Buy a lifetime account for Lotro and you're done. No monthly fees. The game is guaranteed to run until 2014 at least, if that's long enough to finally get to Mordor is another thing though. God knows i hated MMos until Lotro came up, that says a lot.
Keep an eye out for Aion, Earthrise, Blade and Soul, Continent of the Ninth and Star Wars: The Old Republic. all of them looks very interesting imo, none of them released yet though. Other then that Eve Online and WoW would be by best suggestion for already released mmos. wow if you want to play what "everyone" else plays and Eve if you want to challange yourself.
imho LOTRO is best out atm... i dont play i play AoC but LOTRO is best out atm imo.... Blade and Soul will be epic win in the future if done right same with SW: TOR
Speaking of MMO's, i have finally persuaded my best friend to quit WoW after a /played time of 391 days. He admitted he had wasted the last few years of his life on the computer game equivalent of heroin.
there arent many really good MMOs out there but imo the best one by far is WoW, you can say what you want, but it has the polish, the content and the funfactor to keep you hooked for ages. And its a cultural phenomenon, i say you should try it just so you can say that you have, even if you dont like it somewhere down the line you have Age of Conan, fun, graphicaly pleasing, nice combat and great atmosphere, its only been out, what? a year? so not too much content, but still a good game and a expansion is brewing. Warhammer online was deff not for me, but i guess fans of the other Warhammer games might like it alot, to similar to everything else for my taste, bad polish, bad development, bad content, bad art, overall just bad. Should have some nice PvP experiences in it tho, if you like that as a main focus for a game. Lotro aint bad, but as Warhammer, i feel, its mostly for the fans of the books and films, i don't really care much for the universe, but it has a nice atmosphere, good content, but crappy combat and crappy classes imo. Still worth a look if your into the whole hobbit and walking thing Final Fantasy XI, sure its old, still its one of the best MMOs, if you like hardcore gaming that is, if you die, you loose experience, it can take several hours to get a group together, but the rewards are therby greater when you first succeed. Great game, loads and loads of content, you can be any class you want without re-rolling, but extremely time consuming and alot of grinding. for new games i would'nt hail Aion as a winner, tho i have never played it, it seems like it has nothing new for the game genre, its a grind, some nice quests, ok graphics and flying.. but :/ looks dull imo. and its publishers have a bad track record. Dunno why so many people think its the next big thing, it just have 'just another asian grind mmo' written all over it. Tho it cost money in Asia to play it, wich would indicate that the game offers alot more that the usual crap. And they finaly tried to make it more playable for us westernes which will give it a playerbase no matter the outcome. Still i have my doubts and reserve the comment 'i told you so' Star Wars: the Old Republic tho seems very nice, and i am waiting for that one. Prolly going to be the next next-big-thing-after-WoW when it hits. But its a long way away, plenty of time to test out some other MMOs If i where you, i would try them all, trials are just a few clicks away. alteast thats my opinion edit: omg i wrote a wall of text
WoW is so great I quit it to go back to a 10-year old game: EverQuest. I run my own server and enjoy every minute of it. My wife on the other hand quit playing WoW around the same time I did and has recently given back into the addiction. She tries to get me to play, and I pretend like I'm interested, then just blow her off. F--k WoW. If I wanted to play a game with no sense of accomplishment, WoW is the game I'd play.
EQ is still the one MMORPG that I look back on with (mostly) fondness. Well, everything pre PoP that is. And WoW is essentially just a dumbed down version of EQ.
Lotro is good put after a certain point it gets boring. The thing with MMO's is that quests are clones of each others. Kill x amount of something, collect x amount of something or talk to mister x etc. I hope that SWTOR will change this since mainly quests and the way story is old is far from deep and it just kills the immersion when everything is very static.
I must mention two mmo's. Both are high production and great games. I recommend them both. I will state some main things about them to help you with your choice. Lineage 2 . If like those anime kinda hot looking characters, good graphics and not so much doing quests, but pvp . Very hardcore game. Also hard but lots and lots of fun... Here are some of the races and characters you can play with : Kamael, And some others World Of Warcraft. If you like Warcraft universe and its style and quests and pvp . Little easier leveling and game overall . Also very nice and fun game.
Anarchy Online is hands down the BEST MMO out there. It just has a LARGE learning curve that most people dont like. Aion is gonna suck...
Aion is in beta and people are saying its a very basic mmo + flight, it doesnt have any new ideas or anything else to seperate itself from the other average mmo. I play runes of magic its free to play, but thats really just an illusion, if you play that game you will find yourself at lvl 50, and ur getting 1 shotted by other lvl 50s who made there gear with real money and a lot of it, some people spent 1k-2k USD on there toons, and unless you spend as much, you will never be able to take them on. So the whole game ends up being a big hook so u have to spend cash to stay competitive (like 200$ min). But there is a mmo coming out in a few months that is going to be awesome, its Star Wars: The Old Republic its a bioware MMORPG, read about it, and check out the trailer, its prolly the best game trailer ever made.
