Lusternia is pretty good. Yeah, it's Iron Realms, and all the stuff you've heard is probably true, but I found the money needed to get in isn't that bad. It depends on the class you play, like monks can dick on people in PvP with little more than maxed weapon skill and the bare minimum of other combat skills, but then stuff like priests yeah, you're gonna be putting some cash in to get your skills workable in PvP.
I actually found the script-heavy PvP pretty fun. The way it works is there's dozens of different status effects and probably 20 or so curatives of different types (salves, potions, smokeable herbs, spells, etc.) so it's too complicated to do yourself in real-time. The scripting, at least when I did it, was only for managing cures. It sounds complicated, and it is, but once you've got your script running effectively, and there's lots of third party scripts you can use rather than make them yourself, then you can just focus on offense, which is the fun part. There are limits to how fast you can use cures, and a lot of the status effects disable certain types of cure, so the goal is to overload his ability to cure himself with interlocking afflictions. Put a poison on your spiked chain that causes oily sweat and make salves slide off, then crush his windpipe. He can't smoke to cure the poison, and he can't apply a salve to fix his throat. Then hit him with something like death poison or burst his organs with your chain and see if he can get his shit together before he dies.
It's a wall of text, but with enough practice you start to "see the code" so to speak and it becomes a lot easier.
All that being said I dunno if I'd recommend it. There's a lot of secret club shit and internal politicking so if you're new you'll probably have trouble getting anything done.