Lord of the Rings Online: International Service Details Revealed

Turbine and Codemasters have announced how the service will work for international customers of Lord of the Rings Online. We've known for quite some time that Codemasters would operate the game in Europe, but today confirms that Europeans (not to mention chunks of the Middle-East and Africa) will not be able to play on the US servers.

Our own JR "razor" Sutich has a rant on what this means for guilds (nothing good) on his site. It is an understandable business move, especially for Codemasters, but seems a bit antiquated in this global culture we're supposedly all now living in.

In North America and Oceania, Turbine is the service operator. We work with two publishers to support our service - Midway in the US and Codemasters in Oceania. In Europe, Codemasters is both the publisher and the service operator.

What this means is that the version of the game you can play is determined by the service operator that supports your region. Since the service operators maintain completely separate billing, hosting, and support systems it is not possible to allow players to access both services - they're just not compatible with each other.

The full post is here.