Now this was somewhat unexpected news – Turbine will be taking over the running of the EU LOTRO servers from Codemasters from June 1st 2011. And all EU players will need to migrate their accounts to US servers –0- lifetime accounts, characters, items et al will all be moved across smoothly, Turbine claim.
Here’s the FAQ. They also say not to create a Turbine account until the official migration process has started (unless you already have one).
What we don’t know yet is what will be happening to the EU servers. The FAQ notes that all existing servers will become part of the US service, so it’s not clear whether that means there will be new servers to support the EU population or if migrants will have to pick an existing server to join.
I guess this sheds some light on the extended talks which held up Codemasters from implementing the F2P patch some months back. I always felt that Codies did a good job with LOTRO on the whole, but at the same time it’s always been clear that the US guys were getting a better service with elements such as my.lotro which weren’t available outside the US servers.
Note: If EU servers stay the same (for all intents and purposes) as Longasc suggests in comments based on posts on the german forums, then it’s worth noting that the EU RP server, Laurelin, is actually marked officially as RP and CM’s enforce RP-based name complaints there. This is a markedly different approach to the US unofficial RP server which has no staff support.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
Servers will stay. German Forum and CM talk etc. confirmed that. In general it seems it was known and planned for a longer period of time already and should go a lot smoother than the DDO transfers.
Should, that’s it. People should still be afraid and donate their stuff to me, just in case.
“Servers will stay” <- Yes. But it seems that this means a 1:1 server copy of the same name that will be within the USA, and no longer the UK. Ping, Pong…?
Seems I was too optimistic that the service just continues as usual, I hope my Ping won't become too high.
The servers will be migrated to the Turbine Data Center, East Coast. Let’s see how my ping is. I will probably download the US client and try it soon.
Really? That’s bloody stupid.
I’m not sure if Turbine are aware of the fact that the Atlantic ocean is pretty big (and their nearest Euro customers, the Icelandic and Irish, are still pretty far away) but it’s simply nonsensical.
If you’re going to take charge, you should do it properly. And I can’t help but wonder: is getting Mylotro and its associated lotteries, along with slightly quicker patch times, really worth it for (in my anecdotal cases) a tripling in ping times and a presumed removal of official RP realms?
Sadly, I can’t see myself saying yes.
Exactly, Dril.
I’ve been off LotRO during the transition time, and tried recently: ping seems to be up from around 30ms to 130, but while that still could be OK, there is a constant 3-8% packet loss, which means that some things are simply not doable any more, like the horse race, for example.
NCSoft moved the European City of Heroes servers to the same data center as the NA servers a few months ago. People were a bit worried then also about performance, but worked just fine.
It may even have improved a bit; that may perhaps be more of an indication of that the Euro server set-up may have been a bit old though.
I did some ping tests on US servers playing with the US client. 6MBit T-Online DSL connection without fastpath, my 16MBit is usually 20-40ms faster:
70ms to EU Morthond, 140 in crowded areas during prime time.
Windfola, Firefoot and Landroval around 09.00-11.00 GMT+1 have 150ms ping. But yesterday evening I had a 469ms max ping spike, around 350 ms in the instanced (lots of people) Bree starter area.
Still: Even with 469ms ping things ran very smooth, which surprised me. I also tried the horse races today, and guess what, I had no lag related issue on Landroval (150 ms) while I managed to hit the wall on Morthond with 70ms ping. I will try the same race later this week during US prime gaming time.
So yeah, I can somewhat agree to Sente, despite the ping they seem to have better Servers over there. If I would not have pinged I would not have noticed a negative difference at all, but I would have noticed the better experience during the horse race for instance. What was without doubt laggy and slow as hell are the official Turbine Forums, while the CM Forums are super fast.
And another test: 70 vs 145 vs 145 (DE-Morthond, US-Windfola, US-Landroval). Worked nicely. We apparently don’t have to worry too much. At least not about the latency.
Don’t think you need to worry about the Atlantic too much. I always found (from UK), that playing City of X was smoother on the US servers than on the UK ones.
Certainly Turbine provided better NOC control than COdemasters on launch. The US launch was flawless, the EU launch, while better than many, had quite a few complete network outages.