A Casual Stroll to Mordor

Today Turbine has announced that the ability to transfer your characters from the Codemasters service to Turbine is closing.

In a report by the BBC, Codemasters has confirmed that “the personal details of thousands of people have been stolen…” which includes names, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. However, thankfully payment information was not compromised.

We received the following email with pictures of the Codemasters final party from Aaron of the Evernight server and thought it would be fun to share while our EU friends are waiting to be migrated.

Turbine has launched it’s European LOTRO Account Migration page! Time for our EU friends to prepare to join all of us into one happy LOTRO family!

It is the final weekend of Codemasters running The Lord of the Rings European service before the June 1st migration to Turbine Global Service. Satine posted a message on the Codemasters forums today on behalf of Codemasters Online.

With the the migration to the Turbine Global Service quickly arriving, Codemasters has announced some services that will be shutting down before the migration.

Zombie Columbus stopped by the forums the other day to further discuss proposed upcoming changes to the Hunter class with Isengard

Our friend Justin “Syp” Olivetti has a new article out reviewing the two 3-man instances coming in Update 3, Halls of Night and Inn of the Forsaken. It’s a really good read and you’ll want to take a moment and give it a gander so you know what to expect. As an added bonus he went through the instance with Aaron “Rowan” Campbell and Joe “jwbarry” Barry, so he’s got some insights to the instances that you might not have been aware of.

Yeah, it’s a cheesy title, but I couldn’t resist! All thanks to Caelas for pointing out today that Sapience posted on the Codemasters forum that EU players transitioning over to Turbine’s system will not need to download or install a new client.

Sapience posted a word today addressing concerns from the EU players who currently reside on Codemaster role-play servers.

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.

Our friend Justin “Sypster” Olivetti over at Massively was able to interview Turbine’s Aaron Campbell and Adam Meresky and has a great post with a ton of great information in it.

Some great news to Codemaster’s players looking to buy Mirkwood or who bought Mirkwood with last week’s daily sale

A new competition has started for our friends in Codemasters land. You may have been following the Tolkien Tour they were posting on the Community Team blog.

Codemasters will be getting the latest patch for Echoes of the Dead tomorrow, Thursday. Servers will go down at 08.00 and be back up at 15.00 hours, UK time (BST).

Spring is here and the festival is in full swing and Codemasters is celebrating with a screenshot contest!

Installation of Echoes of the Dead has been completed on Codemasters servers. All worlds are now online and ready for use!

Codemasters has been able to test the hotfix launched by Turbine yesterday and have announced that Echoes of the Dead will launch on their system tomorrow!

The exclusive PAX East 2011 mount is revealed!

Codemasters has finished QA on the Echoes of the Dead content and it is cleared to launch tomorrow, March 22nd, 2011. Downtime is listed to last from 8am to 3pm GMT.

The official patch notes for Update 2, Echoes of the Dead, were released today!

Starting 18th March Codemasters is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a Double Bonus Points promotion. This offer expires on Monday 21st March, 2011. Note that the prices are in Euros. These promos are typically the best deal for points. The bigger the bundle you purchase, the greater the deal.

Update 2, Echoes of the Dead, brings a lot of content with it including a new part of the Epic Storyline. Jeff “MadeOfLions” Libby has put together another great developer diary not only detailing what we can expect to see as the epic storyline continues, but also discusses his work in helping to introduce the new Instance Cluster to LOTRO as well.