Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II came out a few days ago to lackluster response from players, despite stellar reviews from the press. Sure, the controls are great, but the game is not without it's problems. Day 1 the game had to be patched due to excessive frame-rate dipping. The patch didn't fix the problem entirely.

Then there is the problem many have with not being able to log into the EA servers to play on XBL. After being hammered with calls, Microsoft decided to make an official statement on their website on how to alleviate this problem.

"If you are playing this game on Xbox Live, and you get hung up at the 'Connecting to EA Servers' screen, we are aware of the issues and working with EA on this. In the meantime you can get online the following way:

1.) Sign in and start the game
2.) Select Xbox Live
3.) This is where you will sit “Connecting To EA Servers”, at this point, press the 360 button on the controller and sign out, but don’t go back to the dashboard
4.) Once signed out, sign back in again.
5.) Go back to the game, it will say “the active gamer profile has been signed out”, press A to continue.
6.) Select Xbox Live
7.) You get connected

Thanks for your patience as we work on addressing this.

Major Nelson Xbox Live Director of Programming"

There you have it folks, a rigged way to get past the problems until EA can roll out yet another patch for this game. Seems to me that this game wasn't ready. What happened? Oh well. Feel free to voice your opinion or experiences here in the comments section.

Source: http://forums.xbox.com/5267853/ShowPost.aspx