LotRO Servers Having Issues Again, SSG Says It's "Outside Of Our Control"

Have we ever seen an MMORPG go through its death throes in real time? I'm not saying The Lord of the Rings Online is about to become The Lord of the Rings Offline, but if I was still a player, I'd be extremely nervous these days.

After experiencing the worst server instability in its history, LotRO seemed to have weathered the storm and come out relatively unscathed (unlike one Dungeons & Dragons Online server), only to be hit with another spell of instability, disconnects, and rubber-banding over the past couple of days. This was acknowledged both on Twitter and on the official forums as being "due to external issues outside of our control."

(Remember that LotRO shifted to a new data center four years ago, and I posed the question "Does It Bode Well For The Future?" The answer to that appears to be mixed, in that the game has continued past its then-perceived death date of 2017, but it's gotten a little thin and stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.)

Naturally, as when anything goes wrong, there's a mostly pointless petition to try and make it right again, and that's the case here. In this case, it's to "Ask SSG to make better servers," as Standing Stone Games a) doesn't realize it's got a problem; and b) a bunch of e-signatures are what's needed to convince the company to improve the situation (and provide the funds to do so), even if the situation isn't as "outside of our control" as SSG put it. But I guess it makes people feel a little better to voice their complaints somewhere other than social media.