Notice Served: Three Months To Quit

It wasn't like I had plans to move anywhere. I was quite happy where I was. Then one day, out of the blue, the eviction notice comes through the door...

That's what it felt like, when Standing Stone decided they couldn't afford the upkeep on the old 32-bit servers and told everyone still hanging around there they had three months to pack up and leave. And for once, I didn't waste any time doing as I was told. I was gone in less than ten minutes.

That was the biggest surprise of the lot, really, the speed of it. And the efficiency. Two words rarely seen in any sentence that also contains the name Standing Stone Games, unless that sentence also includes the phrase "lack of".

I had been vaguely following the long-running saga of Lord of the Rings Online's transition from 32 to 64 so I was aware the worst of it was over but I still wasn't prepared for the swiftness of the operation. For a start, it only took me a couple of minutes to log in, which has to be some kind of record. I had patched up quite recently but in the past that's not always made a huge difference. This time it only took about twice as long to get to character select as it would in any other game.

Once I was there I was expecting to have to go look up how the whole move-to-another server thing works but no, it was all there in front of me in easy-to-read form. I just had to click a button and the launcher walked me through the whole thing.

I didn't think I had any other characters than the five on the EU-RP server Laurelin but it turned out I had one other - a Level 7 Hobbit Hunter named Juniperry on another EU server by the name of Withywindle. I didn't remember much (Or anything.) about her. Not surprising, considering I last saw her fifteen years ago!

The tool tip handily tells you when all your characters last logged in and Juniperry hasn't been played since November 2010. LotRO, very annoyingly, doesn't have a command to tell you the date a character was created. The best it can offer is how many hours you've played them for and when you last logged them in. 

The game launched in 2007 and I think it was at least a couple of years before Mrs Bhagpuss and I got around to playing it, so Juniperry is one of my older characters for sure. I wish I knew why I created her on a different server. I suspect it might have been back when being on the RP server was getting on my nerves but just before it became so infuriating I couldn't stick it any more. 

Back then, servers in almost all MMORPGs really were siloed, not like later when megaservers, phasing, clusters, instances and similar gimmicks made the separation mostly notional. I'd long been in the habit of creating a new character on different server, whenever I wanted to get away from some annoying person or just be assured of some peace and quiet, so I imagine that's how Juniperry got her start.

Just to add a further element of confusion, the confirmation emails I received from SSG aren't identical. I got separate emails for the two outgoing servers. The one for Laurelin lists the five characters on that server by name and includes the line "Account data transferred successfully for subscription EU subscription 06/20/2011", which would seem to suggest all my regular characters are actually newer than Juniperry, something I'm sure isn't true. 

The email for Withywindle doesn't mention an account date at all. Instead it just refers to the date of transfer: "Your World Transfer is complete! Below is the information for your transfer on 2025-06-13 12:52:14". What that all means is anyone's guess. 

For the big move, I did think about keeping Juniperry separated from the rest of my characters and moving her to a non-RP 64-bit server but in the end I decided it was so unlikely I'd play LotRO often enough in the furure for it to matter, so she might as well go live with all the others. I also decided that, for all its past faults, I probably would rather stay on the RP realm, which is at least slightly better-mannered these days. No-one's called me out for not roleplaying in a long while and I note the official SSG description of the server strongly warns that RP is neither enforced nor enforceable, the clear implication being that the roleplayers need to suck it up and play nice when they don't get their own way, just as much as the rest of us.

With that decided, I moved all of them to the new 64-bit RP world, Meriadoc. I have to say that, had I been choosing a server without all the other baggage, I wouldn't have picked one named after a really annoying Hobbit but what can you do? At least it wasn't Samwise.

The move operation itself only took a few moments but then the confirmation screen came up to warn me that my account would be temporarily uavalable while the data was being processed. I knew the move wasn't likely to take days as it had done at the beginning of the operation but I assumed it would mean I'd at least have to wait until the next day to log in and check out my new home.

Nope. The notice also said they'd email me when it was all done and it felt as though that email arrived almost immediately. It was that quick. 

It seemed like I probably should log in and see that everything had worked and naturally I picked Juniperry to be the scout. She is a Hunter, after all. 

She was standing on the road in Michel Delving in the pouring rain. Honestly, Hobbits have no sense. I went through her bags to see what she'd got and found that at Level Seven she'd already managed to fill four of them. She did have one empty bag, so I thought I might claim all the stuff she'd been gifted over the last decade and a half...

... only there wasn't any. Or hardly any. I spent about twenty minutes trying to find the mailbox in Michel Delving (Seriously, could they make the things any harder to spot?) in case her presents were in the mail but she didn't have any there either. I guess being on a different server didn't entitle her to her own anniversary presents, which I guess is fair enough, although with no cross-server trade and shared storage having so many limitations, it does seem a bit mean.

I suppose I should be grateful in a way. All those things do is clutter up your bags anyway. I mean, who actually uses all those fireworks?

With everyone safely moved, it's goodbye to the 32-bit servers but not good riddance. As I said at the top, I had no intention of moving. I was planning on staying on Laurelin as long as it was there for a couple of very good reasons. For one thing, on the rare occasions when I play LotRO, I play entirely solo, so the fewer people around to get in my way the better I like it. And for another, I never really experienced the infamous lag and even if I had it would have been a safe bet it would have improved with all those other players having left.

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess. So long as the new server wasn't overcrowded and everything there carried on as smoothly as before, there couldn't be much to complain about, right? 

Well, as far as the overcrowding goes, Michel Delving was pretty quiet although there's not much you can read into that. Logic suggests, though, that if everyone has to move and there are fewer servers in total, those servers had better be able to handle a considerably higher population. And logic also suggest that, while 64 bits may give the back-end more room, it's not going to increase the size of Middle Earth itself by one square millimeter, so all those characters are going to be standing closer together every time they go to the bank or the auction house.

Still, I spend most of my time out in the countryside when I play so maybe I won't see them. And of course, it'll be all smooth and lag-free with the new technology, won't it? 

Anyone sensing irony here? Hard to put it across without the sarcastic tone of voice.

I was in Michel Delving, pretty much on my own, and the whole time I was there it was like pushing into a strong wind. I didn't see the full rubber-banding effect but there was plenty of  stuttering and glitching and poor old Juniperry did keep flicking back a few paces as she ran all around the town looking for the mailbox. I hardly ever saw anything like that on Laurelin, not at all in recent years, so Meriadoc is certainly not feeling much like an upgrade to me right now.

As Wilhem points out, with supporting evidence, Standing Stone did more than suggest they were going to keep the 32-bit servers open as long as enough people wanted to stay on them. Either almost everyone left immediately or that plan got changed pretty fast. Possibly when they realised how many people didn't want to go. Or maybe, as a couple of people suggested in the comments, SSG is throwing out the ballast in the hope of keeping the ship afloat for a little while longer. Can things really be that bad?

As a very occasional, casual player, I can't say I feel incensed by the bait&switch tactics but it certainly doesn't give me any more confidnce in any promises SSG might make in future. And now I see they're doing the same thing with their other game, Dungeons and Dragons Online, only this time they're not making the mistake of letting anyone think they have a choice.

I do have a couple of characters over there, too, although it must be a decade since I last played the game. At the moment I feel like I'd be fine with letting them slip away into the darkness but I guess I have a while to decide for sure. The final cut-off there is also 31 August. 

I bet in the end I crack and have to move them even though it's odds-on I'll never play them. Just like I'll probably have to do something about Mrs Bhagpuss's characters in LotRO before it's too late. And don't I have another account on the NA server cluster, too?

It's like having children. The feeling of responsibility never goes away.