP, go to whichever other server remaining (transfer / start new on other server / region), quit roleplaying (open world/at all), quit game after server closure when neither is an option).

Since LotRO had more than one directly supported language RP-Server for so long a lot of people are now worried about losing their beloved playground, friends, locations they have filled with life for so long.

[CaerArianrhod]

I don't see the language problem as insurmountable, though it might need a bit of lateral thinking. Laurelin is fairly tolerant of mixed languages in World

A World (and an World/Map-Chaet) with mixed languages don't work. I'm not talking about a small server with a handfull of people with different languages, but about huge servers with thousand of people with different languages.
I have seen this Megaservers in GW2 and Wildstar and since they are active the communication in the world/map chat is considerable less than before. I have seen maps in both of that games (with many players running around) where for an hour or longer there was not a single world in the chat. And even in the main cities there is much less communication in the chat.

I'm leading a kinship and a raid (with players from different kinships). I will not transfer our kinship to a mixed language RP-server.
And even if i would, what about other kinships which don't? How we can Keep our raid?
The best solution would be, as it has been said already: 1 EN-RP, 1 EN, 1 DE-RP, 1 DE, 1 FR (may be as RE).

The discussion we had yesterday im TeamSpeek wasn't about if our server will be closed or not, it was about which other game we will play if there is only a mixed language RP-Serever!!!

And all this because Turbines unablility to clarify how this:

5 US and 5 EU is correct. In our selection we will have one RP per region (EU & US) and one world per language (DE, FR and ENG).

fit with 5 EU-Servers!

A mixed language RP-Server is a "stillbirth".

[Marancil]

In a few hundred years, or a lot sooner, German, French and other minority languages (including my own, Swedish) will be...ehm, minor minority languages. Just look at the global language statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ative_speakers

So just drop'em.

Fortunately I am fluid in Spanish.

[ertr]

In a few hundred years German, French and other minority languages will be...ehm, minor minority languages. Just look at the global language statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ative_speakers

So just drop'em.

Fortunately I am fluid in Spanish.

In a few hundred years that may well be true. In a few hundred years I very much doubt that LOTRO will still be running however.

Right now the people playing on DE and FR servers account for nearly a quarter of the total LOTRO players, which is far too many to simply ignore.

[Marancil]

Yes, but right now EU players wanting their languages might be causing Turbine waaay more headache than the US servers, for obvious reasons. Just make your own communities on the servers, from what I read the Russians did. Language orientation on server level is such a bad idea to begin with. Sure you can support foreign languages by having Unicode support, but there is no reason whatsoever to specifically configure a server to a set language.

[Anárion_Ancalimë]

OK so it's finally come down to this, the dreaded server transfers. I personally think that this is a good thing because on those remaining 10 servers there will at least be enough ppl playing the game so nobody will get the feeling that he's in a singleplayer game. I simply don't understand some people that say that this will ruin the game, because it already is IMO. I ask you this: how can this game be even more bad than it is with all the bugs, and the lag we experience atm?? not to mention some other stuff that also completely ruined the game in the past 2-3 years? What everyone fails to read in the dev diary is also a very important bit of information that we will get new and up to date hardware this year.

But all in all it isn't the players and the community that is to blame. Every server could be at least half of the brandywine or even more full if Turbine would not make such a mess of the game over the past years. It could have been the way it was in the SoA days, MoM days, you name it. But we've come to the point where transfers will probably extend the actual life of this game. Noone that plays MMO's want's to run around all day and meet only NPC's. That's not an MMO anymore. And it drives people away. Not to mention the pain of finding people to do group content like instances let alone raids....

If Turbine finally decide to do things right for once, then there is some light at the end of the tunell, but if they mess it up again, then this time it will be more of a mess than it is when you release badly done update or expansion.

But hey, it's just my opinion, feel free to flame me or tell me how stupid I am. I still play this game even though it's way worse than it was a few years ago.

[Fratonia]

Why would it be easier for a lifetime account owner to purchase more slots?

The point is, we've already paid for the characters we have, as well as additional costs for costumes, costume slots, horses, houses, and so forth. Why should we have to pay for them again?

It is easier because lifetimers get free points each month so they don't have to invest additional money like all others have to. It still sucks to have to spend points again on something you already had. I agree with that.

Agreed, but I'm not sure that they are in sufficient numbers to enable 2 rp servers to be supported - I could be wrong of course. If Laurelin closes and Belegaer remains open, I'll move to Belegaer. It seems to me that what matters to you more than anything is that your server has the DE label. I'm sorry, but that smacks to me of linguistic imperialism. I'd far prefer to have 5 EU servers with no language designation whatsoever.

It has nothing to do with "linguistic imperialism" as you call it. If a server is labeled DE the common language of the inhabitants is German so if you speak German you can be sure that most other players will understand you. We were hosting several server events in the past and had to create lots of text for them. Do you want us to do that text in English so a lot of the German players don't understand us? Do you want us to continue to do the text in German therefore barring non-German speakers from the event? Or should we do a multi-lingual text? No thank you. You have obviously no idea how much work it is without translating everything not to mention that a lot of the meaning would get lost anyway.
If anything can be called "linguistic imperialism" it is your "everyone has to speak English nowadays" attitude. We are NOT an English colony! I have to read, talk and listen to English language all day so I would at least like to use my mother language in my free time. This is why I choose a German server. Thank you for your understanding!

There are lot of people on Laurelin that don't understand english also. Should Turbine make servers for Italians, Spaniards, Russians, Turks, Dutch or even me and 3 other Croatian speaking people so we can understand what is happening around us? Or we are just less valuable?
Lucky for us non EN, DE, FR people Turbine did make player-created chat channels (they could add few more slots for that...) so we can use it and ignore all the rest if we like it.

Again you are missing the point. Turbine didn't see the need to provide servers for Italians or Spaniards in the first place because they deem that player base too small for own servers. Those players made a choice to play on an English server. They might as well have decided to play another game that provides different language servers. For the rest see above. I don't want to repeat myself.

This is the last thing I will state on this topic.

[CaerArianrhod]

Yes, but right now EU players wanting their languages might be causing Turbine waaay more headache than the US servers,

Who cares?!?
That is theirs job! That is what they get paid for!

Just make your own communities on the servers, from what I read the Russians did. Language orientation on server level is such a bad idea to begin with. Sure you can support foreign languages by having Unicode support, but there is no reason whatsoever to specifically configure a server to a set language.

Go and troll elsewhere!

[Beorthnoth]

It is easier because lifetimers get free points each month so they don't have to invest additional money like all others have to. It still sucks to have to spend points again on something you already had. I agree with that.




It has nothing to do with "linguistic imperialism" as you call it. If a server is labeled DE the common language of the inhabitants is German so if you speak German you can be sure that most other players will understand you. We were hosting several server events in the past and had to create lots of text for them. Do you want us to do that text in English so a lot of the German players don't understand us? Do you want us to continue to do the text in German therefore barring non-German speakers from the event? Or should we do a multi-lingual text? No thank you. You have obviously no idea how much work it is without translating everything not to mention that a lot of the meaning would get lost anyway.
If anything can be called "linguistic imperialism" it is your "everyone has to speak English nowadays" attitude. We are NOT an English colony! I have to read, talk and listen to English language all day so I would at least like to use my mother language in my free time. This is why I choose a German server. Thank you for your understanding!



Again you are missing the point. Turbine didn't see the need to provide servers for Italians or Spaniards in the first place because they deem that player base too small for own servers. Those players made a choice to play on an English server. They might as well have decided to play another game that provides different language servers. For the rest see above. I don't want to repeat myself.

This is the last thing I will state on this topic.

You must have missed the bit where I said that I'd transfer to Belegaer if Laurelin closes. However, I'd wager large sums of money that if Belegaer does make the cut, it will not have a DE label. The statistics suggest that there are not enough RP players to run two servers without the non-RP servers becoming more overcrowded than even Brandywine. How do you propise to square that circle?

[ertr]

You must have missed the bit where I said that I'd transfer to Belegaer if Laurelin closes. However, I'd wager large sums of money that if Belegaer does make the cut, it will not have a DE label. The statistics suggest that there are not enough RP players to run two servers without the non-RP servers becoming more overcrowded than even Brandywine. How do you propise to square that circle?

Plenty of non-RP players play on RP servers. As long as they respect the RP players and do not try to grief or otherwise disturb the RP it is not a problem.

[Marancil]

Who cares?!?
That is theirs job! That is what they get paid for!



Go and troll elsewhere!

Nope, just commenting on what seems to be some big issues for some people and what might be technically reasonable and cost-effective to do. Maybe you need to look up troll behaviour on Wikipedia or some.

You do not seem to get that this is a cut down on services because we are not as many paying customers as we used to be. How much real money have you spent on this game the last year? I know I have spent quite a bit more than the VIP yearly subscription fee. And today or tomorrow I will purchase another bunch of TP, because I can and because I think I need them. I am a paying customer, but, again, there are just not enough of us to have Turbine keep the server layout as well as upgrading the hardware.

We are all worried about the final result, even you are. It is natural, neither of us know how our game environment will look like in a few weeks. I am on a low population server that most likely will get shutdown and the guys on high pop servers are worried about how the influx of players from all those closing servers are going to affect the performance on the resulting servers and their player environment.

So no, Turbine is not really getting paid for this, not as much as they would need to anyway...

[Beorthnoth]

Plenty of non-RP players play on RP servers. As long as they respect the RP players and do not try to grief or otherwise disturb the RP it is not a problem.

Looking at the log in figures suggests that all the current RP servers run at about 20% of logins - enough to support one RP server if Turbine wants to have broadly even server load. That leaves an awful lot of players currently on other servers to be willing to move to justify two of them. I'm just playing devil's advocate here - I really can't see a situation where enough players would want to play on an RP server to justify having two, particularly once language restrictions come into play.

[Trixie_Me]

In addition to allowing rename tokens to overwrite inactive character names, can we please get more storage? I am sure I am not alone in using the mail system as storage because there is so very little of it in our bags and vaults. If mail will not transfer (and I understand why it won't), people like me will need some place to put those items.

[wbhz]

This question may of been asked, but are we getting any form of gold back when we loose our houses so that we can apply this gold to a new purchase?

[Fratonia]

In addition to allowing rename tokens to overwrite inactive character names, can we please get more storage? I am sure I am not alone in using the mail system as storage because there is so very little of it in our bags and vaults. If mail will not transfer (and I understand why it won't), people like me will need some place to put those items.

In the past Turbine has increased storage capacity for shared storage as well as wardrobe several times. They might do that again in the future. In addition to that you can always use storage mules.

This question may of been asked, but are we getting any form of gold back when we loose our houses so that we can apply this gold to a new purchase?

Please read the dev notes first that are linked in Frelorn's post. This question is already answered there. You will receive mail with your original purchase cost of the old house.