| Description | North America (NA) | Europe (EU) |
|---|---|---|
| High population | Glamdring | Orcrist |
| High population, roleplaying optional but encouraged | Peregrin | Meriadoc |
| Newest, lower population | Sting | Grond |
The NA servers are located in Las Vegas and the EU servers are located in Amsterdam. Your physical proximity to these locations will greatly affect your latency. A high latency will manifest itself as “lag”, a delay between your input an seeing the result on screen.
You can try making a character at each location and check your ping by enabling Show Connexion Status in the Options > UI Settings menu (note the Tolkienesque spelling of “connexion”!)
If you wish to regularly partake in group activities such as dungeons, raids or PvMP (player vs monster player), then a higher population server is recommended.
When a server is overcrowded, there may be “lag spikes” when the server struggles to process all the simultaneous activity, and everything freezes for a few seconds. This affects the highly populated servers more than the lower population ones.
As of May 2026, server lag is generally not a problem most of the time. The weekly server reboot occurs every Wednesday and is timed to keep the server as lag-free as possible over the weekend.
Having the highest non-roleplaying populations, many consider Glamdring and Orcrist to have a larger number of poorly behaved individuals in World Chat. Players on these servers often choose to join kinships where they can chat without dealing with internet toxicity.
The writer of this article plays on a North American server and has relied on external sources to obtain information on the EU servers.