On a side note, I think that Darkfall might be one of those that I keep going back to, As tomorrow I’ll get started playing it again.
Game is such a adrenaline rush at times.

Ive heard a lot of bad things about Darkfall, but I’m tempted anyways just because it sounds so much like some of my favorite MMO’s: Ultima Online and Shadowbane. To be fair though, in SB i got lucky and happened to be in the guild that ended up running the entire server. Kind of makes it more fun.

When I look at the Multiplayer online games I keep coming back to none of them are really MMO’s in the traditional sense. I play team fortress 2, eat poop u cat (http://www.eatpoopucat.com/), and online poker. But they all have taken something from the MMO model, rewards for grinding. TF2 has rare unlockable hats, EPUC has a kudos system and keeps track of people with the best panels, and pokers grinding reward is money over time.

Why i think I keep coming back to these games rather than MMO’s (which I enjoy) is that all these games reward skill to a much greater extent than MMO’s which tend to reward time invested.

So maybe it is time to look for an MMO that runs in Hard mode.

We can defend MMOG’s all we want because we enjoy them so much. Or do we? Sometimes I think we just think we’ve invested so much of our time that even though maybe we’re “seeing the man behind the curtain” we’re unwilling to cut our losses. If you took your all-time favorite MMOG but you were the only player on the entire server, would that MMOG in fact be fun enough to keep you entertained very long? Probably not. (I’ve been in that situation with more than one game, so I can speak from my own experience that *for me* MMOG’s are atrocious games with no one else to interact with.)

I still don’t get the whole Borderlands :: Fallout 3 comparison. Borderlands isn’t post-apocalyptic. At all. If anything, it shares more with Firefly because at its heart it’s a sci-fi western.

So let me get this straight: you find yourself in an MMOG funk because you’re “seeing the man behind the curtain” in every MMOG, have acknowledged (but not accepted) that single-player RPG’s at this point in time have superior character building and worlds, yet your proposed solution is to find a new MMOG? Might I suggest an addiction intervention instead? Regardless, you’re not going to find *anything* out there that is “new and fresh” like you asked. Someone suggested EVE which technically isn’t “new” but it might be new to you if you haven’t played it. Otherwise your choices are pretty much: EVE (space, skill trees), Darkfall (fantasy, skill trees, open pvp) or your choice of hundreds of DIKU-based clones. I lump all those together since under the hood they’re all the same game. If you’re tired of one DIKU-clone, somehow I doubt jumping into another DIKU-clone where the only differences are the graphics and sounds would count as “new and fresh” much less cure your funk.