As many already know, Turbine was hit with some major network issues Wednesday. In the middle of a busy day most servers started to report rubber banding (when trying to move forward you got shot back and could not make headway). OOC and Kin chats started to buzz with reports of others being stuck and not able to move. If you logged out you found you where not able to get back in. Overall, it was a PR disaster.
The cries from the official forums was swift and scattered as MMORPG forums tend to be. Some simply reported what they discovered, others decided to beat a dead horse and whip out a laundry list of things they perceive makes LOTRO suck. Does it suck that you could not play? Yea. Does it suck that I wanted to spend some time working on traits now that I hit 50 with my Rune-keeper? Yea. Does it mean the world will stop turning? No.
What we know is this. Not much. What we can figure out is that a major network backbone, or router issue hit the main login and possibly game servers. Several of us in my kin, the Old Timers Guild, chatted and discussed the situation in vent. We ran trace routes to the gls.turbine.com address which houses the information about the login server and instructions. What we discovered is that somewhere along the line, the chain was broken. So from an educated guess it appears as if a major network failure has hit either the data center or backbone leading to our favorite games servers.
This is NOT, as some have said in the forums and even on some other blogs, necessarily the failure of Turbine leading to them adding another notch to the fail column. Rather several third parties are involved and share the load. Turbine is not the only company to experience a situation like this.
We chose to keep ourselves entertained with a technology that is at the whims of the delivery system. When one part of that breaks then it brings everything down around it.
So, is the sky falling because you can not play LotRO? No, its just a part of life.
“But its not fair!”
Who said the world was fair?
And now for those who are left behind working their butts off for us. The people who have to face an angry mob of people who think they know all the answers. To Patience and her crew, who where just as blind sided by this as the rest of us, at a time when drama over the Escapist competition is roaring, as people are complaining LOUDLY on the forums, and bloggers are making negative lists, to them I want to say thank you. I also want us to take a moment and place ourselves in their shoes.
Everyone of us will have bad days, times when its hard to keep a smile on your face, and from what I can tell you, the group at Turbine do more than most other community managers that are out there. Are they the best? I can’t answer that. Are they the worst? No way.
So, as we wait for things to come back into perspective let’s just take a moment and think about the words we use, the attitudes we help foster. Do we really want to be seen as a bunch of self centered people that we are being accused of being in the media and by other groups of gamers? I for one do not. Let’s do what we can to build our community with class and fair criticism, and pray that we do not find ourselves in Turbines position when things go wrong around us. But if we do, lets hope we can sleep at night knowing we did the best we could do.