The BEST Free Online MMORPGs

There are many free online MMORPGs on the internet today. From the most famous and most made fun of, a la Runescape, to the more obscure and smaller community MMOs, there are many good ones out there. Unfortunately for you, there are a lot more bad ones.
My least favorite MMORPGs are the ones that are made with an open source client. The open source is great for those who are good at programming but need graphics and formats to start with. This is fine for a personal sense, maybe a small MMO server just for your friends at school. However, too many of these cookie cutter MMOs are put on the internet. The most prominent of which are those based off of the First Star Online client. There are many variations of this game but they are all the same. The graphics are an old 2D style and the game play isn't bad, but the community is a bit too small for my liking because the players are spread out among all the bad variations. These game might hold your attention for about an hour. If you have a slow connection, these games are pretty small so they may have a strong draw for you.
My favorite MMORPGs are the ones that are made from scratch with many different diverse people volunteering and contributing. These games are very fun. I haven't seen many of these games, but the ones I have are very interesting. The most prominent of these is Eternal Lands. Eternal Lands has many different programmers helping out, volunteering their time. One programmer actually spent a lot of time, and still does, working on a mac version for the game. I appreciate this very much because I only have a Mac laptop when I'm on vacation. The many different programmers leads to a wide variety of maps and areas which is a large part of the fun. I sometimes find myself exploring the different areas just to see the different beautiful 3D graphically rendered scenery. Recently EL introduced an entire second continent of play which was a ton of fun to explore for the first time. Eternal Lands is at the top of my list. Although I have focused on the exploration, that does not mean the game doesn't have good game play. The game is also at the top of its class for expansive, complex, and versatile game play. One major draw to EL is the fact that there are no set classes so that you can focus on fighting for a while, then if you get bored you don't have to make a new character. You can just focus on manufacturing or alchemy or another of the many skills. EL also has a great community. Unlike Runescape, the community is very nice and being rude for no reason is shunned. The community is actually somewhat focused on not turning into another 'Runescape'. All the player groups and moderators are against rudeness and even the player versus player fighting is very honorable. Runescape is a forbidden word in many social circles, known as the R word. Eternal Lands is an awesome game, which would match up in the class of many online MMORPGs which you have to pay for.
I don't personally like this MMORPG but it deserves to be mentioned in any list of the best free MMORPGs. This game is Runescape. The fact that you can play it in a browser without a seperate downloaded client is a plus. The benefits of this is the fact that anyone can play it, even if they don't own a computer. I have seen many kids playing Runescape from a public library computer. The bad part about that, is that anyone can, and most likely has at some point, play the game. This makes the community very large and generally un-friendly. This is a major point, because you can't play a multiplayer game if you don't like the people you are playing it with. Other than the community, the game is very well set up and has a large amount of content and many hours and days of game play.
My favorite free MMORPG and the one I have been playing the most recently, is actually a parody of MMORPGs. Kingdom of Loathing, or KoL, is a humor based MMORPG which is browser based and turn based. This game leans more towards an RPG than many other MMORPGs and this many would see that as a good thing. The bad thing about this, is that there is an end to the game. The good part, the game has a great system of generating replay value. The first time through the game, I went very quickly just because I was focused on the game play. This game provides a lot of game play so even if you only go through once It will be very fun and will provide hours and hours of game play. On my second time through, I'm reading the humorous battle text and quest details more thoroughly to enjoy the game more. The third time I go through I plan to play on different difficulty levels adding restrictions and more strategy. This game is all about the community. Everyone on the game spends most of their time in the chat to the right of the main browser. I spend a lot of my time just chatting and I forget about playing the game. The only multiplayer interaction is through player versus player fighting, trading, and buying and selling through the flea market and mall.
I do play some other free online games which aren't considered RPGs but are very good Massively Multiplayer games. All of these games are available at IJJI. These games include Soldier Front, an army based FPS; Gunz, an anime based FPS; Kwon Ho, a recently released multiplayer hand to hand combat game; and Gunbound, a physics based artillery game. There are also some smaller games like a poker client called Rounders. All of these games are very fun and the IJJI format makes it easy to install the games on your computer. This allows for fluent and easy switching between each game. Sometimes when you aren't doing very well in one game you can switch to another to get your confidence back. I'm classifying all these games together as IJJI. This is because each game is good but doesn't provide tons of game play, but together they provide loads.
I plan on writing a sequel to this as I only showcased a few games out of the many great free online games. These are just the ones that come to mind as I have played them all recently. Yet there are many others that I have played in the past that are just in the back of my mind and need to be refreshed. Just writing this paragraph I have remembered two that I will feature in Part 2.