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Accurate. One look through Red_Panda's replies in the o-forum's Dev Tracker shows what the priorities are. Note promptness and punctuality pertaining to anything store-reated. Which leads me to think the current broken "limited live servers" situation is not from SSG's ineptitude but a deliberate testing ground. When something is a priority, it gets treated like a priority. When something is not treated like a priority - then the priority is elsewhere. Who's to say they're not using this datacenter fuckup as a chance to see how the store sales figures compare in a severely limited game environment (no chat channels, no fellowships, no friend lists, no grouping). If the sales are good - and hey, the whales finally got rid of that pesky grouping they hate so much! - it sets a new threshold for lowering standards and divesting resources from LotrO. While ensuring it's "just" functional enough to invite player spending. Interestingly, the game infrastructure directly involved in player spending has not been disabled: vault, wardrobe, shared storage, and housing system all remain perfectly functional. Item storage/retrieval interfaces are working and loading without lag. It is only the social aspects of the game that have been mysteriously "impacted" by these outages - everything that contributes to social in-game environment, in fact. Why no urgency to fix this? Easy: it's not urgent. Why so vague and elusive in communicating this? Easy: the CM whose entire job revolves around communication is making conscious decision to be elusive (per direction from higher up the food chain). A limited test run of "maintenance mode" store sales in controlled setting? I assume maintenance mode = no active (paid) GMs to monitor the chat channels, so they will be disabled for politically correct reasons of "player safety". And I assume maintenance mode = fully operational store intact. Transitioning to a new business model by opening up the entire Lotro world "for free" invites all kind of internal data metrics experiments. Maybe they needed to tighten their budgets by giving a pay cut to those active GMs and furlough them for a few weeks. "We're experiencing undisclosed server issues but re-opening the game worlds with limited functions" sounds a whole lot like "We're extending our covid gesture of unlocking all Lotro regions to play for free for another month." Let the starry-eyed imbeciles keep fawning over SSG's "kindness" and "efforts"... Every single game-related decision is governed by budgetary bottom line. Including this one.

You know that weird phenomenon where sub-beta males send cam-whores money online and buy their bath water? SSG is that cam-whore, the whales are those simps, and this housing is the bath water. They'll chuck that money down with the excuse of "I have fun" or "it's not a lot of money" or "I want to keep supporting them", but it's all weak attempts to internally rationalise being exploited.

They've kept a few servers "open" (a.k.a. on life support, feeding tube) while taking others down. No chat /channels, no mail, no auction house, no friend-list functioning. Put another way, keeping the addicts who cannot function without being plugged into the game on life support/feeding tube. Interestingly, in this unstable server environment, the $tore has not been disabled. I've logged in a few days ago out of curiosity, to check out the new festival in what (I thought) would be a less-laggy environment due to new restrictions. Result: extremely choppy movement, massive rubberbanding on foot simply running around, toon getting randomly insta "ported" 10 - 15 meters backwards which often results in being trapped behind columns or in-game assets, inability to interact with quest objects due to prompts not loading or having the click commands "interrupted" by said rubberbanding. tl;dr : I don't suffer from motion sickness but two minutes of this "Lotro experience" was enough to induce physical nausea and I had to go lie down. But hey, now that they've made the entire game world "free", you get what you pay for, right? You know the grass is not green on SSG's lawn when servers have been down for more than a week (they've now shut them all down) and there's not even any rage threads on the official forums, just a handful of "concern" threads amid the summer peace and quiet. (Though I can't help adding... seeing Arkenstone server as the one that's been down the longest made me smile at the thought of Maarten A. being deprived of his playground for that long)

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?682181-Housing-Mount-Pet-Decorations 🙊 I've commented in red: 😂😂😂😂😂

Well played on the OF and here now as well lol.

It's the staggering incompetence of everything they do is what gets me. They cocked up access to the housing, didn't come close to a balance of house types and are going to have empty neighborhoods on the most part. Even a stable I looked at had a cart next to a big fake door inside and a frigging wall on the other side. Now Cord is making excuses about hook limits not being understood and he's supposed to be telling the community these things. Every time the "Big Reveal" is a fucking "Train Wreak". Doro is just an SSG enabler, fanboi since he stopped playing lol and that free outfit is shit... So you want the fanbois to be happy, I want them to know they are starving their cat and wasting their giro/welfare checks. Can you ask them to bring QuartermasterU back as he at least understood the concept of shame? It's no wonder Devilled_Egg became Friendly_Hat, and the malignancy at SSG chose a cuddly Panda for a handle. (There's an interview that places SSGRed_Panda as steering things here) Mac

I've had some time to think about it and I actually don't mind this now. It's not an integral, necessary part of the game, and was never promised as free to VIPs, so it's fine for it to come with a cost. If people want it, they can buy it. If they don't, then there's regular housing still available. There's too much self-entitlement these days. People should be grateful they get to help keep the game they love alive, warts and all.

I logged in, had a look, and logged back out. The houses are so dark inside that you have no idea what you are buying and the mead hall is a hall. Can't decorate that as if it's a house. Then the monetization of placing horses and pets - 20mc every time. No thanks. I've lost all my houses/kin houses due to lack of upkeep. That's how little I log in anymore. No desire to change that. Knowing what it was and what it is now - no fun left. Bumping into monetization in so many areas is a constant reminder.

Ay hol up! So yous be tellin me dey gonna sell race changes 25 dollars a pop? https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?682004-Race-Change-Workes-well-Only-the-Horses-xD

I 100% agree with this. The game used to be praised for it's faithfulness to the lore. Now it's just the case of how much bullshit can they put in the game with every update. I'm surprised they even fixed it. The problem is that most of the whales won't even complain, and those few sensible people that are still playing the game can't cause too much of a backlash on the OF, because there's so few of them even bothered to post anything. So eventually everything dies down and the shit fest continues as per usual.

The difference is that bouncers are doing their job, while SSG are not. They aren't even worhty to tie the shoelaces of those bouncers boots lol.

It's extra bad because if you don't do the landscape quests in North Central Mordor at level 114ish, you have no idea wtf/why this goblin shows up at level 127 in Minas Morgul.

Mol has been all too willing to say with indirect words he plans on milking LotRO until he reaches retirement age. That's some awful big pair of optimist glasses he wears.

Probably straight into the pockets of Russian oligarchs. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/after-sanctions-daybreak-games-changes-its-tune-on-its-russian-affiliation/

What can you expect? At least the store is functioning perfectly, that's the main thing for them. I'd bet that if the store went down, there would be a fix in 24 hours max, because they depend on the cosmetic buying whales so much.

As vague and useless an answer as expected. If I was back home, and if I had LotRO installed, and if I was still logging in, and if the game was entertaining, and if I didn't have a Lifetime account, and if there weren't other games to play... I'd be royally pissed. But then what else are people expecting from a shambling zombie of an MMO? Whaaaaaaales... whaaaaaaales...

I don't even know where to start. As I was reading her reply, when someone pointed out that if that DDO announcement would have been posted in the LOTRO forums at the beginning of this shitshow, and then she came up with that 18 hours bullshit, and that it didn't matter anyway. When confronted on the late 2013 HD shambles, she refused to comment because her feeling were apparently hurt. Maybe it's because she could not think of a good enough excuse to throw back. I honestly wonder who even allows such a person to have an access to a computer? And when she's called an 'SSG fanboy' and a 'white knight' she hides under the SSG skirt and cries that someone called her a bad name... Honestly, I'm lost for words, it's one thing to be the devil's advocate and try to look at the issues from another point of view, but what she's saying is just retarded. No matter what anyone says, she'll find an excuse that suits her SSG agenda. Edit: I can only speak from experience, if the company where I work had the same level of customer service and communication as SSG is showing us, then I can guarantee that we would go bust in half a year. Nah I don't believe that, just casuals with way too much spare time and money to spend in the lotro store. Einstein's quote fits quite well: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

You can really see the psychosis on display in that thread. I can't help but point out Arnenna (hasn't she publicly threatened to quit/unsub multiple times now?)...where she defends the fact that SSG provided DDO an update but waited 18 hours, nearly a day, to update the LOTRO forums with the same update. Let's think about that for a sec...a company whose livelihood depends on people having access to their product...and that product is currently inaccessible...waits almost a day to keep a huge chunk of their customers informed about the status of things. Apparently, Cordovan was on annual leave? Which, of course, is the lamest excuse. The point is, stuff like this is clearly indefensible...it's just poor business practices on behalf of SSG and you'd think even the most devoted white knight would pull their head out (kudos to Massively for doing just that), but looking at that thread...either people are being contrarian for the sake of it or there is some deeper, psychological problem going on there. It's probably a little bit of both.

There's gonna be a bunch of arse licking idiots going through withdrawal if the game went dark. I'd wager the forums will go offline the moment the statement is given, because those same drugged with optimism will be trolled to death. Their denial will be real world problems in their minds.

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?681724-Stating-the-obvious-is-NOT-quot-Keeping-us-updated-quot Their gripe is, in essence, "We know the servers are down, and we know you have no clue what's wrong. Telling us what we already know is not keeping anyone updated." I love it. I love watching these idiots wallow in the mediocrity they've enabled for the past 10 years. I also love watching them slap down the same handful of shills with their heads up SSG's asses (Armenna, maartena, etc), who are trying to gaslight the community into believing an entire week of downtime with no explanation or update other than "The servers are down and we still don't know why" is normal and nothing to be upset about when you're paying 15 bucks a month to play an already terrible game. SSG could literally hold the shills down and bind their hands and feet while they defecate into their open mouths, and they would STILL praise the downsized Z-tier developers for their quality feces. Now more than ever, I believe those accounts to be SSG employees, or at least on the social engineering payroll. It's no great mystery what's happening. LOTRO players were promised upgraded datacenters years ago, but instead the company opted for cheaper, cost-cutting hardware, resulting in a downgrade, and that hardware is now failing. It doesn't take a week (nor a team of stoners pretending to be IT specialists) to diagnose that. The issue is clearly that they can't afford to replace the hardware, and are desperately trying to apply a band-aid onto a sucking chest wound. But in other news, the cash store is working just fine. Priorotie$.

At this point, we're basically chasing down the Gúrzyul, the former disciples of Sauron. This mainly includes Dulgabêth, the Mouth of Sauron; Karazgar the Weeping Warrior; and Urudanî Stonemaiden, previously the mistress of Nargroth and currently a fire-wraith. Karazgar is involved most of the Black Book story in the Three Kingdoms (Felegroth, Dale, and Erebor) and The Dwarf-Holds (Iron Hills and Ered Mithrin). He also appears in the Vales of the Anduin. His story is never adequately completed, before you are whisked away to help Isildur (himself now a wraith) find a final peace in the final chapters of the Black Book. The other ongoing antagonist is Lhaereth the Stained, the Lady of Blight, a Morroval who is adept at brewing up plagues and poisons. The new area, Wells of Langflood, has started a whole new epic line. In it, players are headed to Gundabad with the dwarfs - Prince Durin (Son of King Thorin III) has decreed that the dwarfs are destined to reclaim it. This area is relatively easy and has no real endgame - there's an ongoing series of quests to defeat some named goblins in various instances. The epic doesn't really go anywhere, and the main non-epic story involves a Rohirric scholar trying to suss out the history of the people. End-game instances are still related to Minas Morgul. There is a series of rep tiers - the reclamation quests - that require you to run them endlessly until you max out your rep with this faction. As you unlock each tier, you unlock an associated quest chain that involves destroying a particular artifact so that you can defeat some random baddie named Thargaun. The state of gear is still bad. The best landscape gear is still obtained from lootboxes, and it's still all about essences. Crafting is still a waste of time. The new virtue system is just another grind, unless you're willing to buy stuff from the store. If you've not played since HD, you have a lot of catching up to do. If you intend to imbue your LIs at lvl 100, you'll be grinding scrolls of empowerment for months (unless you're willing to spend MC), as there is no good solution even now. You'll also need starlit crystals for the main LI stat, and the crystals are even rarer (and I've found it's easier just to MC the tiers - it only costs 10 MCs per tier). They have added both the scrolls and crystals to the embers NPC now. Overall, I feel that the game has become repetitive - it's always kill 10 of these, pick up 10 of that, grind the rep for this faction, and spend the tokens for some cosmetics, housing items, or cosmetic pets. One note: the Minas Morgul currency is account-wide, and capped at 999 sigils. This is perhaps the stupidest idea ever, especially if you intend to take multiple characters through the region. There is very little to spend the sigils on, and so you end up losing them.