I play LOTRO too!

Never thought I would play a MMO at all, in part because I had heard about the sexism and homophobia in WoW, but I read interesting things about LOTRO last year, and decided to try it. I was pleasantly surprised both by how much fun it is and the tone in-game.

I made a male hobbit as my first character because I had heard about people randomly being creepy to females in these games, but all my characters since have been female, and I have had no trouble at all in a year, apart from people assuming I am male. Found a good kin with a female leader and several other female players, and now I'm an officer so I can potentially tell people off in the kinchat if they get strange, which is nice for my peace of mind.

The only place that is a bit dubious at times is the globallff chat (I'm on Laurelin, which is supposedly nicer than some other servers), but if people there get into the sexism/racism/using "gay" as an insult thing, people tend to put them down, or I remove the chat from my view for half an hour until the current troll has lost its vigour. So far I've seen nothing worse than what one can get on almost any website one visits, which isn't perfect, but still a lot better than what I thought.