Standing Stone Games Starts Compensating LotRO and DDO Players For Extended Downtimes

After a week-plus of up-and-down servers and general instability in The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, Standing Stone Games finally appears to have things under control. Executive Producer Robert "Severlin" Ciccolini made a quick apology on the forums today, and that was followed up by announcements on each game's forums of the first round of compensation.

LotRO players can receive boost items for XP, deeds, reputation, and virtues by using the code THANKYOUGIFT in the LotRO Store, while DDO-ers can pick up the Sovereign II Experience Elixir by using the code SOV2POT in the DDO Store. Both codes are redeemable once per account and will be usable until Aug. 31. More compensation is planned for VIP players who lost time during the recent outages.

I have to admit, though, if I were a player of either game, I'd want to hear some kind of longer explanation of just what went wrong, even if it is a little on the technical side. Severlin said that the issue was "due to environmental and infrastructure challenges" and "required (and requires) substantial restructuring of our server infrastructure." Changes are underway to prevent this from happening again, and the compensation will help smooth things over, but I'd be a little wary about financially supporting a product that's demonstrated such instability without a better explanation for why it's unlikely to happen again.