Thread: Black Screen and Crashes in LOTRO -- Can we get real for a moment?

You only have to scan the first few pages of the technical support forums or do a do a quick search on google about 'lotro bsod' to find an unreal amount of issues and crashing.

For all the people helping troubleshoot and coming up with ideas about swapping memory dimms, overclocking, or other such hardware related things you are wasting your time. I am not saying that those issues don't exist but there are not thousands of posts on this forum and others because of silly issues like that.

I don't claim to know the fix. Scanning through all the threads, most people seem to be using some form of NVIDA card. Not all, but certainly the vast majority. Maybe that is because more people use their cards, but it also seems just as likely something within the LOTRO code is not working with the various NVIDIA drivers available. I have multiple computers that run LOTRO and all have NVIDIA cards though some work fine, and others BSOD after a handful of minutes.

Just today I pulled my NVIDIA 8800 GT out of a machine about 2 years old and moved it to a brand new machine. New OS, drivers, directx, etc was installed followed by the game and sure enough within minutes it was BSOD'ing again. Don't let anyone tell you its your system or your issue by default. This is something with the LOTRO software and its ability to work properly with stable/working drivers on your system.

This is a systemic problem. Whether turbine wishes to deal with that is all about the bottom line. Financially they are doing much better since the F2P option and if a certain (unreasonably high) percentage of players experience a consistent BSOD issue, there will not be a determined effort to fix it unless it hits them in the wallet. Unfortunately with the F2P success and 'fresh meat' coming to play each and every day and a percentage of with turn into VIP paying subscribers (like myself) there likely wont be any concerted effort made for some time.

Hopefully we can work together and figure out specifically what the problem seems to be however unlikely that may be.

I fixed by switching my audio up in the audio section of options in lotro. Now I am running flawlessly.

I had the problem persistently and kept playing despite the frequent crashes. I have to agree with one point by the OP - if the game doesn't run well, you're not going to subscribe to it. When I started a 10-day free trial (around December 2009), I had so many problems downloading the game it took me 8 DAYS to get up and running. Turbine extended my trial for the trouble. When I came back, I faced BSOD repeatedly, but I kept lurking around the forums waiting for a solution. Either I'm cheap enough, or the game is good enough, for me to stick through the hardships to get it running. I'm sure some other folks have given up. I only played WOW for 3 months, but it always downloaded, patched/updated, and ran flawlessly. I don't wish Turbine any difficulties, but I have to admit it's the toughest gaming software I've ever had to endure troubleshooting.

That said, the root cause of my NVIDIA problem was having outdated drivers despite Microsoft Windows telling me the drivers were up to date. Turbine's technical assistance FAQ says to make sure the latest drivers are installed, but how can one blame them when I (or Microsoft) failed to comply with the intention of their instructions? For me, it worked eventually, but I had a lot of grief until then.

Despite moving your card into a brand new machine, I urge you to manually check the NVIDIA web site for the latest driver. Do not trust Microsoft's wizard to check drivers for you. My card's driver was updated as recently as last July. I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping that this solution works for everyone with NVIDIA cards. You'll get a rush of joy when the game finally runs as intended.

Best of luck.

Originally Posted by Homonculus87

I fixed by switching my audio up in the audio section of options in lotro. Now I am running flawlessly.

I am always looking to try new things. What do you mean by 'swithicng my audio up'?

Not using EAX and changing the default playback device....

8800s are pretty notorious for overheating. I bet if you check your GPU temperature that card is burning up, or lost the ability to disperse heat long ago. Of course, it must be a problem with the game code

You can try lowering the clock speed of the card, reducing settings, or just replacing it with something more stable.

Originally Posted by Elordim

8800s are pretty notorious for overheating. I bet if you check your GPU temperature that card is burning up, or lost the ability to disperse heat long ago. Of course, it must be a problem with the game code

You can try lowering the clock speed of the card, reducing settings, or just replacing it with something more stable.

They do run hot, but not hot enough to make a game crash.

Go back to the drawing board.

At times I've seen mine hit 90, but that's when it's hot in this room (it's on the sun's side of the house). At night, when it cools down, it will be around 70. Neither is hot enough to crash a game. LOTRO crashes for me every 4 hours or so, but that's due 99.9% surely to an incredibly horrible memory leak (as far as I can tell).

This is a small data sample:

My family runs two near identical computers for this game - and in the last three years both at some point started having BSOD's while playing LOTRO but not any other game.

The first computer that started this: I messed for a week with drivers, settings, you name it. I finally swapped out the 8800GT for an older card I had sitting in the basement and viola: no more crashes. So I purchased a newer card for that computer - also by NVidia - and it's still running like a champ.

When the second computer started crashing about a year later I decided to forsake normal trouble shooting and just got a new GTX460 for it. (Okay, I admit I also wanted to try out DX11) Same story, the crashes were cured immediately. Running great still.

The common thread between the two systems? Both started out with an 8800GT at the same time, both video cards failed in LOTRO but at different times (about a year apart) and both video cards seemed to work just fine for almost any other use . . . even after they failed for the game.

I can't blame patches by Turbine - they did not fail on the same patch. I can't blame video drivers either - they were both running a very stable driver build for a very long time. (I believe it was v183 . . . but I might be wrong.)

If you've followed tech news over the last two years - you might have noticed NVidia had issues with certain GPU's . . . there's even a class action suit over one now -- for laptops. But the problems all seem similar (search for tin whiskers and NVidia for a technical overview.)

Now . . . I sure hope I am not jinxing meself . . . but at this writing both computers will typically run LOTRO from 2 to 8 hours non-stop when our family plays. They never crash, never slow down. If I check my memory usage over time there is NO indication of any serious memory leaks - RAM usage bounces quite normally depending on where we are in Middle Earth. It goes up, it goes down. It never climbs without limit.

If you think you have a memory leak, I would check your driver revisions for audio and video first. Then I would check your Anti-Virus solution.

Our systems:
Intel E8500 OC'd to 3.5Ghz (both)
NVidia GTX 260 / GTX 460
8 GB RAM
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

We turn on ALL the eye candy with no problems at 1680 X 1050 with frame rates running smooth and locked to VSynch at 60. (Sometimes dips to 45fps for short durations in some area's, still very playable.)

Originally Posted by Nevaaz

Just today I pulled my NVIDIA 8800 GT out of a machine about 2 years old and moved it to a brand new machine. New OS, drivers, directx, etc was installed followed by the game and sure enough within minutes it was BSOD'ing again. Don't let anyone tell you its your system or your issue by default. This is something with the LOTRO software and its ability to work properly with stable/working drivers on your system.

It's not Turbine. Seriously -- you have a bad video card . . . The fact is that this game will cause a crash on a card that's got weak circuits due to constant heat and poor design on the manufacturers part.


.

Worst post ever.

I agree with this, I have seen so many problems here being reported on these threads.

Seems like, almost half the new people can't even get into the game. So, does this thing only run on ideal conditions?

If so, then why the heck hasn't anyone put the effort into changing that? I can't even get in and I've been working on this crazy thing for hours.

I bet the game is amazing, but what good does it do when you can't even get into it?

So it must be down to fairy dust and magic that I never get a seconds problem then?

Problems with something as complex as an MMO are exactly the same as problems with operating systems and spy/malware - 99% user generated. Installing/removing software (any idea how much junk the average program leaves behind?), tinkering with Windows settings etc are all potential causes of system instability.

Do people check their windows logs? do you keep your registry tidy? Is your system overclocked? Have you read up on and understand every single element of your motherboard BIOS and set it up correctly or just randomly changed stuff?

The problems might be closer to home than you'd care to admit.