Loinhead

Molyneux told Videogaming247.com that all Fable II singe-player saves will be horded on one server:

All the single-player games are accumulated up to this one server and then filtered back down to you.

There are a number of filters that filter down what orbs are seen in your world, and you can have up to 64 simultaneous orbs in your world at any one time.

And they can be filtered down by region, so you can see the people that live locally and close to you, they can be your friends from your Friends List, they can be people with a similar game ranking as you, or I think there’s one - this is purely from memory, so I may be wrong here - for people in a similar state or progress in Fable II.

If we could patch the code we could add any filter we liked.

So we could, if we wanted to - not that you can - say everyone that likes the colour yellow, or everyone who dresses the same as your hero, or everyone who’s a woman: we could filter it down in a whole host of different ways.

… would be a doom-mongering and inappropriate headline. From the blog:

You should see our servers a bit as the average pensioner; old, dusty, it’s going downhill and the inevitable will happen at some point. Because the TMO servers are running on their last legs we wanted to strongly recommend everyone – in case you haven’t got a local copy anymore – to back up their online movies. We don’t want you to lose any of your films in case the poop hits the fan.

Clearly there are some people inside Lionhead who are worried about the state of the servers. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone inside LH knows about this. By the tone of the post, it seems that nothing is being done from the top: servers patched up, things work again, but no money or manpower invested into fixing the real problem that puts the data at risk. Lionhead being as caring as they usually are, that could mean MS doesn’t want them to work on TMO when Fable 2 is imminent.

[Extra paranoid interpretation: plug on servers is about to be pulled, LH not allowed to disclose it, advises backups.]