Lord of the Rings Online Provides a Coupon Code As Thank You Gift, VIP Sub Time Compensation News Coming Soon

In a recent forum post from the community manager Cordovan on the Lord of the Rings Online website, a “Thank You Coupon” is available for players affected by the downtime and additional troubles that gamers have experienced over the past couple weeks. The coupon comes along with an apology for the downtime and points to issues with the data center and other environments affecting the playability of LOTRO.

As we have reported recently, and for those that don’t know, Lord of the Rings Online has had some stability troubles as of late. Some issues are ongoing, and in way of an apology, a Coupon Code of THANKYOUGIFT, redeemable in the LOTRO Store, was provided which will reward players for their patience. The rewards are listed as:

• Skill and Slayer Deed Boost x5
• Enhanced XP Supply x5
• +5000 Enhanced Reputation Supply
• +2000 Virtue Acceleration Tome

The rewards will be redeemable throughout August 31^st. While players were barred from responding to the forum post, in a corresponding tweet that pointed back to the aforementioned apology thread was lambasted heavily. Few if any responses were positive of the, largely consumable, rewards provided, and others just felt cheated out of being able to play the game as issues persist, and some players are still having trouble logging in.

Rob Ciccolini, LotRO's executive producer took to the forums to also express his own apology to the players, giving a little more insight as well as to why the problem has persisted for as long as it has.

"In the last week, as our players are aware, we have experienced ongoing outages due to environmental and infrastructure challenges. The cause was outside the scope of code and bugs, and solving these issues required (and requires) substantial restructuring of our server infrastructure. We have completed the first wave of those changes, and will continue to work on and hone these improvements in the coming weeks to make the experience better for our players.

I wanted to personally apologize for these outages. As a gamer myself, I understand how frustrating it is. We are planning on giving our VIP players compensation for lost VIP time, and the teams have put together an in-game care package as an apology and to help players catch up on lost progress."

The reaction from players on Twitter seems mixed, with many supporting and thanking the studio for their work, while others are still waiting on a concrete response from the team as to exactly what is going on. Many players are also expressing their displeasure with the nature of the thank you give, as well as the  fact that even now the in-game chat system is still mostly disabled, removing a large part of the social element from The Lord of the Rings Online. 

We'll keep an eye on the situation as it continues to progress and update our reporting accordingly as new information becomes available.