While American LOTRO users have been sitting back and questing throughout Middle Earth without a care in the world, the EU lot have had to endure up until now.
Codemasters announced that the reason for the delay was a contractual dispute that has been resolved, allowing them to press on with the release of the F2P servers today (November 2) to coincide with the launch of Book 2: Ride of the Grey Company.
Now EU players can experience LOTRO for free, with the option to buy additional items from the in-game store. Said items are entirely optional, though in some cases they can get around some of the restrictions imposed upon free account users. Micro-transactions seem to be a profitable business model nowadays.
Along with this is the chance to subscribe and pay for VIP status which removes a number of hinderances such as limited quest packs as well as giving you an extra 500 Turbine Points per month to spend in store.
The last time Turbine introduced this for Dungeons and Dragons Online they saw a swell in the number of people playing. To accommodate for this two new servers have been added for LOTRO, namely Withywindle (an English server) and Anduin (a German server).
If you had some time on your hands or are just curious, download the game at community.lotro-europe.com.
