If you’ve been following the Past Shows made in “Lord of the Rings Online” this week, you may have noticed a common theme: The game keeps crashing, closing the livestream very abruptly. This last weekend was merry Hell, trying to play LOTRO for any consistent amount of time, as the game would freeze up, then the Livestream would cut off, as my bitchin’, uber-powerful MSI laptop would lock completely up, requiring a hard reboot to clear!
This wasn’t good, nor was it normal at all. After this issue happened a few times, I tried livestreaming another game (World of Warcraft), and had no problems at all. Tried LOTRO again, still crashing here or there, so I tried livestreaming “Rift”… with no problems. Rinse and repeat with LOTRO then “The Secret World”, and this all proved one, simple thing:
LOTRO was clearly the issue here, as all of those other games played and livestreamed just fine, with no crashes. In all cases, I was using the same equipment, and running the same exact software in addition to the game, being FaceRig, Chatty, and OBS. So if WoW, Rift, and TSW ran fine, and LOTRO did not about half of the time, the problem was clearly with LOTRO.
… or was it?
Those LOTRO crashes all seemed to occur at times where more people were playing the game, even if I weren’t near them, the server load might have been a contributing factor, at the very least. And I did notice that FaceRig was spiking on occasion to use 99% of the processor, which I tracked down to a bad setting (the FPS cap for the software was at 9999, rather than 30, as it should be… oops!). I expect a combination of issues on my side and on the server side led to LOTRO buckling multiple times over the weekend, while other LOTRO streamers had no issues that I could see.
In the end, I am going to try livestreaming LOTRO again on Friday morning (no Saturday morning show again this week, due to Renaissance Faire goodness), and we’ll see if everything is going good again. If it isn’t though, I may just have to set LOTRO aside from my streaming schedule for a while, and play other games instead. I certainly don’t want that to happen, and am trying my best to rectify any issues I can find, but if all that fails… I’ll be playing “Rift” primarily in the future, I suppose.
