Free MMO's without "cash shops" ?

[madwarper]

Spoiler: snip

A free MMO without a cash shop that is actually worth playing is like having your cake, eating your cake, having the cake be delicious, and being paid to eat it.

/thread, that about sums it up.

No, it doesn't sum anything up.

Edit for your edit: Let me be clear on this, having a transaction system in the game is perfectly fine as long as it doesn't lead to clearly upset balance between the paying users and non-paying users. A game with a well made shop allows you to have the same experience regardless of whether you pay or not. You won't have a clear, outstanding advantage if you use real life currency.

In that case, DDO. You can earn in-game currency as you play that will allow you to buy most anything from the store. Of course you earn it VERY slowly, especially as compared to the amount of time it would take to just pull out a credit card.

That said, they've made a great attempt at giving free players the majority of content up front, and having very little that you feel like you would need to get from the store at all.

There we go, a sensible answer. I'll have to give that a download then.

If you're going to do this, then I have some advice.

Spoiler: DDO Favor Grinding

Completing quests in DDO earns you favor within certain factions.
Repeating the quest on a higher difficulty will earn more favor; 1X favor on normal, 2X on hard and 3X on elite.

For every 100 total favor, you will earn 25 Turbine Points.
There are other perks associated with total favor, such as free access to Drow at 400, Veteran at 1000, 32pt build at 1750 and Favored Soul at some ungodly number. Though these favor unlocked perks are only available on the server you unlocked them on.

Also, for the first character to reach certain favor amounts on each of the servers, there's bonus TP to be had.

So, make a character on each server and get up to 100 total favor.
Doing that will get you a fair amount of TP, and from then on you should pick a server.
On that server, make a char. Get the new char to 100 total favor. Liquidize their stuff. Mail the cash to your first char. And, repeat.

As for your first purchases in the Turbine Store, I'd recommend getting the Veteran Status and Shared Bank.
a) Veteran Status allows you to make new chars at lvl 4, with lvl 4 equivalent gear. Yes, it is possible to unlock Veteran via total favor... However, you're going to have to get a bunch of the expansions to actually have the 1k total favor, which defeats the purpose of trying to get it early to favor grind.
b) Shared bank allows you for easier transferring items between chars, in case you find an item worth keeping.

Also, in the Action House, try to find a cheap (~100p) item with a clicky of Detect Secret Doors. The search skill is only really useful to Rogues.

TL;DR: Create a toon. Get 100 favor. Delete. Repeat.

However, just to repeat what Xzi said, with the amount of time you'd be spending grinding for favor, you could just as well pay for that TP with a credit card.

 

[lapan]

A completely free game without a cashshop is probably hard to find. I would recommend Guild Wars myself, which should be rather cheap by now.

 

[Maleval]

Well, it's pretty hard to find what you are looking for. The only thing I can contribute to the disscusion is Path of Exile [http://pathofexile.com/], and dark fantasy Diablo style hack-and-slash with an interesting skill system, which appears to be shaping up to become exactly what you describe, completely free with an optional cashshop of graphic customisations. The only problem - it hasn't been released yet.

 

[Skratt]

Guild wars and ddo are decent. Personally wish eve were free to play. Borderlands is at least multi-player.

 

[Eat Uranium]

World of Tanks calls itself an MMO (though why I don't know). There is stuff in it you can buy for real money, but mostly that stuff only makes grinding quicker. The only stuff that makes you fight better is actually pretty worthless in normal gameplay.

 

[Davey Woo]

I don't know about completely free ones, but Guild Wars only costs like £15 now for all expansions and after that you pay nothing.

I tend to find free-to-play MMO's a bit boring, especially as most of them are like you say, half content and you have to pay for all the good stuff.

 

[Euhan01]

Puzzle Pirates? It has a in game currency that can be brought (dubloons) and another you can get normally (Pieces of Eight or just Poe) but you can exchange Poe for dubloons, or go to there subscription surver and not have any dubloon fees. (Its about 50/50 for items that need dubloons but poe is pretty easy to get, so its no problem.)