Ah.. I see.. mm..
But you don't have to get stuff in LOFTO right? I mean you can play without having to pay for something.. ?
Well yes and no. To put in WoW terms , imagine there are 5 classes , imagine only 3 of them are "free" , the other 2 you must buy. Now , while you play ,in WoW, you can say go to a lvl 40 zone called "Thousand Needles" OR to another lvl 40 zone called "Dustwallow Marsh" . Imagine you have to pay for the one zone, the other one is free. That is LOTRO .
So yes there is a "path" you can play that are free up to a point, but it will be a very specific path and not necessarily the most interesting path. There will also be a point where you might have to "grind" to level , because you don't have access to a zone that could have gotten you a few levels.
You will also have to buy the expansions eventually [ Moria and Mirkwood] which is i think lvl 50 onwards. I'm not sure whether you can level past 50 without the expansions [i bought it before the game went F2P, so i don't need to buy it again] , and last i checked it was quite expensive in the cash shop (well not expensive by Blizzard standards, but expensive considering how old it is, was like $25 per expac) . I think pricing per zone aka "quest pack" was like $10 per zone .
So it's very easy to start buying up these zones and spending $30 in a given month, where if you subscribed for $15 a month you would have had full access all the time. The advantage of buying a zone though is that you will have it "forever", if subscription stops you lose access to the paid zones, but i would ultimately still pay $15 and level unhindered through all the zones and hope i don't need to return to them
. Usually you don't return to lowbie zones in most MMOs.
)
(With my 384KB)