I can agree on the above made statements. You can play it with not much money invested, too. I bought only 2 x Turbine Point cards yet, the rest was erned by getting "favour points" from within the game (plus I won a few ones for testing on Lamannia, the test server). The cards were a bit expensive in my opinion, but I thought that I wouldn't bu many anyway.
The really important thing is, imho, to wait for adventure packs on sale, and I mean : Discounted. Two or three months ago thatere was a single weekend with *all* low-lvel packs being discounted by 75%. And that weekend was easy to miss, because the only announcement about it was in the forums (they have a special announcements for the in-game "DDO Store" sub-forum there
http://forums.ddo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=233 and another one for general announcements :
http://forums.ddo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2 ).
So, even without owning all packs, there are so many adventures within the game I own right now that I don't know what to pick. Plus, there are sometimes even huge "wilderness" areas you can get lost in.
Regarding PUGs, I have nothing to add to dte's comment. In the forums someone put it like this : "PUGs are like a box of chocolate . There are many flavours within it ..." And that's right. Thre are *all* kinds of people out there, from the bad-mouthing, constantly gear-showing, but soon dying elititist jerks to the super-friendly and helpful multi-life player who gives out platinum and gear to those Newbies who needs it. There's the (rather high-level) Noob, who appears to know everything but doesn't (often the source of not very good advices, the community believes) and there's the totally clueless Newbie who just learns the game. There are "Griefers" who like to destroy others sand castles, and there are beggars, instantly opening trade windows or "telling" via chat and asking for stuff. There are people who invite into guild ships if the PUG needs buffs (onöy recently I found out, how !), and there are the so-called "static groups".
It's like going into in ice-selling shop : You get everything. Lots of flavours are there.
So far, I had rather mediocre experiences with PGs, but not really bad ones, either. My most creepy moment was in a PUG where someone tried to tell me things he thought I didn't know about (we had had a brief discussion over crafting at the Crystal Cove event, but I had figured most o that already out) while constantly showing his gear via "linking". Ofter some minutes I just lost interest and disappeared.
It's like in real life, really.
The only real "problem" is that you don't know who is playing what kind of character. I remember a short tale of astonishment in the forums when someone had found out that a Warforged One was played by a woman - audible via voice chat. The player seemingly expected Warforged Ones to be only played by men.