Former FFXI player chiming in. After finally canceling my account for good and swearing I’d never pay a monthly fee for an MMO again, I made the rounds trying out a bunch of F2P MMOs. Ultimately, I settled on what I think is a very polished game called Atlantica Online.
Fantasy setting, but it takes place on an alternate Earth, where all the “golden ages” of many respective civilizations exist concurrently. (Golden age according to the Korean devs!) Unlike any other MMO I’ve ever played, combat is turn-based, just like a console RPG, and while you make your own character, right from the start you build your own party of NPC Mercenaries, of which at the moment there are 26 different classes of mercs to choose from (with three more in the pipes). As you level and upgrade your mercenaries, they take on the appearance of famous historical (and fictional) figures, from Napoleon to Cassandra to Leonardo Da Vinci.
There is a PVP element to the game, but it’s 99% optional (unless your guild gets wardecced, but even then it’s hardly an issue as long as you’re not the dude who pissed the other guild off). Mainly, PVP is done via tournaments that occur daily, with bi-weekly cross-server championships. Because of the size your party of mercenaries eventually becomes (eight, plus your main character to make nine), plus the large number of mercenaries to choose from, plus the various ways to plan out the skills of said mercenaries, tournament PVP takes on a sort of Magic The Gathering feel where, even if two players of the same level fielded the same exact mercenary formation (which is unlikely), depending on which skills they leveled for their mercenaries and main character, the strategies and tactics employed during the match could be vastly different. Neat game. Good for solo and party play, and without blabbing even more, Atlantica gets so many little things right that I wish other MMOs did (from infrastructure to economy to PVP, lots of things).