As both Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online players noticed yesterday as both MMOs were unavailable for 15 hours, SSG’s game downtime seems to have gotten longer as of late. This may be the new norm — at least for a while — as Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini said that the studio is struggling with the older hardware that keeps these games running.

As much as I love games with long histories, one of the things I don’t love is the hardware that runs them ages out eventually,” Ciccolini said. “When hardware that is responsible for reliability and redundancy needs to be reworked and replaced, we get bouts of frustratingly long downtimes. You can swap in components piecemeal, but eventually you need to work on the backbone of your infrastructure.”

Along with the extended downtime yesterday was the announcement that DDO’s Update 68.1 is being delayed, with no word yet of its new release date.