My experiences with the game.
This game, in and of itself, is a solid game. Nothing mindblowing to be had here, no matter how hard you look, but there is definitely a lot of solid gameplay to be had.
The classes: The classes range from quirky and unique to solid archetype classes. One of the biggest problems here, in my opinion, is the lack of a traditional healer. The bard fills this role, healing the party through his magical song and music... yeah... (wtf?) However, this isn't entirely without merit, as you can actually jam some notes on the various instruments, and having my friend running around healing by banging loudly on a cowbell provided quite a bit of hysterical laughter.
Skills: Like any other RPG/MMO all the classes are based around class-specific skills that propel them through the world, accomplishing whatever it is that their class is meant to accomplish. They handle "talents" in a very unique, though often annoying and occasionally useless way. Each race has a set of nine "racial" skills that they can unlock at various levels through various tasks. Every character also has several "class" talents they can earn through incredibly arduous tasks, as well as a couple "legendary" talent slots. (Forgive me if I've distorted some of these numbers, it's been awhile and that's really not the point anyway.) The main focus here are the class talents, which are earned by executing moves from a certain branch of skills for your class, thereby increasing your proficiency in that branch. For example, I was a Champion and I focused on skills that did sweeping or AoE damage, so I grabbed skills that helped boost those skills. Alternately, I could have focused on skills that boosted my ability to damage a single enemy.
Achievements and the like: The biggest bore and annoyance of this game was all the damn achievements you could do. Here the game really started to dull and rust, as these were no more than a series of progressively larger "Kill X number of X creature and earn X title" or "kill X and receive and boost to X". These numbers eventually got ridiculously high, and some of the required monsters had pitiful spawn times etc. Yes, I know. Stop QQ and grind just like everyone else. Trust me though, it gets to be beyond ridiculous with this game.
Crafting: The crafting system was marginally interesting. To their credit, there was at least some variation in results, which always makes things more interesting. However, like WoW and so many other MMO's, the items you could make were generally useless compared to those that you could find, and often took more time and resources to make than was worth it, giving the average player a great deal of reason to avoid the crafting scene altogether.
The story: A familiar story that most of us are familiar with, executed in an extraordinarily dull way. The game takes place (with the expac present) during the first book, roughly through their adventures in Moria. However, the game takes some serious liberties with just about every plot point imaginable, and to be honest, this only accomplishes the task of making you feel minimally immersed in a generic fantasy story line, and very removed from the lore of Lord of the Rings altogether.
The player base: In my opinion this was another one of the huge downsides of the game. The player base was definitely lacking when I played. Servers weren't exactly ghost towns, but there definitely was times that I was the only one in a major zone, and major cities were often virtually devoid of population. I'm sure there were some strong guilds to be found lurking around somewhere, but the level of organization was definitely far below that of other MMO's.
My conclusion: It's not a bad game by any means. The main thing that killed it for me was lack of player base and repetitive gameplay. Virtually any MMO, or game for that matter, will eventually run into the latter two of those problems, but for me, the onset of that feeling came pretty swiftly. The combat is pretty satisfying at times, but when you feel like you're doing the same thing for the hundreth time, then you realize that's because you are, you start to wonder what you're doing there in the first place. The content gets much better when you hit the end game side of things, but that does take quite a while, and a great deal of patience. Hope this was helpful, good luck.