Today Turbine has announced that it will expand its global operations and assume full control of The Lord of the Rings Online in Europe beginning June 1st, 2011.
The press release posted today states that Codemasters will continue to operate LOTRO until June 1st when European players will begin to migrate.
Included in this announcement was some FAQs for EU players wondering what will take place. I thought it may be helpful to highlight some of these FAQs in a quick list.
- Do not make a Turbine account now. Wait for migration instructions as accounts cannot be merged. If you currently have both a Turbine and Codemasters account, they will remain separate.
- All your characters and items will migrate with you. This includes your Turbine Points balance. It is suggested to not be posting items to the Auction House before migration as there is no guarantee you’ll be able to collect your money/items after migration.
- All existing lifetime accounts will remain lifetime accounts on the new Turbine Global Service.
- Existing VIP accounts will be honored until the subscription period ends, at that time they will need to update your billing information with Turbine. Good news is you’ll have the option to pay multi-month again!
- Additional servers with the same names and language designations as currently on the Codemasters service are being added to the Turbine Global Service. You are not being merged onto existing North American servers.
- Game Time Cards by Codemasters will not work after migration. Be sure to apply all your codes before migration!
- EU players will have access to my.lotro and all the goodies it brings including the blogs, character panels and lotteries!
- No posts from the Codemasters forums will be migrated. You may want to take some time to gather up important stickies. Turbine suggests adding useful and important guides/information to the Lore-book once you are migrated to the Turbine service.
These changes are only affecting the EU (Codemasters) players. Existing players on the current North American Turbine servers will continue to operate as normal.
More information will come as we get closer to migration time. I would also like to take a moment to welcome our European friends to the Turbine community! We are excited to have you join our forums, my.lotro blogs and more!
April 26, 2011 at 8:50 am
Don’t forget that LOTRO Russia’s and LOTRO China’s (still in paid closed beta after years) regional operators are not being merged. Turbine’s scope of operations won’t quite be “global”.
April 26, 2011 at 9:04 am
Wow… didn’t saw THAT coming *_*
April 26, 2011 at 9:04 am
hihi. I knew it since the cancellation of the 3-month-subs. But let us see if this is good or bad for the non-english-cleints of LotRo. Codemaster’s localization was always not 100% … but let us hope that it does not get worse.
I would like to migrate my numerous guides in German into the Turbine Forums or Lorebook … but up to now nobody at Turbine was able to tell me if I am able to make a German post in the Lorebook … or if this will ever be possible …
April 26, 2011 at 9:09 am
I have no idea why you couldn’t put it in any other language? It’s just a text wiki. You provide the content.
We already have bloggers on my.lotro who write posts in French I assume with no issues. Turbine also posted the press release in French and German.
April 26, 2011 at 9:19 am
Turbines German FAQ is flawless as far I can tell so let’s hope for improvement. Maybe they will even finally translate the third starter quest for dwarves and elves (unchcanged since starter zone revamp – always lets me wonder if they want to deter people before they consume to much server load by offering a non-translated quest there…).
April 26, 2011 at 9:50 am
Hm. thanks for this info. My last PM from Sapience read as if no non-English texts are allowed. Hm … perhaps I simply try and include one of the guides an see how (if) they react.
April 26, 2011 at 9:52 am
Perhaps they’re planning on a section for other language player guides so they can be more easily searched for those who speak that language?
April 26, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Duwis has posted on player created guides in languages other than english here: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?&postid=5351817#post5351817
April 26, 2011 at 9:35 am
I say move it (while there’s time
). Any language issues can wait after the merge is done.
April 26, 2011 at 9:08 am
Might be a good time to pick up the hard-copy MoM expansion in Europe if you don’t have it as that will cease to work after the move… I can see CM doing some good deals over the next few weeks to try and maximise revenue. If they are allowed to do that though
April 27, 2011 at 12:27 am
seth: what do you mean moria will stop working after the migration? why would that happen?
April 27, 2011 at 9:37 am
According to the FAQ, you won’t be able to apply European retail keys or game time cards once Turbine take over. So make sure to apply those old keys to your account before June!
May 2, 2011 at 7:47 am
Thanks LD that makes sense.
since i bought moria and mirkwood in game with actual turbine points that i’ve payed for, i’m guessing there will be no problems.
at least i hope
April 26, 2011 at 9:15 am
Once had a minor problem and tried to contact the support …
Would you believe it that I never got a response whatsoever (and I didn’t ask once and had screenshots)
Makes me a bit sceptical this merge of services will be for the greater good :/
April 26, 2011 at 9:15 am
I’m a bit sad to be honest (and very surprised), I will miss Codies much.
It looks like it should be a big change but it probably won’t feel like much in the end, on the server side at least nothing will change. I’m already a regular on the US forums and so the only issue is that I can’t merge my two accounts together.
April 26, 2011 at 9:24 am
As another player who has had accounts with both Codemasters and Turbine for many years, I agree there are a few things I will miss about Codemasters. One thing Codemasters has always had going for it is its commitment to customer care. That’s a quality I’ve always found somewhat lacking from Turbine, despite their “Powered by our Fans” motto.
For the most part, Codemasters has also been quite closely involved with its community, going as far as to provide GM involvement with in-game events. Codemasters has taken the initiative in situations where Turbine might have taken a defensive or reactive approach.
I’m sure in the end, Codemasters customers will face a few new frustrations, but also have a few new benefits available to them.
April 26, 2011 at 9:24 am
OMG! That is great news! I’m so excited to finally be able to use mylotro…it’s about time that Turbine takes over, Codemasters didn’t do the best job. That news just made my day
April 26, 2011 at 9:24 am
We over here are a bit worried. CM has always been about providing good quality service, even if that meant waiting a bit for releases until they had thoroughly tested the releases on their servers. With Turbine’s track record, I am not sure I will be wanting to merge until we are sure no harm will be done to our accounts in the process.
Also, with the servers being moved to the US, how will that affect lag and service in general? And for the RPers among us – Turbine never enforced RP, will we be seeing an influx of griefers on the RP servers? (Of course, that worry also came up in the f2p update, and so far that has not been a huge problem…)
Anyway! We’ll be missing the good folks at CM! Let’s hope the merge is for the better in the end
April 26, 2011 at 9:25 am
Does this mean that we would be able to create new chars in European servers with our actual Turbine account?
April 26, 2011 at 9:28 am
Turbine are working on using one client to access both US and EU servers, but they won’t confirm if this will happen just yet.
April 26, 2011 at 9:52 am
I think so!
April 26, 2011 at 6:39 pm
The “European Server” will be in Boston, like all the others.
April 29, 2011 at 1:48 am
No way the European game servers will be in Boston – would be too laggy – but ingame-shop/logging/account will probably be directed to same servers in NA.
April 26, 2011 at 10:04 am
My Google-Fu is failing me this morning. Somewhere I thought you linked to a way to get the Founder’s in-game pack benefits over on LotrO EU . I took advantage of this at the time, and with the incoming merger I thought if it was available still it might be nice to share with anyone who’d considered doing a second account.
April 26, 2011 at 10:41 am
I have no idea if this is still active. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/06/heres-free-stuff-for-lotro-eu-newbies/
April 26, 2011 at 11:07 am
Not active. Thanks for pulling it up so I could check though! CM accounts though, still get the 250TP starting bonus that we no longer get in the US.
April 26, 2011 at 10:13 am
A bit sad to leave the Codies that have, in my opinion, been really good to us EU players and happy to know we will finally be able to use the my.lotro features (although that is one very VERY slow loading page!)…
Yeah we can participate in the lotteries finally! Shame we could not for the Anniversary Tokens!
April 26, 2011 at 10:33 am
Wait, will we be able to pay turbine using our non NA cards without all of the billing problems ?
With the billing changes I was not able to go VIP on the Turbine servers and I am not going to fax them my card details, thank you very much…
April 26, 2011 at 11:27 am
Cathdien, I would assume that they will have to make changes for that, they have to keep customers after all. As to how that will happen, I can’t say.
April 26, 2011 at 2:17 pm
What I would like to know is if lifetime memberships are still available from Codemasters until June 1st…
April 26, 2011 at 4:44 pm
I knew as soon as Codemasters would make a improvement to the game that Turbine did not intend to do, Turbine would pull the license. After all the time they spent to work out a deal for free to play. I can not see Codemasters working out a few month deal to just hold the game instead of a few years deal. I do really think then when Codemasters improved the customer service and started to rollback hacked accounts, that Turbine had no choice but to follow and decided they had no interest in a company that would force them to change their set in stone policies. Time to pull the license.
I am sure there are also other reasons to take over the EU area but none of them stand out as much as this in many eyes.
April 26, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Does this mean we are going to get a bunch of new servers or just more people on the ones we have?
April 26, 2011 at 5:32 pm
My only slight concern here is what if you have a turbine account and CM account, that both use the same login details?
Anyone seen any answers about this?
April 26, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Here’s some serious wishful thinking that they allow server transfers to and from our new community members.
April 27, 2011 at 12:20 am
And there was much rejoicing.
April 27, 2011 at 4:37 pm
This is great news I look forward to integrating with our US cousins
April 29, 2011 at 9:21 am
‘…Additional servers with the same names and language designations as currently on the Codemasters service are being added to the Turbine Global Service. You are not being merged onto existing North American servers.’
But no mention whether the Roleplay (RP) designations will also remain? Will Turbine honour Codemaster’s RP guidlines and practices? For example the ability to ticket a silly character name such as ‘Pixels’ and expect character to be renamed.
May 3, 2011 at 7:35 am
This is AMAZING news! I stopped playing around the time Free-to-play started because I was just too frustrated with Codemasters and I didn’t want to spend all the money to get all the content on the US servers and restart all my characters.
I have now started playing again and cannot wait to be rid of the Codemasters incompetence! Will be great to *finally* have everything that our US friends do! Thank you Turbine for saving us!!!!