The animation can be skipped by deleting "<LOTRO Install Folder>/raw/<Your game language (en, de, or fr)>/logo/turbine_logo.bik"

My messing around failed to uncover a clean way to skip the pregame ad/"press escape" screen. One could make a plugin with a startup script for OneLauncher to do the escape key spamming on game launch pretty easily, though. Might add a similar, but more precise solution to Onelauncher in the future, if some potenttial features involving similar tech get implemented.

Hi and thank you for the tweak about the animated logo, however, it in my case, lotro restores it on the next launch.

Easiest way I've found to get around that with the default launcher should be to:
1. Replace "turbine_logo.bik" with a file the client still recognizes but won't play an animation. You can just create a copy of "lotro_ad_pregame.jpg" and rename it to "turbine_logo.bik".
2. Run the launcher with the "-skiprawdownload" and "-disablepatch" command line arguments.

Downside is you would have to run the launcher without the arguments and redo the change to "turbine_logo.bik" when there's a game update. Of course, the skipped patching also speeds up the launch process, and the change to "turbine_logo.bik" could easily get automated as part of your launch shortcut.

Only other easy option I found is to use a script to delete "turbine_logo.bik" a few seconds after running the launcher. That could potentially fail during the launch right after a game update, though, since patching would still be in progress when the file is deleted.

@June Stepp

Thank you :)