Summary: Chris, Cari, and Layanor talk about server updates, fourms, and LOTRO lag. Listen now: What We Did in Game Layanor- 33% in the moors Have been running more end game raids. Finally did a complete run of Ost Dunhoth. Barad Guldur. Tried to kill the first boss. Things went bad. Started compiling all the Did You Knows and posting them onto my blog. http://layanor.wordpress.com Cari - Leveling up Ali on Brandywine almost to level 75 I have headed into Rohan and bashed small children I saw the hobbits go to Isengard live. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJGGlVg5PpY Chris - Hytbold, Hytbold, Hytbold News Small Updates 8-20-2013 Forum Updates https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?520856-Today-s-small-changes-8-20-13 The auto-logout has been increased to 6 hours (instead of 45 minutes). The lottery now makes it very clear which characters you have entered into each lottery. The site was not properly emailing things like subscribed thread notices and private message notices. These should be fixed (there is a huge backlog to catch up first). The dev tracker should now show posts from more forums. Sapience Talks about Lag and Forums https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?520386-Why-You-screwed-up Post started out as a usual Turbine you screwed up post. He was angry at Turbine for taking out leaderboards, how "most" players used them, and the lag is still there after the change. Then it got interesting. Most people didn't use the leaderboards. The thing people used the most were the Lotteries (which is why I was able to make a case to save them). No other my.lotro.com resource was used nearly as much (we're talking orders of magnitude). Forums were next, Lorebook a very distant third, then character pages (a very, very distant 4th behind the lorebook). Leaderboards were only slightly more used than Blogs. With the monitoring code we put into the game with Update 11.1 and 11.2 we know what the status of the lag is for the vast majority of players (your client tell us now) and it has dropped somewhat since 11.1. Though there are a few things we know the cause of now (thanks to the reporting code) and are working on a fix. Considering the use of the forums has increased nearly 30% since we changed everything and forum performance has increased dramatically (I haven't seen anyone complain they were laggy), I'd say that's the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. Ping times, unless you have truly insane pings (300+) have nothing to do with it it turns out (yes we were just as surprised as you are). If your pings went from say 90 to 190, then you (regardless of what you may think) aren't having any meaningfully negative impact on your game play simply because of how the game functions (yes even in the moors and in raids). You don't have to believe it, but that's the blunt truth. Client side issue are the primary cause (we're adding more data collection in a future update along with some fixes from what we've already learned), but don't take that as were 'blaming' players. It's in the client. We're trying to figure out where. Thus the continued focus adding measurement tools. We do suspect that some of what players are reporting as lag is hardware based. That's why we're reviewing our minimum and recommended specs to see whether or not they are realistic considering the changes in demands on the client that started going into the game as early as Moria and they were compounded with DX10 and DX11 support and with Rohan and Mounted combat. There is some concern that the existing min spec really isn't sufficient to run the game at a level that's enjoyable and that some of the reports of 'lag' are really issues of poor performance due to hardware not being up to the task. Yes. So here's a funny story. Lotteries were never meant to have 'normal' schedules.
