The Lord of the Rings Online Volume II, Book 8 Q&A

Ten Ton Hammer has posted the results of a pretty lengthy chat they had with Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel about The Lord of the Rings Online’s Volume II, Book 8 update and the game’s future in general. Hopefully the answer to this question applies to the lag in Dungeons & Dragons Online, too:

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s being done to address server stability? Some players are getting some crashes and server resets. Can you speak to that?

Steefel: Sure, and I think this is something that we’ve addressed in the forums to some degree. As we talked about earlier, as these games grow and evolve and we move into the deeper content, we continue to grow. We’re pushing the edges of our content systems in ways that we haven’t done before as a company. Moria was doing all sorts of things that we’d never explored before lighting, underground spaces, etc. and we’re just branching out and experimenting a lot more.

At the same time, the audience is growing and we’re now in the part of development in this game where we’re asking ourselves (how are we going to grow and evolve and get bigger over the next ten years?)

It really strains our system. We are in the process of making some pretty big changes, both in the technology and our infrastructure so we can expand our capabilities quite a bit. There’s definitely been some bumps along the way, and I think everyone here at Turbine will be the first to admit that. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy taking the steps that we need to so that we can ensure that the stuff we’ve been seeing doesn’t happen anymore.

We want to return to the quality and stability that we’re not only known for but extremely zealous about and want to have. That’s what we’re focused on, and we’re spending a lot of time and energy in making sure that things get markedly better.

And I think players will be seeing that. We just need to catch up with ourselves a little bit, but I think players will be seeing improvements soon.