Its all the dwarves and their strange behaviour. Freaky little fellows.

Also, for all the nay-sayers about them not knowing what they're doing, etc., no environment, especially one this big, is built to be destroyed or altered in large-scale fashion.  It's built to exist in the intended state for long periods of time.  No one builds a high-rise with the intention of gutting it from the ground up in 10 years.  No one builds a house with the intention of the new owners having the ability to move the walls at will.  Certainly, no one builds an entire world with the intention of a cross-dimensional merge without strange behavior.

I'm undergoing a similar but in many ways less complex transition at work right now too, and have been for months, just moving users from one domain to another, and I can tell you, if it's anything like that, every time they move a group of people, they find 5 more things no one mentioned before and forgot and the plans have to be reworked each time.

I'm not surprised.  It takes a long time to unwrap old duct tape......

Seriously though, from an IT level this sounds like a fairly huge undertaking; they can have all the time they want IMHO.

Maeg.

They should be further along but the transition from old to new hardware is troublesome apparently. Monday is the beginning of the end...again.

Thanks, I thought the process was further along than it is apparently.

No worries

Maeg.

They've not really had chance to shape up yet as the closing worlds are opening for transfer just now. We'll know more in several weeks probably.

Is Ark still looking like the place to be?

I moved Hafwen from Gladden to Arkenstone and was able to grab my name that way. The person that had my name on Ark hadn't played in some time so I was given the name and they got the -1.

It literally took a minute.

First I want to thank everyone who participated in the initial transfers that occurred last week. Due to some unrelated connection issues we had to turn of the service after only a short couple days and before we could really kick off US transfers, but in that time we received a lot of data that will help us improve the service even more. If you attempted a transfer last week and encountered any issues, please open a ticket with Customer Support and they should be able to help you out.

We are releaseing a patch this morning with the improvements and at that time we will open up the service for 48 hours for the 5 Remaining US worlds: Arkenstone, Crickhollow, Landroval, Gladden and Brandywine (off world only) to shuffle among themselves. The service will then be turned off again Friday morning as we assess the data and wait for some of the new hardware effort to catch up to our transfer progress.

Currently we expect the new hardware and data center to be available for public testing on Bullroarer in early September and are planning an event around that. More info as we get closer.

In mid-September to Early October we expect to start open transfers off of the closing worlds to the remaining worlds. We will begin with the smaller population worlds so as not to tax the old hardware as we transition to the new but still allowing those on the quiet worlds to start getting to know their new communities. In the October to November time frame is when we expect to be able to do the full switch over to the new hardware and data center for everyone and turn on transfers across all worlds. Please note this is our current timeline and is subject to change based on other delays that may occur during build out.

For those concerned about the free transfer timeline between remaining worlds that we originally set to end on October 1st, we are adjusting this plan. We will no longer have a time frame for free transfers, but are instead working out a way for everyone to have a chance to change their mind on their destination server once before having to pay to do so again.

So once again I want to thank everyone for their patience. This is a monumental task to undertake and we are making every effort to ensure it goes as smoothly as possible, but in order to do that sometimes it means taking pauses or delays in schedule. And this is only the largest of the upgrades we are working on for this year! You should be getting eyes on our new in-game storefront in the coming months as well as a new website coming in the months following that! So many shiny new updates for Lord of The Rings Online coming up both in-game and out, so stay tuned.

Cheers,
Athena “Vyvyanne” Peters
Executive Producer