In his latest +Cord of the Rings, LotRO's community manager Jerry "Cordovan" Snook hosted a Q&A with players, he addressed, albeit still with the vagueness many customers are upset about, the ongoing problems with the game servers.
Cordovan started off the stream addressing the elephant in the room off the top (after showing off his incredibly cute kitty, Ms Elizabeth Bennet). While Cordovan didn't say anything really new about what is causing the problem, other than the team is investigating issues at the data center.
After bringing all the game worlds down on Wednesday, the team has reopened the worlds yesterday evening. Cordovan mentions that the team is "not out of the woods yet," explaining that the team has made "significant progress" in the past few days.
Unfortunately, Cord states that he isn't able to give any real details as to what exactly is causing the issues with the data center.
" What I cannot do, is really give you a lot of information about what caused the issues we were having at the data center. So I appreciate that that is sort of the big question on many of your minds, and the one question I'm not really able to answer here today."
Cordovan reiterated what LotRO's Twitter has been broadcasting since the outages began in earnest a week ago: that they have been having issues with the "data center and related environments." He mentioned that the team is looking to make sure the game worlds are stable throughout the weekend, though the team is already thinking about ways to compensate customers who have been dealing with this downtime, especially subscribers who have paid for it. Cord mentions that he hopes to have more info on this early next week, and acknowledges that he knows the teamhas been vague as to what they are saying right now, and that the downtime has been rough for everyone.
"I know that it's been a rough week for a lot of our LotRO players, as well as us. I don't want to do any kind of 'poor me' or 'pity me,' or anything like that - we know that it has sucked for you. And we are working very hard to try to get this corrected. Hopefully we will be able to get this corrected and get this behind us in the coming days. I do think we're going to give it the weekend before we do a lot of formal announcing of sort of post mortem stuff."
One of the main takeaways from the Q&A is Cord's reiteration that the issues are server-related and not the result of any sort of data breach. Additionally the next update, 27.2 is being pushed back, roughly targeting next week, depending on when server stability permits. He mentions that it could even be pushed to the following week, stating it's "basically ready to go." Cordovan also addressed the Midsummer Festival, reiterating that the team has extended the event through August 3rd. He's also hoping to see world chat and world character transfers in the near future.
Again, nothing really new overall, but it does at least give some insight what the developers are thinking and communicates something directly to consumers, providing something of a roadmap as to when they can start to expect more information from the studio as to the fallout of the outages.
