As The Lord of the Rings Online has been navigating through the fallout from its extended downtime, the team at Standing Stone Games has finally given VIP subscribers some info as to how they will be compensated for the issues. While still largely quiet as to why players couldn't really play LOTRO for about a week, especially on servers like Arkenstone, the team has announced that VIP subscribers will be gifted 250 LOTRO points and a 5 day extension on their subtime.
The announcement was made on social media as well as the official forums, and the team will be announcing when the compensation has been applied. Naturally, players, especially those who literally paid for the downtime, have been eager to hear from Standing Stone Games as to how they will make it up to them - as well as what exactly caused the issues surrounding the game they pay for - and the announcement on Twitter at least has been met mostly with backlash over the actual compensation.
For our VIPs, you will see your VIP time extended by 5 days, and will grant you 250 LOTRO Points. We will make an announcement once this has been applied. #LOTRO
— LOTRO (@lotro) July 31, 2020
Given that much of the game was unplayable, even on servers that were up during some of the downtime (high packet loss, downtime on multiple servers, world chat being disabled, etc), it seems players expected a bit more from the team. Facebook users responding to the announcement pointed out that five days of compensation doesn't equate to the two weeks the issues persisted while many are asking whether or not Lifetimers will receive the points compensation as well. Additionally, there is nothing about Premium users at least receiving the LOTRO point compensation, even though they too lost the ability to largely play The Lord of the Rings Online during this outage.
As far as what caused the outage, the LOTRO team is still staying largely silent, still only really stating that the problems are "out of our control in the data center and other environments." It'll be intersting to see if the community really ever finds out what caused the issues or not, as well as how Standing Stone Games handles downtime like this in the future.
