Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

The Lord of the Rings Online is just a little over a month away from getting its next expansion the Siege of Mirkwood. As we draw closer to the release of the digital expansion, Turbine is letting a little more information slip out through the release of developer diaries. This week Jessie "Vastin" King details the development process and some of the content players will find in the new expanse of Mirkwood. Surprisingly, as Jessie explains, one of the biggest problems from development didn't come from creating the content, but rather from making sure it didn't make the servers have a meltdown.

The world of game development is quite a bit more byzantine than you might imagine at times. For example, it might interest you to know that the single largest share of all the time I’ve spent working on Mirkwood was in trying to figure out and implement ways to keep our servers from being reduced to piles of smoking slag within hours of Siege of Mirkwood going live and all of you hurling yourselves at it at once. This is a surprisingly intractable problem, against which a wide range of technology, engineering, and design have been thrown. Hopefully it’ll work, and your entry to Mirkwood will be smooth and mostly free of lag or server downtime.

• You can read the full diary here.
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