Hello everyone,

I'm trying to find a game that fits the collowing criteria:

Mostly gridning based leveling - I don't understand why this has become rare. I hate running from hub to hub looking for NPC's with ?'s over thier heads, running to a field, then back looking for !'s. I'd rather grab some potions, possibly form a party, find a spot with a lot of monsters and grind for exp. Yes, technically you can do this is any game, but I'd rather not choose a slower means of progressions.

Highly customiziable - I hate being Mage #30001. Whether it's in appearance or skill slection, I like being able to make my avatar stand out in some way. Even if it means dumping money into a cash shop I'm fine with that.

Open World - Not much to explain really, I love the gameplay of action MMO's but hate being restriced into the same instances over and over.

Active Community - No fun playing an MMO in a ghost town.

I'm totally open to suggestions, and appreciate your time.

Thanks!

Maybe the next OWPVP focused MMO will be lineage eternal(sequel to Lineage 1), yes there will be some instances for epic bosses, but if LE follows the model of L1-L2 the instances will have a cooldown, so you only can make another instance after some time(can be 24h or even 1 week if the boss is very epic). Yes I hope LE is a grindy game as L1, where players go to world bosses and fight against enemy guilds(or clans).

The debut trailer shows 3 classes, but devs will announce more 3 classes in the future:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCdbdsFgNGI

To compare, some world pvp in L1(real world pvp, enemy guilds fight over world bosses and territory control):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4f25QJyy3o

An epic raid, but as I said this instanced boss has 1 week cooldown, because the main focus of L1 is the open world-open world pvp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYPul8eiDE

Darkfall? You didn't mention if you are for or against full PvP. Best option if you like PvP but is planned to have a massive overhaul and it might change after that. It might not though, I don't know all the details.

Other than that..

FFXI (not much customization though)

Asheron's Call (active but small community, and it's old)

RF Online (definately a mob grinder, can't remember about customization)

Fallen earth (I consider this a mix of questing and mob grinding)

Originally posted by Reizla
Silkroad online is what you're looking for. Class system is semi-sandbox, allowing you to customize your class the way you want. And grindy..? 115 levels total (iirc) and that'll take you like forever to reach ;)

^

Although most old-school games are like this. Unfortunately for OP, most old-school games also have terrible options for customization. There are no modern MMOs with this kind of grind mentality, not the kind you're looking for, because most people don't like that kind of thing. I don't include games like Darkfall or MO because on top of being broken messes, they're supposedly in the middle of renovating and becoming more "accessible". Same thing for FF14. 

You're going to have to sacrifice one or the other. Customization, or grind-based leveling. Can't really have both.