Transfer Timeline

 Transfer Timeline

Initial Panic: The date was January 10th, 2025. Severlin came onto the stream to inform the public that there was going to be a major transfer process. This was something different than what people thought was going to happen when they introduced the legendary servers back in June 21st, 2024. Everyone thought they were simply going to upgrade the current servers. Instead, they decided to announce brand new servers at a new data center. Instead of the servers holding up in New Jersey, they will now be located in Las Vegas and Rotterdam (something that we did not learn until Kehleyr mentioned it March 31st on the Official Discord). Not only that, but you had one last chance to transfer from the dark worlds before they wipe the data. What would everybody do as they wait for the date? 

  
"We got another hoarder with 1,800 decorations here." - Dwarf Movers 

Update 43: January 21st, 2025 came Update 43 Bullroarer with the new deed log, Moria revamped with new stable-master routes, appearance changes to the elf, and a long list of Quality of Life features including new tasks for old reputations. Too bad we never did get to see those visual updates to introductory instances. While the patch didn't come until February 27th, 2025, there was definitely excitement for all the little things that were left unchanged for a long time like the rate of Sarnur rare spawns were finally set to one hour. Unfortunately, some players were quick to forget what went into the patch. In the meantime, we received:

Region Confusion: When you have thousands of players who don't usually pay attention to details suddenly coming back, you get a bunch of angry customers trying to persuade the developers to do the impossible. One such problem that has been established from the very start is how you can't transfer a character between regions. Players who chose to be on the roleplaying server of Laurelin are now stuck transferring to a European server. Players who chose to play on Evernight simply because of the population are now in a tizzy of their new ping on the Orcrist server. Because of a decision made long ago by Codemasters to use the same identifiers as their American counterparts, almost everything would clash from characters to items if they transferred to an identical database.

Legendary Servers: Then there was a complication when players found out that they couldn't transfer off legendary servers. Despite the community warnings, players felt they should be able to get off the Mordor and Angmar servers even though they were already 64-bit servers. The developers didn't budge from their previous pattern of not allowing transfers until later when perhaps the server closes. One person was very adamant that Treebeard should be included as it too was a 32-bit server. Severlin did hint that the server would probably close early with its current low population. Eventually, the developers did offer free transfers off the one legendary server earlier than anticipated. They chose to disable the slow speed and increase the level cap directly from 115 to 130 to give people a chance to obtain their rewards before transferring.

 
"I honestly liked renaming my name from Hatty to Hatrick."

Transfer Nightmare: The first day was when those who held a subscription could reserve three names on the servers. But then came March 4th when thousands of players tried to all transfer at the same time. Some had multiple windows going hoping to increase their chances that something would happen. What really occurred was the transfer button only appearing for a full 10-minutes at a time until the transfer system could process everyone. That allowed enough to transfer for the next 8 hours. This repeated over and over as players began posting guides on how to discover when their data was being loaded in with the Lotro Point count at the bottom of the page or how to refresh the window to bypass the hourglass icon. Then the developers decided to go a different route...

  • March 7th, the servers opened. The developers switched to a maximum transfer limit from each server. This means Treebeard would almost be always be listed while others like Evernight would constantly be missing. This ran for about a week in which players were waiting up to 100 hours later. Those queued on Saturday were getting on Wednesday. The developers weren't sure if it was safe to play while people waited, and players were freaking out when they received a message they were banned whenever their characters were finally being processed. 
  • March 12th, Severlin posted that they had transferred 1 million characters. They increased the processing speed by an "inordinate amount" and fixed a problem on the Gladden server slowing down the process.
  • March 17th, the wait time was down to about 48 hours. Somewhere around this time is when reports were coming in for things going missing and the servers not being stable. Customer Service began going through tickets of missing currency in wallets, missing characters, and missing housing writs. 
  • March 21st, they initiated transfers only to the RP servers (as the main servers were overflowing) with reports of taking less than an hour. My transfer took a total of 20 seconds.

Kinship Leader: As players transferred, there was some confusion from the developers on how a kinship was supposed to transfer too. Cordovan stated multiple times that a kinship forms when a kinship leader logs in. Unfortunately, a bunch of characters were oddly kicked from the kinship. It seems that players who transferred before their leader were broken away regardless of when they logged in. This went to the extend that the kinship leader's own characters were kicked if they came before that character alphabetically. While it's easy enough to be invited back into the kinship, they would have lost their original join date. 

House Rush: Throughout this process, players on the servers were being frantic about not having a house. To keep things fair, they decided to keep the houses disabled until the majority were able to transfer. Unfortunately, some people found a couple houses available. The developers promptly kicked them out until the appropriate time beginning on March 31st. To disperse the crowds, they were supplying additional brokers in each starting area that had to be manually placed through some admin codes (explaining the 10-minute gap between the servers). They released the houses two at a time in alphabetical order, not by their premium status. Announcements were made globally on the server and one time Kehleyr had to tell the masses to turn around to access one broker. Unfortunately like before, all the special houses were sold out and even supplying additional neighborhoods for a total of 340 still wasn't enough months later.

  
"I'm just excited to be here." - Resolina 

Raid Woes: Although T1 of the Legacy of Morgoth raid was released with Update 43 on February 27th, 2025, there were a number of complaints by the players. The first problem is how some felt like they didn't have enough time to "practice" on Bullroarer before it was released and wanted an extension on the date for the Leading the Charge title. Well, they got their wish when the broken mechanics were preventing players from completing the raid. Orion began updating players in the Official Discord as changes were being made. T2 was first March 13th, then March 20th, and finally March 27th. T3 was changed to April 10th and then April 17th. Raiders were complaining that they were wasting their taken days off work to be the first ones to complete the raid each time it was postponed. Leading the Charge Deed was changed from April 30th to June 1st. Meanwhile, Severlin had been trying to pour more resources into the raid system so the number of instances would be able to hold all the players. 

Server Instability: After implementing houses, there began a new problem. Somewhere around the beginning of April, players began complaining of their characters "flying" and their pets getting confused on where to go. It seems that some load balancing changes might have triggered an old bug. In addition, players in the Ettenmoors were upset of the current performance on the servers. At a certain point, they even started restarts twice a week in request of the players until they were able to incorporate a fix in Update 44.2.1.This is when Severlin made multiple points:

  •  "We removed the 8x servers for now. The performance of the "heart" of Orcrist was showing issues, and the later 8x servers were not performant. This should help any lag on banks, or loading into new areas, or crossing boundaries on landscapes." Essentially Severlin was saying that the new set of servers they added were unstable. They were lowering it back to under than 80 servers.
  • "We changed the set up for the PvMP area to lock them on their own servers; so there will be static lines now where you will cross server boundaries and the server will have to move large groups back and forth, but PvMP people can fight away from those instead of the previous state where the server would be trying to balance things and thus moving people on the fly." Severlin has been asking players to post their /loc whenever they feel lag in an area so that they can identify where those invisible lines are in the landscape.
  • "We are looking at lag reports, we see some for PvMP, but also some reports in the raid. It looks like there are performance issues if the server tries to stick 4 raid groups on the same hardware; we are looking at load balance options."
  • "I think the engineering team have done an excellent job on server performance. The old server maximum of the 32-bit servers before any performance changes (and there have been many) looked to be around 1100 before the server suffered. The new servers are hitting 2200-2300 although we have some PvMP and raid challenges specifically. It's pretty incredible. That said, there are still collectively a group of active players on the current US 32 bit servers that wouldn't fit on Glamdring."
  • "There are some good questions here. Our server technology relies on one central server (What I call the "heart" of the server) that needs to coordinate between all other servers, and when you add too many server instances the traffic get too high for it to keep up. Yes, we are working on optimizations there but that is ultimately the limiting factor for how big any server can be."
  • "One of these optimizations causes the pet issue and makes the “flying” issue much more likely. Fortunately, the optimizations and extra hardware we added Wednesday means we can disable that particular change on Meridoc, Peregrin, and Glamdring until we can fix those two issues. Orcrist is large enough, however, that it needs that optimization; we had to make the hard decision to keep that technology on."

Overpopulation: Severlin comes out and states that the game servers are interconnected to one central server that limits the total amount of players at one time. While modern games can distribute and connect players dynamically, massively increasing the capacity of a single server just isn't possible for Lord of the Rings Online. This means that all they can do is open up new servers. The European server Grond opens April 9th since Orcrist was having more problems than Glamdring. Unfortunately, Sting opens May 20th and transfers from dark worlds shifted from March 12th to May 28th. Tensions rise as players jump between the server channels on the Official Discord to badmouth and humiliate each other. Cordovan had to institute a ban around the beginning of June for anyone still causing a ruckus about another server. It's just that players are stuck in a paradox where they refuse to leave the higher population that is irrefutably causing the problem. There were queues on the Orcrist server during prime time for the first month as people transferred and bought their houses. It is rather questionable whether the free rotating transfers between 64-bit servers would help. Because the developers can't allow people to infinitely transfer to and fro between servers, they set one-way routes on a rotating basis each week for 6 weeks.

Dark World Problem: So, did they ever fix that problem they had that prevented players to transfer their characters from old worlds to the new database? It doesn't look like it. Seems like anybody that still had a house attached to a character was ultimately corrupted when they transferred. Despite the default messaging, the company is not able to fix the problem. What you get is hundreds of angry players persistently begging and trying to persuade the company that there is a quick way to solve the issue. Unfortunately, the company wasn't able to incorporate one in time. Add this to the list of things they weren't able to correct in time. Until then, the least a player can do is look at their character in the roster. 

Update 44: It's funny that the game continued to be updated through the transfer debacle. April 8th, 2025 brought Update 44 Bullroarer with changes to Mirkwood instances, a new quest pack and 6-man instance, revamp to Lalia's Market, Favoured Reputation Standing for almost every reputation in the game, and a number of hidden features like new graphic auras.  That patch was released on April 23rd. There were a few other things that happened:

  
"Fred, are you seeing what I'm seeing?" - Resolina 

Festival Problems: MVP was working on adding missions to the Anniversary Event and quests for the new island Scenario made for the Midsummer Festival. The problem is that players wanted the new missions to count for both the festival wrapper and the mission wrapper. MVP obliged but failed to incorporate an operator that forced players to complete 10 quests and all the missions to fulfill the requirements. This had to be added in a game update much later in Update 44.2 causing an extension of the festival. Unfortunately, the Midsummer Festival had its own share of problems. According to Cordovan, there was a problem with the instance layer failing to reload certain elements. As an example, cats would disappear without ever coming back. Then there was the problem with players not being able to properly leave the island. Kehleyr from the Official Discord said that it was simply an oversight and implementing a dock-master with routes will require a game update. Because of these problems, Midsummer Festival was extended two weeks. Amusingly, players are now complaining that they don't have any bonus wrappers to complete after fulfilling the initial dozen made available.

  
"I'm running a little late!" - Midsummer Dockmaster 

Update 45: June 3rd, Bullroarer begins with Update 45. We already began getting sneak peaks May 16th for Hunter and Burglar revamps and May 21st when Orion talks about the new creep class and changes with Bludborn. Unfortunately, not a lot of players like the class changes. Either they are too superficial when removing the option to use mechanics in your specialization that existed for years or not transparent enough to see a better hunter that will be accepted in groups again. It doesn't help when OnnMacMahal didn't have the class available during the first phase of testing, hasn't adjusted the numbers, not all changes were implemented, and none of the traceries have been changed this far into the development process. There's still a lot of work to do if they plan to release it in July.

Closures: Through it all, the developers refused to acknowledge any closures of the old servers. They wanted to give the opportunity for the community to decide for themselves if moving over to a new location with new technology was worth the hassle. Then June 13th, the company finally announced it. Everything at the old data center must go. Instead of waiting until September to decide, the contract pushed up their schedule. All 32-bit servers will close August 31st. All dark worlds will be wiped August 31st. In a surprise twist, they also announced that the old forums will close August 31st. 

Kinship Escrow: Perhaps you forgot about the large number of players who lost their housing storage during the transfer process back in March. Well, they finally added the code in July 1st. Now when you select the shared storage option, all those lost items should appear in your shared house storage. Away Shall Fade finally retrieved a bunch of things from wallpaper to lootboxes that were in the previous house. Beware since performing such a transfer also pulls all your current items in premium house storage into shared house storage as well.