Environment is superb... characters not so much. Questing follows a very familiar formula, and Monster Play is broken.
First off, characters appearances are uninspired, and the gear they equip all looks like garbage. Metal armor doesn't have an armor look to it at all. Everything looks like it's made out of cloth. Shoes look ridiculous, approaching the appearance of traditional clogs straight out of Holland. When I win an item from a difficult fight, the last thing I want is for it to not stand out in a sea of other gear. Whoever was responsible for designing this stuff failed miserably.
Next we move on to questing. Questing is about the only way to earn decent XP and advance a character. Grinding is almost out of the question since fighting a mob results in very negligible gains in XP. The problem here is questing almost always falls under the old stigma of "FInd person X" or "Kill X number of Y mobs." It gets old very fast. To make matters worse, you can wrap up one quest that asked you to kill a mob over and over, only to complete the quest which unlocks another quest that asks you to go right back and kill the same mob again, over and over. You can see where levels of tedium will set in rather quickly.
One of the few things that sets LotRO apart from other MMOs is the ability to play as a monster on a zone specifically set aside for Monster Player vs. Player battles. It's truly an excellent and fun concept. The only problem is it's horribly broken, and suffers from many bugs that have lingered for multiple months without being fixed. The play is so imbalanced at this point that unless you have 3 to 4 times the number of monsters versus the number of regular players, you'll wind up being massacred.
Monster Play vs. Player is one area where the game that could truly break out of the typical MMO mold, yet falls flat on its face. I believe Turbine is banking that the end game community will be satisfied with re-rolling another character to experience the game through leveling a different job, as opposed to the challenge of facing another person in combat. Only time will tell if placing their bets on PvE content will be a winner. It's just a shame the one of the most unique aspects of the game has been ignored and (especially with the Evendim patch) ruined by poor balancing choices on Turbine's part.