If you are encountering an issue where the game launcher gives an "Internal Error" upon launch, please check lotro.com, ddo.com or the LOTRO/DDO Forums to see if you are trying to log into the game during scheduled downtime.
If you are still experiencing this message when the servers are not down for maintenance, and/or ddo.com related web sites (www.ddo.com, forums.ddo.com etc) show a "Down for maintenance" page (or page not found) constantly, you may have put in place a 'hosts' file workaround in the past that is causing this.
To check for and correct this, attempt the steps below:
First, open Notepad as an administrator by clicking on the Windows Start button and selecting All programs > Accessories then finding and right-clicking the "Notepad" icon and choose run as administrator from the menu*.
* Windows 8/10 users swipe in from the right (Click on "Start" on Win10) and click into search and type "Notepad" (no quotes) and in the list of results above you should find Notepad listed, right-click it there to choose "run as administrator".
Once it is open that way, use its File > Open menu to browse to "C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc" by first clicking on the "Computer" icon on the left then double-clicking on the "C:\" drive (it might display as "Local Disk C:") and then open "Windows" > "System32" > "Drivers" > "ETC". (That last one is a folder that is named "etc").
At the bottom right-corner of the "open" dialog, change the file types option from "Text Documents (*.txt)" to "All Files (*.*)". Hosts should now be visible; click on it and click open.
Once the file is open, look for any lines that mention a ddo.com site. You may see some lines like these in your file:
74.201.102.11 http://patch.ddo.com
74.201.102.11 http://patch-lm.ddo.com
74.201.102.13 http://gls.ddo.com
74.201.102.13 http://gls-auth.ddo.com
74.201.102.13 http://gls-lm.ddo.com
74.201.102.13 http://gls-auth-lm.ddo.com
74.201.102.42 http://forums.ddo.com
74.201.103.43 http://www.ddo.com
If you see lines like that, change them by adding the pound sign (#) to the beginning of the line (and only lines that mention ddo.com pages!) so that they look like this:
# 74.201.102.11 http://patch.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.11 http://patch-lm.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.13 http://gls.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.13 http://gls-auth.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.13 http://gls-lm.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.13 http://gls-auth-lm.ddo.com
# 74.201.102.42 http://forums.ddo.com
# 74.201.103.43 http://www.ddo.com
Once they have been changed like that, click on File > "Save" in Notepad (if you receive an access denied error at this point, Notepad may not be running as administrator). Once saved, exit out of Notepad but before rebooting the computer, perform a 'flushdns' per these final steps:
Click on "Start" > All Programs > Accessories again, but this time right-click on "Command Prompt" and again use run as administrator.*
* Windows 8 or 10 users hold down the Windows key and press X and choose "Command Prompt (Admin)" from the menu list that comes up.
Once the command prompt window opens, type "ipconfig /flushdns" (no quotes) and hit enter. You should receive a 'successfully flushed the dns cache' message back. Once that occurs, reboot the computer and then re-attempt to load www.ddo.com to test.
If you continue to encounter issues loading ddo.com related sites, please follow up with our Technical Support team.