The Ringwraiths on Angmar and Mordor gained a new power recently, as the wraiths will start banishing players if fights on LotRO's new legendary servers get too crowded.
The Veil of the Nine event on The Lord of the Rings Online's new Legendary Servers, Angmar and Mordor, sees Nazgul and lesser Wraiths pop up periodically while players are adventuring around Middle-earth. While the lesser Wraiths have been the target of balancing passes and tweaks in recent weeks, Standing Stone Games announced on the forums last that the larger world-event scale Nazgul fights will see players banished from the battle in order to help server load.
Via the forums post, developer Vastin mentions that while the new 64-bit servers are "performing very well," when large-scale Nazgul fights occur during peak hours, "300+ players in a small area will still tend to stress" the new servers.
As a result, if a battle is becoming too crowded, players will be banished away from the fight by the Nazgul, though if the Ringwraith is defeated, those who were banished will still get credit for the win.
"Once the player count in its immediate vicinity exceeds ~50 players, the Nazgul will begin banishing nearby players, this is mainly to help maintain performance, as well as keeping the fight challenging," developer Vastin says on the forums post.
The developers also caution against returning to the fight if you've been banished, or having a Fellowship member who wasn't banished summon you to the battle, unless players drop out of the fight. Vastin states that the mechanics of the fight are meant to cause this to happen naturally, so players should be able to filter in and out of the battle. However, crowding the battle could result in your ability to defeat the Ringwraith to drop.
It should be noted that the Ringbearers who are present at the battle cannot be banished, which is a nice clarification considering these large world-event Nazgul are harder to defeat if a Ringbearer isn't present.
