SSG provides Update LotRO's 64-Bit Transfers As The Queue Continues To Grow; Spring Festival Still On Track For This Week

The Lord of the Rings Online's transfer queues have only grown since they first opened last week, and this morning the team has provided some more insight into where things stand if you're one of the many still waiting on that transfer confirmation email to come through.

When transfers opened up on Tuesday of last week, the initial rush saw SSG continually enable and disable transfers to work on optimizations to the transfer queue to meet the demand. This meant that, for long stretches especially on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, many players never even had the chance to actually initiate a transfer in the first place. 

This changed on Friday when SSG opened the transfer wizard and have effectively left it open over the weekend, allowing players to queue up their character transfers - at least the ones lucky to make it past the dreaded hourglass or empty world list. However, the team did note then that transfers were expected to take at least 48 hours to complete at that point, and that it could be longer. 

This morning as the SSG returned from what was very likely a stressful weekend, we got an update on where the transfer queue was at. Good news is that it's moving. Bad news is it seems like that 48 hour window might have been a best-case scenario estimate, as community manager Cordovan confirmed in Discord today that the server transfer queue had only just started to get to transfers that were kicked off on  Saturday morning Eastern Time. This confirmed a previous post made on Saturday on the official Forums, where Cord told those who are only just entering the queue to prepare for longer than 48 hours. 

Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini estimated on Discord that the team was processing "over 100K characters" but even if that number isn't entirely accurate, the number is "high."

"My guess is right now we are processing over 100K characters? But I might be misreading even the napkin math data so take that with a grain of salt. But yea the number is high."

For those who have been worried about transfering a Kinship over, especially as the process to ensure a Kinship is properly established requires the Kin leader to successfully transfer over and then log in first, there seems to be some issues that are hit or miss. Players have reported Kinships being disbanded on their initial server if a transfer failed, while others have reported being booted from Kinships even when properly following LotRO's guidance on log-in order. 

For my part, this was my biggest concern, and this morning was able to log in with my 17 (going on 18) year old Kinship intact on Glamdring. But just be aware that your mileage might vary right now. 

One aspect that concerned me was if the Kinship transfer didn't work as advertised, the historical data of our memebers being lost to time, especially Join Dates. Cord confirmed on the Forums that if someone was booted from the Kinship as a result of the transfer, there is no way for the team to recover the initial join date of a Kin. This looks to have something to do with the transfer timing of a Kinship member versus the Kinship leader, with players reporting being booted from Kinships even if the Kin leader was the first to log in on the new server because the members transferred their characters first.

For Standing Stone Games' part, the team has been pretty responsive, even through the weekend. Ciccolini apologized to players on Saturday, stating that he initially underestimated the demand for transfers, and that the time to fully clear the queue "will be very long." But, understandably, information has been flying fast, especially on Discord where much of the chatter seems to be happening as players continue to try to enter the transfer queue, seek clarification on questions and concerns they are having, or simply to share excellent memes to keep spirits high.

This is a double edged sword for SSG, though. On one hand high server transfer volume could mean a raptive player base who is eager to jump into LotRO on a server that, at least on paper, should be rid of the nagging lag and rubberbanding that has plagued the game. On the other hand, the high amount of uncertainty, the long transfer queues, and just overall issues with the process could drive players, especially those who came back to try these new servers, away from the MMO. There is also the looming Update 43.1 downtime this week, which Cord has stated the team "should" be able to simply pause the queues to ensure no one's transfer gets canceled or cleared out by a server restarting - but even that statement has a certain amount of uncertainty around it to cause some to worry. 

In the meantime, for those who are playing on the new 64-bit servers, housing is still disabled with no re-enable date in sight. This was done to try to alleviate some of the rush to transfer as the land rush for housing in LotRO was apparently a big driver for players to initiate transferring right away. Personally, as someone who owned both a Premium house and a Premium Kinship house, I understand this - I want my island house in Belfalas for my Kinship and my beautiful Rohirrim house for my High Elf, but my reason for transferring was to leave the lag behind, and I do wonder how many long-time players are like me in that respect. Either way, be prepared to leave quite a bit of furniture in housing escrow on the new servers for the time being. 

The Spring Festival is also slated to kick off this week, and as of now that looks to still be on track, as well as the Update 43.1 patch this Wednesday. Additionally, the Tier 2 and Tier 3 release of the Temple of Utug-bur has been moved, with Tier 2 launching on March 20th, while Tier 3 will kick off a week later on March 27th.