LotRo is and always was a nice game for players that like its story. And to a certain degree, it gave raiders nice content, too.
However, with time moving on, some issues get harder.

As I see it, currently, the worst parts of lotro are itemization, performance and the lack of reaction to playersuggestions.
In detail:

Itemization:
-The System of imbued legendary items is a complete mess for anyone that is not at the maximum potential at any time. Catching up is litterally impossible and even though players asked for a chance since years, there is still no change, just the "announcement" of a likely rework another year in the future.
-The distribution of stats and the mainstat rework made mainstats on any endgame items ridiculously weak. Therefore, the balance of stats on any highlevel items is totally flawed. This has been reported several times and to my knowledge not even been aknowledged by the DEVs. As a result, itemization is heavily dependant on essences again, because non-essence-items are simply bad.

Performance has been an ongoing issue for lotro since Rohan. For a game as old as lotro, simply running around in the landscape should not lead to rubberbanding, lagging, hitches or disconnects, still it does so regularly for many players. A mmo must run smoothly on most machines, not just on certain setups of a few lucky players.

Players made lots of good suggestions to reduce the issues with itemization or other problems, but the only real reaction we get is whenever it comes to class-balance-rework and discussions with Vastin. Other than that, the only reactions we get are "yea, we know, we work on it (since ever)", but mostly nothing. There isn't even any reaction, if players ask to fix bugs themselves, for free, which could easily be done with localization issues. Thats sad.



As a result of the aforementioned issues, in those rare moments when I can still motivate myself for playing, I see less and less players in my kinship and generally in the game. Going on like this wont be good for the game. Please, SSG, change your path and do something. Or just finally declare lotro as "in maintenance" officially.