Earlier this week, Vyvyanne posted on the forums suggesting that there may never be physical LOTRO servers in Europe ever again.
“Now that we have been in the new datacenter in New Jersey on the new hardware for several weeks now, we have learned a lot about how our service works with domestic and international ISPs. Early efforts at tuning have been showing progress, leading to measurable improvement in latency for both US and EU players. Based on this early information we believe that players will be best served by us focusing on improvements to the new datacenter, rather than moving the EU servers to Amsterdam.
Going forward we’ll continue to work on with the technology team at our datacenter as well as key regional ISPs to improve the performance of LOTRO for all players worldwide. The next step of this process will have us on a new routing system in the next few weeks. This is expected to improve performance for players in much of the EU, and certain parts of North America as well.”
I have mixed thoughts about this news. One the one hand we have Turbine saying that updates to the routing system should improve performance for EU players. Also the cost of only having one data center is likely far less than two. On the other hand, some players in Europe were looking to have their own servers that would potentially reduce lag for them. If Turbine can actually make the NA servers behave close to EU servers in regards to lag, then I think this is a smart move. We will have to wait and see.
The post continues on to talk about possible improvements to PvMP and instance server stability:
“For those players experiencing issues in PvMP we are adding in client side optimizations with Update 18 that we hope will lessen the strain on client and server alike when in battles with large groups. We are also looking into the cause of client crashes when traveling and changing instances.”
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Having an EU centre wasn’t really addressing the issues with lag anyway for many players, Amsterdam is still physically several hundreds of miles away from other European countries and it certainly wouldn’t have helped players elsewhere around the world like Australia for instance. It makes more sense to address the stability of connections and optimise what they have. I think this is a good idea and I think that keeping the costs down with 1 data centre will keep the game alive longer – that can only be a good thing for all of us.
You’re not an EU-player, are you?
Love LOTRO and I can understand their reasons, but if this is the case we feel again ”fooled” since we were promised something that probably are never getting now.
Lets wait for more news…