LOTRO: Book 14 goes live today!

[Tanith]

We've still got about an hour before the servers come back up, but the latest content update for Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar will soon be complete. "Book 14: The Ring-forges of Eregion" will continue the epic storyline of the game, taking the player to the very forges where the legendary Rings of Power were first created. There will be new quests to undertake, new treasures to win, and of course new enemies to battle.

There will also be a number of new features added with this latest update, such as:

• As a prelude to the upcoming Mines of Moria expansion, we will be helping the Fellowship of the Ring as it prepares to leave Rivendell.
• Wargs, spiders, and orcs of the Ettenmoors have several new emotes to express themselves with, when swords and fangs just don't seem to get the message across.
• Along with some new dye colors (burgundy, orange, and my favorite--gray), we will have a "dye preview window" so we can see how dyed armor will look before applying it.
• Auto-attack will now be disabled if the creature you are attacking is in a state that should not be broken, such as a root or stun.
• There have been fixes to skills for all classes.
• In the Ettenmoors, "diminishing returns" has been introduced for a number of skills.
• Loot has been upgraded across the board.

There have also been fixes to various NPC and landscape issues, and some quest bugs have been resolved. For a full list of changes, you can read them here:

Release Notes Book 14 Official - LOTRO Lorebook

Tanith

EDIT: That was fast, it's live now! Get patching, people!

[Tanith]

Update: Several of the servers, including Brandywine, Silverlode, and Nimrodel, are reporting problems this evening such as rubberbanding, inability to access the vendors or bank, and various crashes. When I logged off from MTT's home server Windfola earlier, no one had been reporting any issues, but I'll pop back on to see.

Tanith

[Tanith]

Further updates: Several of the servers, now including Windfola, are continuing to experience a wide variety of problems ranging from rubberbanding, AH errors, and landscape strangeness to entire raids going link dead in the Ettenmoors and rented horses inexplicably plunging off of cliffs. Turbine continues to investigate the problem; in the meantime, I have my own idea of what is behind this:



Somebody's getting a little jealous of another game stealing his thunder.

Tanith

[Tanith]

Update to the updates: I was just minding my own business in the Shire AH when a large orange message appeared and told me it was time for emergency maintenence, and to Get Offline NOW.

So I Got. Hopefully this means they've found a solution to the problem and are fixing it...but if I lost that stack of Dwarf-Iron Ingots I was detaching from an unsold auction, I'm going to be more pissed than Big Red up there.

Tanith

[Tanith]

Although several of the servers were taken offline for emergency maintenence last night, problems are still being reported this morning, though I haven't seen any Windfola reports yet. As of right now most of the problems (rubberbanding, loading screens hanging, etc.) seem to be coming from Elendilmir, with a few coming from Vilya.

We'll keep an eye on things and post updates as new info comes in.

Tanith

[Tanith]

Afternoon update:

Windfola was indeed behaving as badly as some of the other servers this morning--rubberbanding, invisible walls, nonfunctioning AH, and so forth. I stuck to some rather safe activities such as deeding rather than risk losing something expensive in the b0rked mail system.

This afternoon all servers are offline until 5PM EST, while they work on resolving all this. We don't know what the cause is, but speculation runs the gamut from memory leaks to somebody forgetting to feed the chinchillas that run the servers. We will post further updates as we learn more about Book 14---"The Patch from Hell".

Tanith

[Tanith]

Evening update:

Game was back up. Game is now back down ("We gotta do emergency maintenence! GIT!!!"), and so are the forums, so I really can't learn much about what's going on. But people were reporting the same problems again on multiple servers.

My guess is that the forum issue is being caused by everybody running there at once to post/read about all this.



Folks are getting a wee bit excited.

Tanith

[Tanith]

Late night update:

Well, this statement from Turbine says it all:

We are currently investigating performance issues in-game, such as rubber banding, auction house, mail, and chat performance. Please be advised that the In-game support team may not be able to respond to tickets regarding performance issues due to high call volume to allow the GMs to assist users with other potential game issues. We thank you for your patience, and will bring more information as it is available.

Yep, it's happening again. I noticed the rubberbanding most in Forochel, where I was forced to give up on an exploration deed because of it. This has got to be a nightmare for the development team, fortunately the majority of players are being patient and even humorous about the continuing crisis in digital Middle Earth.

Tanith

EDIT: The servers will be offline overnight:

The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Saturday, July 26th from 12:30 AM - 7:30 AM Eastern (-4 GMT) for a hotfix. Roheryn will not be available during the downtime. Thanks for your patience, and we'll see you back in the game soon!

Let's hope that does it!

[Tanith]

Saturday afternoon update:

Everything was back online and running more or less smoothly this morning, but this afternoon reports are trickling in from Brandywine, Silverlode, and Firefoot of the same issues happening once again. I will check on Windfola later (if possible) to see if things have deteriorated. Right now, I only have time to post this quick update. More news later.

Tanith