Latest LOTRO deal is a free 14-day VIP trial (note you need to manually cancel to avoid auto-billing. You also have to trust Turbine with your credit card again. So maybe "hopefully free" would be more accurate).
For those of you unfamiliar with the differences between DDO and LOTRO costs, this is pretty big news for cheapskates who play LOTRO (and haven't sprung for VIP yet). To put it simply, premium doesn't buy you much in LOTRO: you have to have logged your character in sometime as a VIP (I'm pretty sure it is mentioned above). Once you do that, you get:
Fast Travel (LOTRO teleportation service. Remember that LOTRO is a landscape game where you have to virtually move your character around for each quest. Fast travel is critical and this can't be bought with TP).
5 Inventory bags: LOTRO doesn't have any coin lords: you either buy your bags with TP, go VIP (once...), or do without.
Unlocked gold cap: Unlike DDO, LOTRO characters never outgrow their gold cap through leveling. You either live with it, bump it up to 5 Gold as premium (gold is somewhat valuable in LOTRO), or get rid of it through VIP or ~350TP.
Unlocked virtues: While this is an invitation to grind (see above posts), it is pretty much expected for raiding and charged per character (expensive with alts) otherwise.
If you are level 20+ you can get riding skill as a quest reward (note that while horses can be bought in-game, you need "riding skill" that has to be bought with real money (or this deal), and those 95 TP add up with a few alts.
[you also get premium out of this deal. It gets you only one character slot (Moria, part of the quad pack includes two more). It lets you mail gold (although they just added "bags of gold" at the vendors, so you have ways around this while f2p) and a few other required things. I'm pretty sure premium helps, but mainly expect to shell out real money shortly after hitting 30th (out of 90) level.]
For LOTRO players already starting out, it is a great deal. For everybody else, it is basically $15 off the minimum price of LOTRO. Note that they recently had the quad pack (all the expansions save the most recent) at half off instead of the usual $40 (black friday), so I'd probably included that as the rest of the "required" costs. Throw in the mithril edition* ($20) if you aren't into deeds and have a bunch of TP to spare.
*
http://www.impulsedriven.com/products/ESD-IMP-W2777(This shows up for $10 a few times a year. It missed Black Friday so I assume it is due for a sale sooner or later).