LOTRO: Moving to Peregrin
Posted on March 11, 2025 by Aywren
Last week was quite the time in LOTRO as they began opening the new 64-bit servers. The idea is, hopefully, for these new servers to provide a more optimized experience for players. Seeing that I specifically moved away from playing LOTRO right before Rohan due to the extreme rubberbanding and lag issues on Brandywine, this is of great interest to me.
Being a player (on and off) since alpha, I was also locked in on what I needed to do to reserve some of the character names that I’d rolled back in beta. There were two in particular that I knew I’d lose if I wasn’t quick enough on the draw.
Last Monday, the server opened to VIP players (I’m a Lifetimer), allowing each of us to reserve 3 names by rolling a new character on the server using that name. I quickly went for these particulars:
The idea is that once your characters transfer over to the new server, they will be able to utilize the rename feature. You just delete the placeholder and then rename your actual character.
Fun with the Hourglass
Only… it was the transfer feature that ended up causing the biggest fiasco. Transfers were supposed to begin at noon last Tuesday. This got pushed back to 1PM instead due to last minute server something-something.
I logged in at 1:02 PM and… I did not get my transfer in.
In fact, most of us didn’t. Instead, we were greeted by the hourglass of doom, a screen that looked like this:
At that time, we were just told to hang on and wait if we saw this hourglass. What we didn’t know was that the queue actually was timing most of us out if we waited over 5 minutes on this screen. Or something like that. Who really knows.
In the end, SSG ended up closing transfers to allow the queue to catch up with the mass amount of transfers that had been pushed through. Some of these apparently ended up failing, anyhow.
As the week progressed, the situation got more and more dicey. The transfer button would be restored, only to be taken down again 20-30 minutes later. If that. Twice, I spent more than an hour at the hourglass screen, having no idea I’d probably already timed out long ago.
I knew that given SSG’s reputation with some of these larger issues this would likely be a rocky road. But by the time it was over, they just opened the 64-bit servers on Friday (two days later than expected), and told us that housing wouldn’t be available for a while.
This was a big deal because other than reserving names, the housing rush is the next thing of contention. Remember, there are only two 64-bit servers that all the other 32-bit servers are consolidating into. There’s only a limited number of houses, and some of the houses are considered “special” lots. They’re larger or more rare, and much harder to get.
I’m not one of those people who have special housing. I’m just gunning for the same couple of premium houses I had before. Neither were very special nor contested as far as I’m aware. I do think I’m swapping my Geode housing in favor of the newer Hobbit housing, but I’ll have to see how that pans out.
Anyhow, back to the transfers. SSG worked on tweaking the transfers, and finally opened them for good on Friday night. This included determining how busy a specific server was with transfers coming off of them. If your server was too busy, you could get past the hourglass only to find the server selection screen empty, like this:
This just meant you had to try again until you actually got a server with characters on it.
It was during this time that I re-discovered where I’d rolled all my old PVP Creep characters!
Yes, I did go all-out on crazy names for my Creeps. We used to PVP with the Posse, but that was (as you can see by the last login date) long, long ago. I opted not to transfer my Creeps until yesterday as I figured other folks still needed to get their main characters through.
Finally, after trying several times throughout Friday night, I was able to get a transfer confirmation. All that was left to do was wait, as I’d heard it could take up to 48 hours.
This wasn’t a huge deal to me as I’d also already hopped on earlier on Friday and reserved a few more names that I didn’t want to lose. So, wait it was.
48 hours came and went, but I got no email. Finally, yesterday, I decided to log in just on the off-chance that the transfer had gone through and I’d just not been alerted. This is exactly what happened.
I was very happy to see all my characters on the new server, and the fact that I’d only lost one name in the move (though this was an easily remedied name fix for me). I carefully went through the process of deleting place holders and re-naming – holding off to rename some of my major characters until I thought it was a less-active time of day.
In the end, everyone made it over to the new server, and the Creeps are now on their way as well. Just looking at world chat here seems so much better than what I remembered on Brandywine – at least, so far. There’s a strong possibility that a nice community could build up around these servers. I chose the RP server this time on purpose, so we’ll see what happens with it.
I do know that my desire to pick up and play this game again is strong at this point. I just have so many characters, most of which have a very long road ahead of them, even though some are going on 18 years old!
For those who are still waiting on transfers, I wish you luck!