May I direct you to this page

http://www.lotro.com/free.php?

If you scroll down you will see that "community features" is listed there as one of the things they are promoting the game on the basis of.

If it is included in the game world or not they promote MyLOTRO as part of the game. You have to have a game account of some kind to use MyLOTRO. It is a service available and working for some of their customers yet totally broken and non functional to others. It seems to be largely us EU migrants who are affected and I don't like the way we are being left as second class customers. Get everything working equally and properly for all your customers. That has to be the priority and Turbine are simply not putting the resources into doing it. If they want to build an expansion pack fine but have enough people on board to fix the things you already have that just don't work. They are ticking off a huge number of customers that they really needed to spend these first few months impressing because very few people I know were happy about the transfer (and those that were seemed to be glad mostly on the basis of finally getting MyLOTRO).