So I was looking for a mmorpg to waste some time on, and I didn't want to waste any time with the standard generic stuff. So, I thought about what I'd like, and I kind of drift towards innovative, niche-market, gritty design, customization heavy, and heavily player-driven, player-altered 'evolving' worlds. Good story/intriguing setting (something that most lack...) would also be a plus. Free-to-play would be a even bigger plus.

Anyone know anything like that? :confused:

Given EVE Online a spin? It's certainly not for everyone, but I can't think of a more "player-altered, evolving world" than that of EVE's.

Guild Wars 2 is going to be great as far as I can tell; unlike the first Guild Wars, the world will be persistent. The devs learned from their experiences working on World of Warcraft and created an MMO that uses instancing, so the GW franchise doesn't enable kill-stealing and player-killing. The sequel GW 2 is going to be more similar to WoW than the first game, with higher level caps, but it will still not allow these things. The release date hasn't been published but it may be released in the first quarter of 2012.

The MMO "The Secret World" has potential too, as does "The Old Republic." Too soon to tell.

Free to play? Darkspace and Pirates Of The Burning Sea. They're both free, fairly innovative, and heavily PvP-based. I recommend staying away from "free to play" asian MMOs. There hasn't been one yet that I've been satisfied with and that doesn't secretly require you to burn through your paychecks at higher levels, even Atlantica Online which is pretty revolutionary with it's turn-based combat.

EDIT: Hmm, are the links not showing for everyone or is it part of my no-script or something that's disabling them? They're formatted properly. They're www.darkspace.net and www.burningsea.com, but {url=www.blahdiblahblah.cmo}Whatchamacallit{/url} didn't work.

Well, you are most likely asking too much. I don't think there really is any MMO like that out currently. EVE would obviously be the first recommendation. SWGEMU is another candidate (check sig), but it's only in open beta ATM, although it is sort of free (you only need the game discs, which you can get for like $5-$10).

You sound pretty new to MMORPG, so I'm not sure what your defination of "generic" stuff is. My pick would be try Vindictus and EVE Online.

I've never played it, but I know a few people who have, and I've read a bit about it, so I'll agree with the others and say "EVE Online" might be what your looking for. The only issue I can see is idiot high levels picking on you, which does seem to be the main problem I've heard EVE suffers from. Course, some people like that challenge factor. I personally hate PvP in online games, not my thing.

Sounds like you want to play Final Fantasy XI Online. It is not free, though. You can get all the expansions and the game for 20 bucks on steam and that is with a free month. After that it is 12.95 a month.

EVE Online, hands down. Extremely player-driven, wonderfully non-generic and oh-heck-where-should-one-start deep.

I would go with P2P's if you want decent amount of content. Rift is a good example.

P2P's are generally better off in their early stages of development when content and bug fixing is prioritized higher -- after that, development changes heavily toward cash shop and little else.

Eve seemed pretty boring when I played the demo. The 5 hour tutorial was mind numbing, charts and graphs everywhere! Also the flying is pretty lame. Does the game even have a story?

I like reading about Eve more than I enjoy playing it. Seems to have some pretty cool events that go on, like that Band of Brothers stuff.

Minus evolving world, Diablo 2 has all of that and it isn't even an official MMO. Guild Wars 2 may be right up your alley when it comes out, though, assuming what it's promising is for real.

oh yes another mmo thread.
EVE probably has the biggest and deepest story line out of all the mmorpgs out there. It just takes a while to put together, but once you do it, it surprisingly player driven especially the lass expansion, which was 80% driven by live events, something that no other mmo cam do atm.
But it is so hard to get into it and there are so many people who try to ruin newbies days, it is definitely not easy.

Was that aimed towards me or the OP? If me, lol, I actually just quit FFXI a few months ago. Sold my account to my best friend. Tempted to destroy the hard-drive on my PS2 so I can never go back to it.

Shaiya is good but the problem is that it gets very vague on where to go and what to do next on the main quest at higher levels. Also I have yet to find any type of guide to help you out, not even from the official sites. Good game if you can figure it out and another thing is that the looting is much better then alot of MMOS where you only loot cheap junk or very few gold and it takes forever to save money. At this point my wife and I have roughly 10 billion in gold and I have all the mounts including the highest level ones.

I'd say Rift. I play Guild Wars and LOTRO, while the former is innovative it's hardly an MMO (for the most part, with instances and everything) and LOTRO is pretty generic (albeit having a LOTR niche). Otherwise I'd recommend those two.

I like how people saw Guild Wars two even though it is not out yet and we can't make a good opinion on it. Anyhow EVE seems completely different than any other MMO I have heard of, just the learning curve I heard is a brick wall.

It is, honestly. I'd probably attribute it to the sheer overwhelming amount of information and options that are available to you. It can be daunting.