After 24 hours in The Lord of the Rings Online I'm level 26. I haven't finished the Lone Lands yet – there's at least two quest hubs still to go – but while I haven't crossed the Last Bridge I've seen it from afar.
I've died 5 times. Once from carelessness back in Ered Luin; twice from recklessness, when I decided to wander into the Great Barrow on my own; and twice from the same elite mob in the aptly named Circle of Blood. It was several levels higher than me, and I did kill it on the third attempt.
I say died, but in LOTRO you don't die, you retreat. That's why you – and everything else – have morale instead of hit points, and presumably why you can shout mobs to death... er, retreat. Except you are explicitly sent to kill mobs, often and in extremely large numbers, so it's probably best not to overthink it, or think about it at all.
So I actually died less in LOTRO than I did in World of Warcraft, and yet I'm not inclined to slam this game for that in the same way I did WoW, for a couple of reasons. The first one being that LOTRO lets me push ahead if I want to, and the only downside to fighting mobs of a higher level is they might drop gear I can't use yet.
The second reason it doesn't bother me as much is that LOTRO is just a nice game to spend time in. The pace is leisurely, the narrative is about as clearly defined good vs evil as you can get, and by some magic even the most mundane vistas of hills and distant ruins are wonderful to look upon.
And you'll see a lot of that scenery because the zones are huge. This isn't a game where you blow through a zone in a couple of hours. Take your time, it says. Enjoy the journey, because it's all about the journey.
It's also a game that really benefits from being a Lord of the Rings game. A lot of the mechanics and most of the quest design are decidedly old school MMOing, but the evocation of Middle-Earth is so good that you often don't notice, and the echoes of Tolkien's work adds a sense of depth, of weight, of quality and class to the game that a more generic setting just wouldn't have.
Now Amazon have put their weight behind a new in-development MMO that shares the same setting. There's no doubt it'll be technically superior to this aging title, but will it realise the world of Middle-Earth as well as LOTRO does? Only time will tell, but I wouldn't be surprised if, in the long term, this game remains the definitive Middle-Earth MMO.
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