The problem lie with the Codemasters only part of the infrastructure and thus does not affect the US.

Codemasters Billing system is unable to keep up with the LOTRO login servers. This causes a back log of requests which at busy times can simply lock up the entire login process.

They are working at improving the system, but because it's all in code rather than just hardware, it takes time to write, test, debug and finally deploy.

As a IT consultant working for a company that specialises in Systems Integration, this particular problem sounds all too familiar to me! The bottle neck is often that old legacy system sitting in the corner which isn't cheap or easy to replace. I guess if Codemasters are serious about remaining the publishers of MMOGs in the EU, that system will need some serious buffage!

Check the LOTRO EU forums for Satines post about the above. :)
 

For the record the servers did come up again at about 22:00 (GMT) last night. Not much use for those of us with jobs to go to the following morning. Being too late to begin
questing Throg and a few kinsmen went on a virtual piss-up in the Prancing Pony .... and yes it was as sad as it sounds.
 

Must have been one of those 'if you're already in, you're ok' situations, because I played all night without any problems. 'Night' being slightly subjective to my timezone and sleeping schedule.

Had an absolutely amazing time too. First time into the Great Barrows and finished every single quest in there in that one run (one member of the group stayed behind as I mapped back to Bree, turned in one quest, got the follow up and went back in to finish that too). It was great!
 

As a former Turbine customer, this particular problem sounds plenty familiar to me also.

Christ almighty Tobold, play Anarchy Online or something.
 

As another former Turbine Customer, this problem also sounds ominously familar as well...

I will not play another Turbine/Codemaster game again - I don't care what MMO it is - their support of EU customers is pathetically abysmal.
 

i don't care where the problem lies, but it seems to me they still value the european-market as inferior than the us-market (blizzard,soe,codemasters, whatever)

i mean, only blizzard could have made the excuse "sorry, we weren't prepared for such a big success" in their early days. codemaster could have seen this coming for ages.
good ip, mmorpg-market is grown enormously.