I had a lot of fun back when LOTRO was new, before the Moria expansion. It was an atmospheric MMO (the soundtrack was brilliant) with a lot of classic Tolkien locations (I remember being really impressed by Weathertop), and it was pretty difficult too.
But that was almost 10 years ago, I'm sure everything is a one hit kill now and basically, everything is shit.
The Moria expack is fun to go through, Mirkwood is kinda meh as I felt much of the expack revolved around grouping and you don't get to do that much I found. Isengard one was ok, I quit soon after it came out. The same problem hits once you max out, as there is almost no raiding and end game, just grinding for gear since the gutted the old raid mechanics.
When I played back in 2012 old raids were only done for the storyline quest for lowbies, house items and different gear appearances that still look neat, only one raid was in Isengard, against a dragon, and only a couple guilds bothered with it.
If you plan to just have something neat to lv through and enjoy for a few months, it's good from beginning to Lothlorien, but when you get into Mirkwood proper the novelty drops off steeply. I'd recommend purchasing zones outside of it to work through the levels it deals with, IIRC the zones south of the Moria western entrance tackle them and maintain the old feel of the game.
I, too, play video games only for their worst elements.
Pve-fag who got wrecked, ganked and full looted detected. But seriously, in a MMORPG you either do pve or pvp or both, I never cared about pve because it's something I can have in single player rpgs, pvp is the defining and most interesting aspect of mmorpgs for me. I don't get how pvp is necessarily ''the worst element'' of mmorpgs since you have shitloads of them all with combat and pvp of varying quality.
I love PvP servers, they have a very different climate. I wasn't good at EQ PvP at all, but the social changes PvP had on Rallos Zek allowed it to never be boring. From the typically asshole PKs to the high number of antis that actually sought PvP in an anti way and kept the server form degenerating into a griefing hellhole like Sullon (and every emu server since) turned into.
Atm I'm on Phinigel, but I wouldn't have even bothered had it not been with rejoining my old RZ guild there and the very anti-PK attitude of it that is very laid back, competent and nice to everyone. On Ragefire and Lockjaw we made a huge impression by being about the only non-asshole top raid guild while our raid leader gained massive respect for being the only one that wasn't a man child that remained calm and level headed when surrounded the idiots that ran most of the other guilds.