An important bit of information recently posted on the official forums may concern those players that wish to purchase a game outside of the world region to which they intend to actually play from.  The post goes into how Turbine and Codemasters have split up the services for the game, based upon your region in the world.  Do not worry, this won't affect those players in California vs. those in Maine :P.  Below is a snippet of the article:

As you may know, the LOTRO Pre-order is now available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. European customers in countries* served by Codemasters will be able to Pre-order LOTRO both in-store and online in the coming weeks. As the game begins to enter global distribution we wanted to take a moment to explain how the game is operated internationally.

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.

Click here for the full article.