Downtime Notice: Thursday, July 17th 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT)

[morningfrost]

As European players, we really have it rough when it comes to the timing of maintenance. It's always right in the middle of our playable hours.
And now, with the separated servers, it almost feels like we're being left out or treated differently.
Honestly, it’s starting to feel a bit like discrimination. I just hope no one comes at me for saying this but if someone does, I can already guess they’re probably American. I see it coming a mile away.

As a matter of fact, I hope the downtime of Moonsea will be scheduled accordingly.

 

[Tiff]

They advise players to not rush to buy options, and that a free solutions will (probably) be available.

They could put these items on a hot sale at 99% off, such an easy and simple solution, that likely wont require any new coding or processes and should be executable flawlessly.

 

[liosliante]

Well I'm in EU and I understand that as a Boston based company they need to do whatever maintenance needs to be done during EST working hours as opposed to GMT/CEST. Surely you don't expect them do do their maintenance at 10/11PM at night their time when it's 3/4AM in Europe and we're all asleep?

The separated servers are the opposite of being left out IMHO - the practically untenable service we'd have to live with if we had to connect to Vegas is being eliminated at significant cost to stand up a server in the EU to cater specially to us which I'd never have expected at this age of the game. We should be grateful.

Hey Karadon,

I get where you're coming from, and I don’t expect the devs to pull night shifts to accommodate EU time zones that’s not realistic. My point wasn't that they should work in the middle of their night, but that from our side, the player experience during key hours is constantly impacted. It’s a pattern, not just a one-off inconvenience.

As for the EU servers, yes, I agree, it’s a big step, and I appreciate the effort. But let’s not pretend it completely solves things. The issue isn’t just latency anymore; it’s also the scheduling and the sense of being a lower priority. You can be grateful for progress and still point out that something feels unfair.

Also, it’s worth noting that calling out inequality or expressing frustration doesn’t mean someone’s ungrateful it just means they care enough to speak up. The game is important to a lot of us, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to be treated with equal consideration.

 

[Karadon]

As a matter of fact, I hope the downtime of Moonsea will be scheduled accordingly.

If the downtime of EU LotRO servers are different to the US LotRO ones now there's a chance Moonsea will be scheduled accordingly.
If LotROs EU servers are under maintenance at the same time as their US servers than Moonsea will have 0 chance.

Someone with LotRO server knowledge will have to weigh in here.....

 

[healertank]

It is gone. Earlier SSG said they would bring back the 32-bit worlds but that has changed.

to be fair.. they will reopen the servers after the 2 month transfer window on the 32 bit worlds to allow for transfers only for 2 years. After that 2 year period people just gotta start over.

 

[Karadon]

Hey Karadon,

I get where you're coming from, and I don’t expect the devs to pull night shifts to accommodate EU time zones that’s not realistic. My point wasn't that they should work in the middle of their night, but that from our side, the player experience during key hours is constantly impacted. It’s a pattern, not just a one-off inconvenience.

As for the EU servers, yes, I agree, it’s a big step, and I appreciate the effort. But let’s not pretend it completely solves things. The issue isn’t just latency anymore; it’s also the scheduling and the sense of being a lower priority. You can be grateful for progress and still point out that something feels unfair.

Also, it’s worth noting that calling out inequality or expressing frustration doesn’t mean someone’s ungrateful it just means they care enough to speak up. The game is important to a lot of us, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to be treated with equal consideration.

That's cool. I understand you now.
It's a common thing I see not just with this game but it can depend on where the main dev team for a game is working from. Unless its in the EU and not US or Japan, the EU is always on the back foot.

 

[Eoin-1]

If the downtime of EU LotRO servers are different to the US LotRO ones now there's a chance Moonsea will be scheduled accordingly.
If LotROs EU servers are under maintenance at the same time as their US servers than Moonsea will have 0 chance.

Someone with LotRO server knowledge will have to weigh in here.....

The issue is more with client patching than server side. Can't have a new/older client patch talking to older/newer server code. Well you could, but that amount engineering and QAing is way out of scope.

 

[TedSandyman]

BTC isn't the problem and stop pretending it is because you can't argue against the real problem.

If you want to have even a single copy of each named item you've gotten while playing you're talking many thousands of items.

I just spent 6 hours last night crunching gear into reaper shards and destroying any duplicates of gear, a lot of it Sharn and epic Sharn, even though I often run several characters that could us it. I also destroyed a lot of gear with old effects that don't exist anymore.

Even just having a voice and an epic voice for each of 20 characters is 40 slots taken up. 4 bags each is another 80 slots. 10 spell components is another 200 slots. 2 hireling contracts, stack of heal, stack of raise, 3 types of potions, another 140 slots eaten up.

Even just having leveling sets from each expansion for TRing for arcane, divine, melee and ranged is upwards of 300 pieces.

And if you're going to tell me that they way peopll should play is to just throw away all the named items they get even if they're mythic 4 and reaper, then I honestly have trouble believing the game you play is DDO and not Forum Troll.

EXACTLY.

I have over 20 BTC minor artifacts. And no matter what I can only wear one of them. Why keep them all, because this game is ABOUT TRing and when I TR into something that MIGHT need the artifact I don't want to have to farm/grind for it. And that is just artifacts. All the named item stuff and the fact that every now and then the devs like to turn old items into new epic or legendary versions, it makes it very hard to know what to throw away and what to keep. Even if it is BTA. There just becomes too much. Bank toons become a necessity.

Some of us don't really like to grind the same quest over and over. Our way around that is to keep things when we find them. So one person might find a wizard ring and throw it away thinking "I'm not a wizard. When I play one I will grind this quest until I get the ring." But others, like me, think "I have this ring now, I will keep it so I DON'T have to grind this quest in the future".

Some of you don't keep anything you cant immediately use. Some of you play up to level 34 and don't ever TR and don't need to worry too much about keeping a bunch of stuff for future lives. And that's fine too. Good for you.

But TRing is the very thing that sets this game apart from the others and TRing just naturally leads to keeping stuff. How much is too much? That is a hard question to answer. I

If you don't want to TR that is fine, you don't have to to enjoy the game. But don't come at the rest of us because we DO play the game the way it was designed to be played and since we ARE tring we feel the need to hold on to named items that might eventually be useful.

 

[TedSandyman]

Totally agree with you. A simple delay in the August 31 deadline till everything is fixed would avoid a lot of headaches to all players. Why is the simplest decisions are always the ones that are the hardest to take geeeezzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!

Why push back the deadline? If they plan on fixing the problem, they can just as easily open the worlds on schedule then help the people who are having issues later.

Trust me, I am angry about all of this too, but having a solution is my biggest concern. It doesn't have to be tied to the opening of the new servers.

 

[liosliante]

The issue is more with client patching than server side. Can't have a new/older client patch talking to older/newer server code. Well you could, but that amount engineering and QAing is way out of scope.

I don’t usually write long posts like this, and I’m not sure if I’m explaining things the right way, but I just wanted to share my thoughts.

I understand what Eoin said about the technical side it makes sense that you can’t patch clients and servers at different times. I’m not a dev or anything, so I can’t say how realistic it would be, but I get that it’s not as simple as just changing the schedule.

At the same time, I think what some of us in the EU are feeling is just... a bit of frustration. Even if the server is physically in Europe now (which is great!), the maintenance still hits right in the middle of our playable hours, and that makes it feel like we’re not really being considered.

I know there are limitations and that this probably isn’t easy to fix, but I think it’s okay to talk about how this affects us as players too not just from the tech side.

Anyway, sorry if this is messy or not the usual way of saying things. I just wanted to explain where I’m coming from.

 

[Igognito]

Honestly....+2 Character slots doesn't help much. An extra 10 or 20 character bank space would be better.

For what the Devs are thinking, even +1 Character slot is enough...
You can create near-unlimited only withdraw shared bank space with +1 slot.
We can save all our not BTC items to out Shared bank, but then it is going to be Withdraw only for a while...

The problems are:
1) The time and effort it takes to empty a Reincarnation cache
2) The BTC items we have accumulated fill an inventory. (My Reincarnation Cache is almost exclusively BTC items I have a bit more than 100 BTC items, and I only have 4 lives)
3) The combination of Favor Unlocked classes and the Reincarnation cache problem. I need to reincarnate before I transfer, and I need to Re-Reincarnate immediately after I transfer in order to have space to play...

 

[williambraveheart]

For what the Devs are thinking, even +1 Character slot is enough...
You can create near-unlimited only withdraw shared bank space with +1 slot.
We can save all our not BTC items to out Shared bank, but then it is going to be Withdraw only for a while...

The problems are:
1) The time and effort it takes to empty a Reincarnation cache
2) The BTC items we have accumulated fill an inventory. (My Reincarnation Cache is almost exclusively BTC items I have a bit more than 100 BTC items, and I only have 4 lives)
3) The combination of Favor Unlocked classes and the Reincarnation cache problem. I need to reincarnate before I transfer, and I need to Re-Reincarnate immediately after I transfer in order to have space to play...

yeah and after transfer of 32 toons i would spend weeks getting everything back to the right toons

 

[Summoner]

I am getting real tired of SSG.

 

[TrigganNighthawk]

I am getting real tired of SSG.

To be honest, SSG doesn't roll everything out perfect (That's true). But let's not forget that for the vast majority this MMO is really fun and free to play. I mean they even make their expansions available for DDO points and allow players to earn free money via favor farming. For that reason, I would never judge them too harshly. So many games only care about profit.

 

[Nola]

Inventory management has been one of the long standing issues with DDO. There is no account level search function, and even the individual character bank search is buggy in terms of level and item names. It's a bit silly that a 3rd party can develop an external inventory management tool that spans not only multiple characters, but also multiple accounts, but SSG can't/won't. It's not a solution, but having a dependable, in-game inventory search feature would make juggling of items less of a pain before and after transfer.

That being said, I've been playing since beta and have a ridiculous amount of gear because of all the reasons everyone has mentioned. I also admin that a lot of it was absolute garbage. Blindness Ward goggles of Remove Blindness was funny 10 years ago, but the jokes over. After ditching all that un-named and duplicate gear I've accumulated over 19+ years, I feel like I just left the dentist after a cleaning. It was a bit painful, and I still have to do it for 3 more accounts, but it feels good.

Thanks to SSG for the efforts. Like the game itself, it's not perfect, but whatever you're doing has kept me playing for this long, so as long as you don't completely nuke the servers, steal my money, or prevent me from obliterating kobolds, I'm okay.

 

[TedSandyman]

I am getting real tired of SSG.

I am getting really tired of MSG.

 

[Bobbryan2]

I am getting really tired of MSG.

MGS V was a masterpiece, tho

 

[TedSandyman]

Inventory management has been one of the long standing issues with DDO. There is no account level search function, and even the individual character bank search is buggy in terms of level and item names. It's a bit silly that a 3rd party can develop an external inventory management tool that spans not only multiple characters, but also multiple accounts, but SSG can't/won't. It's not a solution, but having a dependable, in-game inventory search feature would make juggling of items less of a pain before and after transfer.

That being said, I've been playing since beta and have a ridiculous amount of gear because of all the reasons everyone has mentioned. I also admin that a lot of it was absolute garbage. Blindness Ward goggles of Remove Blindness was funny 10 years ago, but the jokes over. After ditching all that un-named and duplicate gear I've accumulated over 19+ years, I feel like I just left the dentist after a cleaning. It was a bit painful, and I still have to do it for 3 more accounts, but it feels good.

Thanks to SSG for the efforts. Like the game itself, it's not perfect, but whatever you're doing has kept me playing for this long, so as long as you don't completely nuke the servers, steal my money, or prevent me from obliterating kobolds, I'm okay.

They need to make a cruncher, like the stone of change, where you put named items. It destroys the item but adds the item and it's attributes to a list. This list is account wide. You can later go back to that stone, ask for one of the items on the list and the stone will make a new one.

Make that list downloadable and you have a lot of what you are asking for.

To keep track of BTA and BTC, you could also keep the name of the toon who crunched the item. So if you request a BTA item, it gets created, if you request a BTC item it checks your name against the stored name before creating the item.

I don't think this would be hard to implement. It might be a source of duplication, but not if it is coded and tested thoroughly.

 

[Jeanclaud]

They need to make a cruncher, like the stone of change, where you put named items. It destroys the item but adds the item and it's attributes to a list. This list is account wide. You can later go back to that stone, ask for one of the items on the list and the stone will make a new one.

Make that list downloadable and you have a lot of what you are asking for.

To keep track of BTA and BTC, you could also keep the name of the toon who crunched the item. So if you request a BTA item, it gets created, if you request a BTC item it checks your name against the stored name before creating the item.

I don't think this would be hard to implement. It might be a source of duplication, but not if it is coded and tested thoroughly.

15 or so years ago they had this on at least a limited scale, i think i still have one in a bag somewhere. Essence of the helm of the red dragon or something like it. Throw it in a stone of change iirc and poof, the helm is there

 

[bsrasmus]

yeah and after transfer of 32 toons i would spend weeks getting everything back to the right toons

SSG has a right to improve their own game, even if it negatively impacts your experience of the game.