Wizardry: Online launched today...

It's not a bad waste of time. Free, too.

It's not an online Wizardry game, but an MMO with Wizardry-style character generation. Pretty fun, I think.
If I have time to be online, you can add my character/soul name, it's "Tekka Exodus".

Post here if you're interested in playing!

I've been following this game on other forums -- honestly what turns me off is the idea of always-on permadeath pvp combined with (I think) fairly standard hotbar-based MMO combat. Now if you could control a party of dudes and the encounters were turn-based...

It's pretty hard to get permaded though, even with open PVP. You can't even get attacked until level 8, there's guards everywhere, and once you flag yourself as a criminal, it's pretty much open season on your face. On top of that, you can actually post bounties for criminal players, furthering the incentive for normal players to stomp ganker face (no penalty for doing so, and you get a reward, I thought that was pretty neat). I haven't played it for a huge amount of time yet, obviously, but the system of checks and balances that I have seen seems to work pretty well.

I do like the challenge, and combat is pretty fun. It's not rotation based, thankfully (like, whee, now that I've used 1-2-3, I can do 4 for +8% damage), it feels a bit more action RPG-ish, with active blocking and everything.

I remember reading about this one a couple of times. It kind of makes me sad that it's taken a more action approach though. I miss the slower mmos like The Realm and UO. Is it open world or more dungeon based? I'd love to play; however, I'm a stick in the mud these days. Between work, study, and family, I get about 10 to 15 hours a week to game. This would be plenty of time to play an MMO, but I have a problem with getting really into those games and not stopping . The last MMO I played was Mabinogi. I decided to lay off them for a long while when I got married.
Anyway, let me know what you think about it. I'm always interested in hearing about the multitude of mmos out there.