Looking for an MMO of some kind.

[Morithias]

Hoy everyone! Me and the friends just "finished" with league of legends, (aka I got bored of it, and the other two are level 30), so now we're looking for a new mmo we can all play together, but we...do not agree on what we're looking for.

Friend 1: wants action, lots of fighting and action
Friend 2: Wants to play with and interact with his friends
and I: want to craft stuff and play with the economy, aka I want to play a merchant not mr "go kill twenty bears and collect their pelts for this random NPC". All I care about is how big my pocketbook is, not my level or DPS.

We require the MMO be free. It doesn't HAVE to be an RPG, but we do like them a lot. Our laptops aren't super powerful, so we can't be running stuff that you need to have custom machines for.

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated and will be researched and considered.

Thank you very much!

[Karoht]

Hoy everyone! Me and the friends just "finished" with league of legends, (aka I got bored of it, and the other two are level 30), so now we're looking for a new mmo we can all play together, but we...do not agree on what we're looking for.

Friend 1: wants action, lots of fighting and action
Friend 2: Wants to play with and interact with his friends
and I: want to craft stuff and play with the economy, aka I want to play a merchant not mr "go kill twenty bears and collect their pelts for this random NPC". All I care about is how big my pocketbook is, not my level or DPS.

We require the MMO be free. It doesn't HAVE to be an RPG, but we do like them a lot. Our laptops aren't super powerful, so we can't be running stuff that you need to have custom machines for.

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated and will be researched and considered.

Thank you very much!

Star Wars The Old Republic is going free to play soon.

As for being a merchant, I'm pretty sure crafting skills aren't bound to/gated by character level, but don't quote me on that.

As for MMO's where you don't have "go kill twenty bears and collect their pelts for this random NPC" questing, well, they kind of don't really exist so much.

The only one I can think of where Level and performance is completely irrelivant AND you can craft like there's no tomorrow would be City of Heroes/Villians. Also free to play, with freemium options.
Yes, there are character levels, but if you get sidekicked, you can literally go see the level cap content while still only at level one. Crafting has almost nothing to do with level, you just have to pick up recipies. And in that game, really no one cares about DPS or anything, you basically spam abilities endlessly, so go nuts.

Hope those help.

[Morithias]

As for MMO's where you don't have "go kill twenty bears and collect their pelts for this random NPC" questing, well, they kind of don't really exist so much.

All fine suggestions and we shall examine them.

However I should probably be slightly more clear. I don't care that the MMO HAS that function. For example when I had my one month test of WOW, I spent most of my time, running to mines, making metal bars, and then selling the swords. I basically completely ignored combat and quests in favor of basically grinding gold pieces.

Basically those two go off and kill stuff with me occasionally joining in, while I offer them special made equipment at reduced cost. Basically we have Fighter, rogue, and artificer, as our party.

[Karoht]

All fine suggestions and we shall examine them.

However I should probably be slightly more clear. I don't care that the MMO HAS that function. For example when I had my one month test of WOW, I spent most of my time, running to mines, making metal bars, and then selling the swords. I basically completely ignored combat and quests in favor of basically grinding gold pieces.

Basically those two go off and kill stuff with me occasionally joining in, while I offer them special made equipment at reduced cost. Basically we have Fighter, rogue, and artificer, as our party.

Well, in WoW you can now level from 1 to max with just herbing and/or mining. Hitting a node of either type gets you usually about as much experience as killing a mob. With my recent alt, I was typically getting more XP from collecting herbs or ore than I was from killing things. Ore and Herbs aren't nearly as difficult to track down these days either. Sadly, no XP from Skinning. Makes me the sad.

[Ogremindes]

If you can bear a one-off cost but not a monthly sub, Guild Wars 2 may be of interest.

I've been playing DCUO recently, which is free. Not so big on the crafting, but with the collectables and races there are real options for alternate advancement. Plenty of action, too.

[Vitruviansquid]

I have two suggestions, neither of them perfect.

1. Lord of the Rings Online. It may be an old game, but it appears to still be going community-wise and content-wise (there's a new expansion coming out soon). The beauty of this game is that it has something for everyone. For example, half the quests in the hobbit starting area (The Shire) don't require that you kill anything. The crafting system is also very well-made, with many interdependencies that contribute to a healthy economy for crafted goods. Your friend 1 will appreciate that the game's actually really challenging compared to other MMO's, and most classes (I only say 'most' because I haven't personally experienced all of them) require a bit of thought and finesse than those in other MMO's. Your friend 2 will appreciate the skirmish system, where the game generates a battle for you to fight where you set the monster level, the challenge level, and the number of players it's tailored to.

Unfortunately, LOTRO's main fault is that it is very very very very grindy. Sure, the fact that Turbine runs it means that you might unlock all the purchasable content just by playing long enough, but they sure make you work for each turbine point (the points you buy with RL money, that you use to buy content). Similarly, levelling seems slow compared to other MMO's and there are indeed many quests that simply ask you to kill X number of mobs in an area.

2. City of Heroes/Villains has almost no crafting system to speak of, what seemed like a dead community to me, and an absolutely ludicrous (in my opinion, at least) pay to play plan. However, its combat is very fun and action-packed. The chief thing that recommends this game is its exemplar/sidekick system. From your description of your group, it seems highly likely that in a conventional MMO (such as LOTRO) your friends will quickly outstrip you in level and then be unable to play with you. This won't be a problem with sidekicks and exemplars, allowing you to set your level to match a friend's while you're teamed up.

[Toastkart]

Seconding the recommendation for Guild Wars 2. Yeah, it's not free, but it is free to play.

It has:

1: Lots of actiony combat where positioning and dodging are important.
2: Lots of ways to interact with friends through mini-games and dynamic events. Even the personal story can be played through together.
and 3: lots of crafting, and both gathering and crafting give you xp, and you don't have to fight other players for gathering nodes.

[SlyGuyMcFly]

City of Heroes sounds like a good fit.

Combat is very fast and action-y and largely involves throwing up huge amounts of orange numbers on small seas of enemies. Teaming is easy, encouraged due to (much) faster levelling in teams and thanks to the sidekick system, anyone can team with anyone to do almost anything. The crafting system isn't all that complex, but there are vast quantities of wealth to be made with little effort by playing the auction house.

If you do give it a try, Virtue and Freedom are the two best populated servers, so teaming is much, much easier on them. Virtue is RP-friendly, while Freedom is vanilla. I played on Virtue for a fair few years, so that's my personal suggestion.

[The_Jackal]

I'll second recommendations for City of Heroes or World of Warcraft, depending on your priorities. If you want a strong economy, fully fleshed out world and better quality quest content, WoW is the hands-down winner in the MMO market. The developers of WoW really went the extra mile to cram in more fun little details, especially for the Vanilla content, but even beyond. The market mechanisms are stable, and the economy robust. I've tried a lot of MMOs during and after my time playing WoW, and I still haven't seen any rival measure up.

That said, if WoW doesn't appeal to you flavour wise, and you want a more casual 'beer and pretels' style of game, City of Heroes is the best of the rest. It came out before WoW, so it manages to avoid to be just a WoW clone by virtue of a completely different design philosophy. You have a completely different class system, TONS of customization, and highly kinetic, if somewhat predictable, combat.

In CoH, every ability uses the same resource, endurance, and every ability is cooldown-limited. Some have moderate to long cooldowns, some are very short, but nothing is 'proc-driven' or unpredictable or reactive in any way. That said, the combat is quite kinetic, and you definitely feel like a superhero when you're able to tackle large groups of minions at once. The economy is much, much less rational, and while the crafting system is intricate, there's no specialization or division of labour. There's one crafting system, it's called 'Inventions', the recipes are one-use, and the best recipes and ingredients take a lot of grinding to obtain. But it's more intuitive, with simple, fun combat and a nice 'sideckicking' system to allow characters of different levels to team up.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Thirding GW2.

Fight guy? Guardian is the most straightforward class. Alternatively, any ranged attacker in a party with a skilled Guardian player (did I mention how important Guardian is?).

Friend guy? Parties. RPG parties, not real parties.

You? Just focus on crafting. You can get half-decent xp for harvesting stuff, but not as much as you'd get for killing things. Plus, the game sort of encourages wandering, to look for Events, nodes of crafting stuff, and Waypoints (teleportation circles that cost a small amount of money to use, but you can't use any you haven't come across).

Renown Heart quests are sorta like WoW quests, but Dynamic Events and Skill Point Challenges, while they have a completion bar, don't feel that way.