[Guardian]

RIFT: For what it was back in the day, it was probably the closest you'd get to a truly F2P WoW clone, and had way more on top of that, like the idea of dimensional rifts spawning randomly around the map and using those as like mini-events which players could still get some fancy gear, premium currencies, and add some more fun to the overall grind. I think I only invested about 20$ in the game because of some event, but I could have unlocked more or less everything for 5$ (Market/Auction house usage). That being said, if you grinded out the money, you could buy that feature for free, or at the very least, if you found a good guild with really friendly people (wasn't hard a few years ago, community is amazing) you could just use them as a middleman to sell off your wares and whatever you'd be crafting. I invested so much time into that game, I check in every now and then still to see the new content. Have a few maxed chars, but the game really isn't what it used to be. The devs (Trion) sold off the project to another company that doesn't really care much for the players and made it way more P2W, less expansions/content releases, and the community is more or less dead now. But shit, years ago it was incredible for F2P., you could still win PvP because there wasn't any gear that you couldn't get just from straight grinding, and you couldn't buy any 'better' gear. It was definitely underrated when it was in its prime, though. True WoW-like tab-targetting combat and raids, but the community was also a lot more laid-back than WoW and the big/small guilds alike were both really easy to get into, people were just looking to have some fun.

I remember friends raving about this one. Saying its going to be the WoW killer. I was too wrapped up into WoW to switch over, and now I have none of them...

Should have tried it then. If its more P2W I will definitely not try it now.