Turbine Takes Over European Operations on Lord of the Rings Online

Codemasters, who have been curating the Lord of the Rings Online business here in Europe are handing things over to Turbine who are expanding global operation.

“After 4 years of successful publishing and operations we are proud to be handing over a vibrant and healthy service to Turbine,” said David Solari, Vice President and General Manager of Codemasters Online.  ”I’d like to thank our many customers over the years for their commitment and look forward to bringing more service-based entertainment to them in the future.”

They didn’t really say why the change was taking place. It could so that, moving forward, all the servers can be brought in line and this could also facilitate quicker patching and updating on all of the servers. It could also make for some interesting cross-server play, or, perhaps is the first step towards consolidating players into less servers overall which is what it really sounds like.

“We will be providing free account transfers to our new global service and players will be notified when the transfer utility is available,” said Kate Paiz, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online.

Turbine is merging the US and EU services into one mega-service we’re calling the LOTRO Global Service.

All current players of the LOTRO service operated by Codemasters will need to migrate their account to the new global service. This simple one-time process will allow current players to easily move game access and characters to the global service.

Wait for the official migration process to start. If you create an account on the Turbine service prior to the launch of the global service you will not be able to merge that account and your Codemasters account.

Your Turbine and Codemasters accounts will remain separate, just the LOTRO account will switch over.

After you have completed the account migration process, all of your characters and items will be available to you. You need only log in to the game and they’ll be there waiting for you, right where you left them (even the server names are staying the same).

Turbine will not automatically access or transfer your private billing information as part of this process. During the migration you will be asked to provide your billing information to us.

All existing Codemasters Lifetime accounts will be converted to Turbine Lifetime accounts.