World Transfers

[Xhiu]

Because of what happens on Bullroarer and the E&G Tavern no character on Bullroarer can be transferred (copied, moved, what ever) off of Bullroarer. In other words do not move any of your characters to Bullroarer, you can copy, but do not move/transfer/what ever to Bullroarer. If you do, at the next character wipe you will loose all your characters, database wipes are a frequent occurrence on Bullroarer. I do think the copy feature will not let you move a character to Bullraorer, only copy.

Which creates another issue. Are copies to BR now going to pull shared / housing w/e stuff now? Since I can copy from a multitude of servers with various number of shared storage and housing vaults, in the past it has been a no fly zone for this type of activity, due to the way items are created. Add to this a copy has always had the chance to fail. Is this a possibility with transfers now?

[Xhiu]

I was going to resist commenting on this as long as possible but can no longer.

Transferring people from one server and down the line is an absolute terrible idea. So many people have said time and time again that names and housing mean a lot to them. Turbines response is to ignore them. I feel awful for which ever server is the last group to transfer. It's extremely unfair that this group should have to wait while everyone else probably ends up taking their names, their kinship names, and housing. My kinship packed up already and was planning on going as soon as possible if our server were to shut down and now we realize, we may even end up staying on our server for a month or more. There could be better ways to handle the merges, transfers, whatever you want to call them. This is not one of them. IMO this is sloppy and not well thought out. I doubt they will delay anything now and everything is probably set in stone. It's rather unfortunate that it has to be this way.

Say what?

Do I have this wrong but I was under the impression that each player would get the opportunity to transfer his or her toons as soon as the button on the char gen screen became available for that. So people in the NA will have first dibs cuz they will be awake and possibly off work then. But they can't x-xfer to EU. I think the land grab is so great there will be people stumbling over each other.

SUGGESTION: Open day 1 to vip's only. With such short notice its gonna be hard to make that call and I highly doubt that is going to happen. It would have been nice, though.

[Vyvyanne]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....

1) We begin with copies to Bullroarer on Monday, but only some of the features are available through copy. For example Kinships do not move in copy. Once we have worked out any kinks we will open the actual transfers.

2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

[Meto]

So happy to hear this is happening as I have been wanting to see the reduction of servers for a long time. I will happily move if needed to finally be able to see more populated servers and then at least be able to run instances and raids more often.

[Halgoreth]

since my main is on Brandywine I had hoped to unite my characters on that server. I do hope there will be free transfers to Brandywine at some point.

I, too, hope that, at some point after the free transfers are underway, they re-evaluate the decision to exclude Brandywine. While I understand their desire to avoid a landrush to an already heavily loaded server, it seems rather unfair that everyone else whose main resides on a "remaining server" will have free opportunity to consolidate their off-world accounts into their main's world. Especially considering that Brandywine will not be closed to the creation of new characters there in the meantime.

Hopefully, once a few rounds of transfers have happened, and most folks have settled into new homes, Turbine will open up Brandy to free transfers in order to accommodate folks who who have a good reason to go there. Ideally, most of the folks who would have considered Brandywine as a destination were it not closed, would elect to stay where they are rather than move again.

I kinda doubt it would have been possible, but it would be nice if free transfers to Brandy were available now (well, starting Monday, that is), but only for subscriptions that already have a presence there currently (that is, as of the 8/3/15 start of transfers). Maybe send out a Transfer-to-Brandywine offer exclusively to those players. Possibly work through a slightly different mechanism in which the requests may take a couple days to process because they require admins to override the transfer lock manually. Perhaps activated by an offer code entered into the Launcher's transfer utility. (The offer would be time-limited and could only be used for accounts under the subscription that's linked to the code, but may be reused for as many off-world accounts or characters as the player wishes to transfer.)

Alternatively, perhaps, after the servers have migrated to the new server hardware (which is supposed to be more capable of handling an expanded Brandywine), they could send out a free Rally-on-Brandy offer to players in that category (even if they had since moved elsewhere with the understanding that moving away would be the only option for them to consolidate their accounts for free). Sure, many folks would gripe about having been "tricked" into moving away from it in the first place (and losing their houses and kinship status), but I think that that inconvenience would pale in comparison to the disenfranchisement of long-time Brandits (Winos? I don't know what they call themselves) who were never given the opportunity for free merger onto their home server, even though that server remains active. As above, the approval code would be subscription-linked, time-limited, and reuseable, but would only work for transfers to Brandywine.

Personally, I have no interest in Brandywine at present (if I ever do end up with a character there, it will be an new one; I won't be transferring any existing of my existing ones there, free or not). But I think there opportunity here for Turbine to be a little more accommodating to those who are currently invested there. (Either by removing the transfer lock altogether when things begin to settle, or by offering the ability to pre-8/3 Brandits.)

[Tuco]

Say what?

Do I have this wrong but I was under the impression that each player would get the opportunity to transfer his or her toons as soon as the button on the char gen screen became available for that. So people in the NA will have first dibs cuz they will be awake and possibly off work then. But they can't x-xfer to EU. I think the land grab is so great there will be people stumbling over each other.

The land grab should be relatively limited. On 3 Aug the five surviving servers in NA and the five in EU will be announced. The transfers among each set of five will then become available, except that Brandywine will be "send only". This means people will be able to step on a desired name on one of the five survivors if they have or can create a character with that name on one of the other four. The land grab does not extend to the sunsetting servers at first.

[cdq1958]

probably by the amount of logins per hour, something that is also available here:

http://lux-hdro.de/hdro-live-us.php

If that is indeed the case, it looks like Riddermark might be the first to go along with Firefoot and Nimrodel each having around 3% of logins, followed next by Vilya, Elendilmir, Dwarrowdelf, Silverlode, Imladris each having around 4% of logins..... not necessary in that order.

There are a couple of problems with that, though. First, that site *estimates* logins using the login queue number. Without knowing more about how they model the system and how the system generates and uses the login queue number, there are a number of 'random' and structural biases that make the credible/confidence interval rather wide. Second, the queue number is generated for an attempt. What happens if that attempt fails, and since we don't know certain key conditions, well that too widens the uncertainty.

Since Turbine knows, directly, better info, I'd discount anything based on estimated logins per hour. Actual logins per week or month would be better as a factor.

[Tuco]

Since Turbine knows, directly, better info, I'd discount anything based on estimated logins per hour. Actual logins per week or month would be better as a factor.

Or perhaps a more relevant measure might be the number of characters that have been logged on in the last year... that is, the number not subject to name displacement.

[Trixie_Me]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....
2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

But again, only the early movers have a decent shot at getting a name on one of the more heavily populated servers. Nothing has been changed in the process to alleviate the problem. If new characters could claim inactive names, you might have a solution. But right now, a great inequity exists between the opportunity some people have over others.

[maartena]

Or perhaps a more relevant measure might be the number of characters that have been logged on in the last year... that is, the number not subject to name displacement.

That would mean that ANY server that has been the "preferred" server some time over the last 12 months, would probably be at end of the line, regardless of how large the current population is. I am suspecting that it is much more recent.

I said logins per hour, but more accurately they probably measure the logins per hour over the last 2 or 3 months, and use that. In the end, Turbine can pull all sorts of statistics out of their database that we don't know. Hey, if the skirmish panel can keep track of the number of times I killed bosses in an instance, they can surely track everything they want to know around logins, activity, average login time, amount of characters per server, average amount of characters per account, etc, etc, etc....

[Beaniemooch]

But again, only the early movers have a decent shot at getting a name on one of the more heavily populated servers. Nothing has been changed in the process to alleviate the problem. If new characters could claim inactive names, you might have a solution. But right now, a great inequity exists between the opportunity some people have over others.

Agreed. Created characters can't take over inactive player names (nor should they) but it means people who don't get to transfer first get the shaft on both names and housing placement.

[Xhiu]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....

1) We begin with copies to Bullroarer on Monday, but only some of the features are available through copy. For example Kinships do not move in copy. Once we have worked out any kinks we will open the actual transfers.

2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

Wow, I really missed the boat.

So the second class servers are going to be opened up in some order and not all at once? *cue the hysteria*
The way this is read (by me) is that if you make a place holder toon on servera and your serverb is shutting down all you have to do is move your toon to servera and everything comes with you? Won't I have to delete the placeholder first? and with the landrush isn't there going to be a point where 8 other people rushing to servera with the same name trying to get that before anyone else making name holding an entire #### shoot if you get caught up in server lag due to a bazillion people all logging in at once?

Pardon me while I get my foil hat. I keep it on a daoc toon. for real.

[wispsong]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....

1) We begin with copies to Bullroarer on Monday, but only some of the features are available through copy. For example Kinships do not move in copy. Once we have worked out any kinks we will open the actual transfers.

2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

I have no problem creating characters on remaining worlds. That is easy. The housing however is not since the deluxe house I'm in right now cost over 7g. That is a big amount of money to get for a lowbie. Plus that character needs to be lvl 15. And I have to do that on 4 worlds. So basically I would be stuck playing characters I will later on probably delete which is not a lot of fun. I can just hope that you will open up new neighborhoods without insisting that the current ones are filled and escrow will last as long as I need to buy a new house. For some of us it's not just housing, it has to be in the right neighborhood and has to have the right view. Never mind that I also have a kinship house just across the river in the same neighborhood.

I understand why you are doing this and know it is not easy. It's just that an average of 20% per server seems rather high and maybe 6 servers would be better and give more options.

[maartena]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....

1) We begin with copies to Bullroarer on Monday, but only some of the features are available through copy. For example Kinships do not move in copy. Once we have worked out any kinks we will open the actual transfers.

2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

Vyvyanne, I would like to thank you for all the hard work you do. I know its thankless job often, and players often complain a whole lot more than they give credit where it is due. I think it due here, you have taken the time to answer almost all questions, and I believe many of us appreciate that.

So thank you.

[maartena]

I have no problem creating characters on remaining worlds. That is easy. The housing however is not since the deluxe house I'm in right now cost over 7g. That is a big amount of money to get for a lowbie. Plus that character needs to be lvl 15. And I have to do that on 4 worlds.

Yes, that might be a bit of a drag, but can be done in about 2-3 hours, including the gold. Don't do quests just kill, kill, kill, kill.... and sell all the loot. Also, become an explorer and mine all copper and rowan nodes in your newbie area. Especially the copper ore (without making ingots) sells WELL on the AH.

Also, you only have to be a novice level 5 out of the intro to ENTER the neighborhoods, so you can check and see if you perfect address and neighborhood is available, so you only have to do it where it is.

Kinship houses is of course not doable, as your new kinship will have to have existed for 3 months.

There really isn't much that can be done about names and housing now. I will accept it as it is and go with the flow. Name-1 it may be for a while, and I will figure out the housing when I move.

[maartena]

This by no means should be interpreted as "the list" when it comes to which servers MAY be staying, and which servers MAY be migrating first, but here is a list I grabbed from this site, USA servers ONLY.

http://lotrostats.gefallenehelden.de/

It is the total amount of logins since the last time was restarted, which was Monday 7/27:

1 - Brandywine: 56430
2 - Gladden: 29252
3 - Landroval: 25374
4 - Crickhollow: 15202
5 - Arkenstone: 11697
6 - Meneldor: 10974
7 - Silverlode: 9689
8 - Vilya: 9639
9 - Imladris: 9381
10 - Elendilmir: 9309
11 - Dwarrowdelf: 9065
12 - Nimrodel: 8006
13 - Firefoot: 7999
14 - Windfola: 7743
15 - Riddermark: 7707

Based on the above information, I believe the top 4 servers to stay are to be the ones in green. The 5th server could be either server in yellow. All servers marked red are scheduled to be thrown in the fire pits of mount doom.

Also based on this, it seems likely that Riddermark and Windfola are going to be the first two servers allowed to start moving to new worlds.

[Christian.S]

Personally I think names should get prioritized by the oldest user as well. My point being that, even with people having the same name across servers there can be things like Joebob on Brandywine has had his toon for 2 months shouldn't get priority over Joebob from Landroval who has had his toon for 8 years.

This could also be a solution for people who could be trolled by people making last minute toon creations before this all happens...

Its lucky for us in LotRo any idea or opinion you ever had,was never considered or listened to.

Some players farm rank. Some players farm names. Surely you can understand the freedom of choice?

[DobbelB_EU]

I think some clarification concerning EU servers is needed here.
From my understanding this means:

only 1 EN (English) server
only 1 EN-RP (English-Roleplay) server
only 1 DE (German) server
only 1 FR (French) server

So what about the fifth EU server?

Just looking at the 6 most active servers:
-Evernight (EN)
-Gwaihir (DE)
-Laurelin (EN-RP)
-Sirannon (FR)
-Snowbourn (EN) or Belegaer (DE-RP) with similar activity

I have the feeling the final server would be a german one. Because EN en DE servers have always been more or less equal in numbers. But that would leave us with 2 roleplaying servers. Therefore it might even be possible Laurelin is removed and Belegaer retained, which would become mixed language roleplaying. An English roleplaying server still exists (Landroval). This seems the most balanced solution for me.

ps. I might be prejudged, because I have characters on Snowbourn


edit: I was overestimating the german population. The difference this makes is only for the roleplaying servers. Laurelin would become an universal language roleplaying server, instead of Belegaer. But in the end the players of those servers would probably be together anyway.

[Ardineck]

A couple of things to add before I head home for the night....

1) We begin with copies to Bullroarer on Monday, but only some of the features are available through copy. For example Kinships do not move in copy. Once we have worked out any kinks we will open the actual transfers.

2) For those concerned that your server will be last to move, you can still create new characters on the remaining worlds. So you can still reserve character name, Kinship names, and houses using a new character or one already on a remaining world if this is a concern for you. One house per account per world, means your items from the previous world will just be added to your placeholder house once your server is opened for transfer.

How will this work, then? We create the character and then RIGHT before we "move" the character, we delete the one that's the placeholder on the world we're moving to? Will we be able to move, then log on to the new server and delete before logging in to the "moved" main?

Perhaps more pressing is this:

If we are to move, how can we protect ourselves against items that might be lost, for whatever reason. If I'm told the server I'm on is closing, should I take screenshots of everything I own on that character or is no one going to care if I say, "xyz is missing" when the server moves are completed?

ALSO, what's safest? transferring characters first? I assume their vault space will transfer over, but what about shared storage? Should I empty everything in it into bags before doing so?

How about account wide unlocks? How can I make sure I have everything unlocked correctly when the server is closed and I'm moved?

How will shared items be handled? If it's bound to account, does that mean it will be able to be used on the new server, also bound to account or will there be a problem when an original character on that world tries to use a transfered item?

These things are very important. There might be an item or something no longer available that goes missing. I don't know what limitations exist for GMs and how the response time is going to be while servers are moving. To some degree I understand that there will be bigger fish to fry if I'm missing my "sword of awesome" in the transfer, but also, how long should we expect people to have to deal with that kind of back up?

You can tell us all you want it should work one way, but I'm more worried about the plans in place to deal with things when they inevitably go wrong, no matter how small it may seem to someone that isn't the player, who has spent months of their lives logged into this game.

[Beorthnoth]

Just looking at the 6 most active servers:
-Evernight (EN)
-Gwaihir (DE)
-Laurelin (EN-RP)
-Sirannon (FR)
-Snowbourn (EN) or Belegaer (DE-RP) with similar activity

I have the feeling the final server would be a german one. Because EN en DE servers have always been more or less equal in numbers. But that would leave us with 2 roleplaying servers. Therefore it might even be possible Laurelin is removed and Belegaer retained, which would become mixed language roleplaying. An English roleplaying server still exists (Landroval). This seems the most balanced solution for me.

ps. I might be prejudged, because I have characters on Snowbourn

Major flaw here. It's not possible to transfer from an EU server to Landroval. Anyone going there would need to start from scratch. Current logins suggest that, on European servers, English logins are 48%, German 38% - not exactly more or less equal

[Rhoewyn]

Um...err...ok, I know folks are fond of nitpicking the dev and producer comments...but this really stuck out to me:

"SHOULD" be capable of handling the current population load? I'd feel more confident if that was "WILL" handle the current population load.

She has to say "should" rather than "will" due to the fact people are so unpredictable. Case in point; we know BW is over popped to the point of inbound transfers shut off. We see a lot of complaints about the lag. What if 50% of the pop on BW decides to transfer to Lando within the 1st hour transfers are open? What if 10 percent of the other 3 also transfer. Guess what just happened to Lando? Its bigger now than BW was before this all started. Unlikely? Very. Mathematically possible? Definitely. Thus "should."

[Gwinthilnel]

Are any other blue names going to comment on this? I feel like V is being swamped with all these questions and no one else is chiming in to help answer them but her, and she's probably busy working on other things too. It's interesting how we have 30 pages of mostly speculation with a few facts thrown in.

[Talen_Gustaf]

snip

. . . There really isn't much that can be done about names and housing now. I will accept it as it is and go with the flow. Name-1 it may be for a while, and I will figure out the housing when I move.

Yes, we LotRO fans are good at beating a dead horse. Maartena's quote above is really the sum of it. I have read through ALL of the comments here, and many of them leading up to this. I currently have 60 characters on 7 US servers and 4 characters on 3 EU servers. Most are for farming TP, but I really like playing alts. I know that I will likely have many renames - especially amongst my Hobbit-folk. I may have double-digit numbers after some of them when the dust settles (Biilbo-89 perhaps ). There really isn't much I can do about that. Therefore, I will have to accept it. My kinhouse, with the three convenient houses nearby (me, wife and two kid's accounts) plus the nearby kinmates may not materialize on a new server. Again, I will figure it out when I move.

Ultimately, this is a rough transition for most of us, whether we become the emigre or the immigrant (I will be both). We all share a common love of the game and world, so let's try to help each other get through this. Welcome the immigrants, and if you are one, respect that the new home server may do things different than you are used to. There really isn't much we can do about names and housing now, but we can be respectful and helpful to others, regardless of who was "there first".

[ddave]

A possible strategy:

1. Create a name-placeholder-toon on your chosen destination server with the name of the toon being transferred.

2. Transfer the toon without deleting the placeholder-toon first. The transferred toon will get Name-1 and a free rename token.

3. Check to see everything transferred properly.

4. Once everything is in order delete the placeholder and quickly use the rename token.

[Trixie_Me]

Are any other blue names going to comment on this? I feel like V is being swamped with all these questions and no one else is chiming in to help answer them but her, and she's probably busy working on other things too. It's interesting how we have 30 pages of mostly speculation with a few facts thrown in.

Vyvyanne is the Executive Producer and probably the person ultimately responsible for guiding the ship. She is the most appropriate person to state what the immediate and future plans are for the game.