Game Services and Helm's Deep Update

[Faythefulle]

Thanks for the info, Sapience. After surviving the weather issues here, I appreciate the hard work your team did to get everything up & running today at all. I am anxious to see HD go live, because the beta was a blast! However, I would much rather have this short delay so everything will be stable and ready to go for the expansion. Keep up the great work! Forth Eorlingas!

[Arched]

Sapience - is there something wrong with Dwarrowdelf?

[Amariel28]

EXACTLY!

PS: why am i now craving cheesecake?

It wasn't me!!

[GIR-dog]

I am a happy wargie camper. Game servers back up, HD still due this week, and I can eat some freeps tonight in the moors.

(Also, after the storms my family and friends are all safe. My heart goes out to those who lost property and loved ones last night.)

[Steamweaver]

Except that the servers are in Boston and the most they had last night was some light wind and rain...

Our power was shut down for 11 days once because of "wind and rain." Besides, I am not sure the trouble originated in Boston ...

[Avasa]

All I can say is thanks to the team at Turbine... It's been a long day for you all, I'm guessing.
Nature's not something we can control, and although I don't know how bad the storm hit Turbine HQ itself, if at all, thanks to the Turbine team for being there and getting the game working again during a natural crisis.
To those who want HD now... Please, let the people at Turbine have some sleep and regroup first.

Thanks for the information Sapience, O' Harbringer of 'Soon'.

[Bel-Astarte]

Except that the servers are in Boston and the most they had last night was some light wind and rain...

The worst part about this is that it's almost a guarantee that there will be problems at launch. There are ALWAYS problems at launch and the "scheduled downtime" is almost always extended.

The datacenter may or may not be.

Launches often do not go as smoothly as anyone wishes, it's true. But I doubt anyone gnashing their teeth over this delay want it to go any smoother than the Turbine folks do.

Take a breath. Enjoy the double XP boost a couple days longer, and I'll see you in Edoras Wednesday.

*salute*

[Disaac]

Guys please, no name calling (in either direction!). People are upset, we understand that. There was an issue, we did everything we could to get all of our services restored. Not just LOTRO, but all of our services across all of our titles. Now that they're all up and available, we considered some of the things we heard frequently during the downtime.

• You wanted more time to get in your last minute per-orders
• You wanted more time to turn in your Bounder's Tokens.
• You wanted more time to get your characters to 85 with the 100% XP boost.

Now you have the opportunity to do all of that and you'll still get Helm's Deep this week.

I cannot help but giggle a little. Seriously? An extra two days? You gave us enough time already. You knew people wanted the HD xpac badly, more than bounders tokens, and im willing to bet once people played the HD content they'd forget bounders tokens in a whole despite my past opinions. I've been waiting for this xpac since i started playing the game, ill wait another two days. Really though, get it together guys. I love lotro, i love turbine, but theres always a delay, and understandably, this wasnt completely your fault. Hopefully we get more goodies than extra time for bounders tokens/xp boost.
Excuse anything taken offensively though..as other people are also outraged im a little upset myself, but atleast we get it this week not next week or month or year.

[JasonEvan]

I understand having issues and thanks for the heads up. I for one will not be happy if the launch on the 20th isn't fairly smooth and relatively bug free. It's one thing to have to wait, but if you guys pushed this thing out the door before it was ready, that is another thing entirely. I will wait and see. You will also get a HUGE thank you if it is indeed ready for consumption. I am not one to criticize but not offer kudos where kudos are due. I've been down this road before though and I am leery of the situation after a delay.

Do we get a HARD release time? Is it going to be one of those situations where the game goes up at 9PM PST after waiting all day only to find we can't log in? What time is this coming out on the 20th so we aren't waiting around for it all day?

[GrorFoebane]

Anybody else notice that the full moon occurred yesterday, November 17, at 10:16 A.M. ET? Quite the coincidence

Sapience, how about a full moon lottery?

[Stephen1981]

the way i see it if you don't use facebook or twitter for updates when forums are down tough luck

[Afaren]

Still Having lots of issues on the Riddermark server. Most of my characters can't log in and those that do crash within minutes or when mapping or crossing to a different area. This issue seem to be affecting most player on the server. Is this currently being look at by Turbine or are they under the impression that the servers are fixed and working properly?

[Erlindur]

AS we've mentioned several times in the past, when specific systems are unavailable we cannot log into the forums. YOU can, we cannot. This leaves us with 1 option. Social Media. In fact for the majority of this outage the forums were not available to anyone. So any post there would have been viewed by exactly 0 people.

While I fully understand the security reasons of why you only moderate the forum from internal secure IPs, I feel the need to make a simple suggestion here. Just create a simple account, with limited (or none) moderation permissions but with a blue name (so that we know that it is official). Use that only to make announcements from everywhere, as a simple user. Even if it is hacked, the amount of damage it can be done by it, it will be very limited till you manage to take back full control of it.

What happened here today looks bad.

[BabyJeli]

Thank you for the update and the hard work. Just an FYI, some problems still persist. A character I haven not been able to access most of the day was briefly accessible before I was disconnected and now will not load.

This is going on with mine too. I can log in five of my seven, and the two that are bugged? My 85's! I can't log them in

[Veleje]

All LOTRO Game Worlds and Websites are now available. .

This is not true for Melandor server. I can't play. If i do get log in every so offetn which is frustrating on its own, i get kicked out in few minutes.
I saw on twitter someone else complained about Melendor. I'm disapointed you guys are telling everything is ok when it is not.

Disapointed also that because of one power failure i cant play for two days.

[airsoftg36c]

Sapience, Riddermark is experiencing severe lag/disconnection issues. I've tried to login at various times during the day, I'm able to play for close to 30 seconds, then I get stuck for 3-4 minutes and lose connection. From what GLFF tells me, it's happening server wide. Can you look into that for us?

[zagreb000]

Isn't it a bit convenient that there is a power outage the exact same day HD is supposed to launch... And this is US not some third world country like Germany or France... Shame on you Turbine... Cutting the power to a large area just for your personal benefit...

And i will bet anything that it was Sapience idea..

[Tobias_R]

Hi,

Pretty good news but if it is not to much to ask, could you please delay HD until thursday 17:48 GMT instead? This would give me the opportunity to run with the herd AND turn in all the tokens i will get until 17:47! It is a win/win really and you will keep one happy vip-customer. I'm pretty sure everyone else will be fine with this because the universe revolves around me after all.

If a blue-name could confirm you change the launch-plan ASAP i would even take a couple of days off to enjoy the new content without work-disturbance.

Oh, almost forgot: how many TP's do i get from not being able to play for 16 hours?

Yours sincerely
/T

[Brodrick]

AS we've mentioned several times in the past, when specific systems are unavailable we cannot log into the forums. YOU can, we cannot. This leaves us with 1 option. Social Media. In fact for the majority of this outage the forums were not available to anyone. So any post there would have been viewed by exactly 0 people.

The forums have been up for at least 10 hours. RockX posted on the forums 3 hours ago. So is 3 hours with zero info on the OFFICIAL forum acceptable?

[Arched]

that would be Dwarrowdelf, Melandor and Riddermark then - any others?

[Aktuo.]

For all the people who needed more time to lvl their alts, hand in the tokens and get the pre-purchase stuff, this is great.

For all of us who had prepared everything in good time, and was just waiting for the expansion, what this gives us is 2 more days of nothing to do in lotro. Will there be no compensation that could benefit everyone? some mithril coins? turbine points or anything like that?

[k3nn3th]

Guys please, no name calling (in either direction!). People are upset, we understand that. There was an issue, we did everything we could to get all of our services restored. Not just LOTRO, but all of our services across all of our titles. Now that they're all up and available, we considered some of the things we heard frequently during the downtime.

• You wanted more time to get in your last minute per-orders
• You wanted more time to turn in your Bounder's Tokens.
• You wanted more time to get your characters to 85 with the 100% XP boost.

Now you have the opportunity to do all of that and you'll still get Helm's Deep this week.

I am glad for your consumers and for your employees (and employers) that your stuff is all back up and running.

But can we please not point fingers towards the players?

• Turbine's services went offline.
• Turbine (and friends) did the necessary fixes.
• Turbine (and friends) didn't fix it all in time to launch Helm's Deep on the release-date-day or in time for players to pre-order/cash in Bounder's Tokens/grab that extra XP.

Everyone expected that this morning, time to pre-order was over, time to turn in bounties was over, extra xp was over.
Weather (or whatever) made it so that we lost some time last night - "the players" (who have no say in what we are going to get or when) would collectively probably prefer something along the lines of

• Pre-order pricing and the extras included available until Wed Nov 20th
• Bounder's Tokens remain as they currently exist until Wed Nov 20th
• Extra XP until Wed Nov 20th

+ Helm's Deep launches Mon Nov 18th.

Of the four things here, the launch of the expansion is far and away the most important to the majority... isn't that who Turbine is here to cater for?

Turbine/WB/Sapience and the Devs are the ones who wanted/need "more time", not the playerbase.
Obviously, we wanted no issues, to get our #### done last night (or be able to finish it up after launch) and to have HD launch hours ago.

THAT is what we wanted.

[Stephen1981]

The forums have been up for at least 10 hours. RockX posted on the forums 3 hours ago. So is 3 hours with zero info on the OFFICIAL forum acceptable?

they were not up for about 7 hours last night though and i think that is what sapience is saying

[kidnova78]

Give Turbine a break here... geez. They do their absolute best to give us 100% up-time, but it's impossible to do. You can't control mother nature and until they make servers that don't need a power source things like this will happen from time to time. They do a great job at communicating and they usually throw in an extra perk to VIP's for downtime. How many other companies do either of those things, much less both?

While I agree that the power outage was probably not within Turbine's control, I still haven't seen anything confirming that mother nature had anything to do with it. Anyways, 2 days isn't long and I'd rather they take their time and make sure everything is stable before moving ahead with the update, even if it needs to be pushed back to next week.

[rodarin]

Guys please, no name calling (in either direction!). People are upset, we understand that. There was an issue, we did everything we could to get all of our services restored. Not just LOTRO, but all of our services across all of our titles. Now that they're all up and available, we considered some of the things we heard frequently during the downtime.

• You wanted more time to get in your last minute per-orders
• You wanted more time to turn in your Bounder's Tokens.
• You wanted more time to get your characters to 85 with the 100% XP boost.

Now you have the opportunity to do all of that and you'll still get Helm's Deep this week.

Umm I only have read one of those things, and that was only because the servers went offline mid day yesterday. had that not happened none of this would be necessary.

Now people can cite all the stuff they want, 'act of God' 'mother nature', whatever. facts are this happens a lot, as in every time. How many server issues have there been? 10-12? The excuses ran out a long time ago on this sort of thing. But the defenders here show there are still enough people here who believe it.

When you have an actual DEADLINE people take heed, to come in and use these three excuses as a reason is really poor. Players would have been more than ready had the game run as expected.

In the end it doesnt really matter, it just delays the inevitable, which is this expansion that was the one everyone has looked to to 'save' Lotro is going to be the worst one yet. (I dont count Mirkwood because we all know what that was).

This whole fiasco is somehow poetic in that it sort of foreshadows everything as well as puts it into a nice neat package of reference.

Now with all this being said how about YOU also utilize these two days. If it is released with a ton of bugs and broken content then that puts it squarely back onto you guys. But really who are we kidding at this point.