The 2015 Producer's Letter came out yesterday.  Here are the highlights of the letter and recent dev posts:

• The level cap will remain at 100, though player feedback could change this plan.


• Osgiliath will come in the first half of the year and Minas Tirith in the second half.  Minas Tirith will not be an expansion, but rather large region.


• They will be working on major bugs and quality of life improvements in between these major releases.


• The legendary item system will change after the Osgiliath update--level 100 LIs will now continue to gain XP and you do not need to deconstruct them


• We'll have new instance cluster with 3 & 6 person fellowships for Osgiliath, but there is no new raid or Big Battle in sight.


• There may be a new PvMP map in Osgiliath.


• Sound engineers are looking into the music system and they hope to have it fixed for the next update.  When it is ready it will go to Bullroarer for testing


• They will be improving server transfer tools to get people over to more populous servers (such as Crickhollow) for free.  People will be able to move characters or entire accounts over to one of the preferred servers (I believe Crickhollow should be on that list).  Transfers between US and EU servers are possible, but unlikely.  It seems that entire kinships can move (don't worry, SB will remain a Crickhollow kinship!).  There will be no forced merge or server combination, and players will choose their new server.  Some servers will eventually close (once again, I believe Crick will be a recommended server, and am almost certain that it will not be closed), but this is after a long grace period.  Characters will remain available for transfer indefinitely.


• They will be upgrading hardware and moving to a better location for internet traffic for US servers.  EU servers will be moved to Amsterdam, but will continue to be on Turbine's upgrade schedule.