Mer­ric at A Casual Stroll to Mor­dor reports that LOTRO’s Japan­ese servers, Aeg­los and Narya, have shut down. ven­erab, a player and LOTRO blog­ger in Japan, was nice enough to com­ment on their post and explain a bit about what’s going on. Appar­ently some of the Japan­ese play­ers are plan­ning to move over to Elendilmir, a North Amer­i­can server, but they’ll have to buy the game. Much to my sur­prise, in Japan, the client is free and they only charge a sub­scrip­tion fee. Any fees that were paid in advance will be refunded.

We never heard much about the Japan­ese release of the game, even though it hap­pened quite a while ago. I won­der how the game is far­ing in Korea … It seems there will always be a large bar­rier for West­ern MMORPGs in the East.

It appears that the Japan­ese LOTRO blog site has gone down as well, which is unfor­tu­nate. MMeOw received a sur­pris­ing amount of traf­fic from http://​lupin​.lotroblog​.jp which appeared to be an offi­cial blog for the game over there, venerab’s blog, which is now at http://​lotrolotro​.seesaa​.net.

It’s a shame, but I hope those that want to keep play­ing will feel wel­come on Elendilmir.

Good catch, Mer­ric! And thanks to ven­erab for the updates!