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Scarlet Blade

http://scarletblade.aeriagames.com/

Gotta love running around dressed like a ho. Go big or go home!

Well, I'm not in outsourcing, otherwise I probably wouldn't have condemned the industry. Primarily we make software for the Chinese market, but I have licensed games that I was involved in building to both US and Russian companies eg: http://realmofthetitans.aeriagames.com/ http://www.rotonline.ru/?mid=153255 (notice it is the same game with slightly different title). The Russian publisher was pretty chaotic and last minute, even compared to Chinese, but went from signing to public release in maybe 2 months of insanity, the US publisher has dragged their feet a fair bit as has still not released in the year since signing, as such it's pretty big in Russia but in the US, because of the huge delays I'm not optimistic about its chances against DOTA2 (which has got far greater hype and Valve behind it). As far as sales go, we just showed the product, it's a good, solid title, which the customer could test it, they liked it and we argued over price and the contract, very little shmoozing was done.

Point is, the product we showed and it had already been run on our own blood, sweat and tears in China for 6 months, I myself had to handle the start of open beta and debug server code from a freezing cold room near our data centre in rural Hebei, I also had to abandon our launch party (buffet at the Golden Cougar) when we had a DB overload and it needed to be fixed and the problem had to be nailed shut so it didn't happen again. I had to spend a week debugging our game client on the worst computer on the office because it was the only place where we could reproduce a D3D bug reported by customers. We had nothing to gain by doing it in any way other than correctly, China or otherwise because whatever happened was our problem. This is the difference between offshore and outsourced.

Try Eden Eternal.

It has cartoonish cel-shaded graphics, which a lot of people my dismiss out of hand, but it's actually a very fun game. And it has a very good answer to the trinity: rather than getting rid of it, it embraces it, and makes it a lot easier for anybody to play any role by separating your class level from your character level. You can change class at any time as long as you're not in combat, so rather than holding up a party waiting for a tank and/or a healer, anybody can fill any role at any time. It also means that groups aren't sunk if your tank suddenly has to go or something, because somebody else can simply switch classes and fill that role. And since your class exp goes up a lot faster than your character exp, you're actively encouraged to change classes around while levelling so that it becomes quite difficult to not have at least 2 different classes at max level on the same character.

It's also free to play (right now, at least, as it's still in open beta), which gives it a huge advantage over WoW IMO....

Most Americans (at least judging by American MMO bloggers' postings) don't really like the concept of MMOs running on RMTs, but if you want a preview of the Asian style of MMO, try Runes of Magic. You'll notice that most Asian games come with a lot more convenience features than you'd find in e.g. WoW, where basic things turn into a chore. In RoM you have auto-walk, auto-find-NPC, your quest journal's important words are linked directly to an auto-walk path to the monster/person you need to find, there are many methods of instant or fast transport, free player housing from level 1, permanent mount available for purchase from level 1 etc.

If you can for one second swallow your hate of mouse-based walking (there's WASD too, for chrissakes) and RMTs, you'll see that a game doesn't become stupidly easy just because it is convenient to play.

You can find some of that in Perfect World and Jade Dynasty or any of the Aeria games as well, but I wouldn't recommend those. Runes of Magic is very well-adapted to the Western audience. Many other Asian MMOs are endless grindfests, because it seems that people there don't mind grinding to achieve things in a game. Radiant Arcana (as the original Runes of Magic is called in China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea) is a much more grindy game than Runes, since Frogster figured that Western players don't have the patience for a grindfest. I think they may be right.

So before someone writes an article about Eastern vs. Western-style MMOs, they should perhaps look at deeper game design elements rather than just imply "oh wow, mouse control is so you can smoke with your other hand". Also, I think the author of TFA didn't even notice that Aion's Western version had a lot of grind removed and is faster to play than the original. If he thinks the leveling curve is bad here, he should play the Korean one.

Someone get a Taiwanese, a Korean, a Japanese, a British and an American game journalist to work on an article, that way they'd talk to each other and debunk some of the myths :P

AirRivals is pretty good fun too, and the only free-to-play that I keep geeting back to.

There's also:
Perfect World
Rohan
Upshift Strikeracer
Archlord
Dreamlords

I know it is not a flash game... but it has definitely consumed a lot of my time and it is free.
http://lastchaos.aeriagames.com/

Sounds like Anarchy Online is what you are looking for. Free client download and free to play. If you want to explore/play their expansion areas, then you'll need to pay. But the original area is large enough to keep one's interest for 30 or 40 levels. Even after that there is still enough content to keep one interested but the expansion areas offer better equipment&xp. The game is well established and well populated. Cedega does support playing AO in Linux.

Another free to play game is Last Chaos. The only time you have to pony up some cash is if you want to buy something from their item mall like an xp potion(+30% xp). The game is fantasy based, so it might not be your cup of tea. It is an interesting game, the devs have done some unique things. Example would be skill points, these are earned along with xp but at an inverse... high xp, low sp/low xp, high sp. They also have events every weekends; friday happy hour(random bonus stuff like double xp during happy hour) and sunday tea time(again random bonus stuff). Last Chaos is playable in Wine.

For a purely cooperative game, you might check out A Tale in the Desert. There is no combat in the game. It does offer a a native linux client. It has been a while since I played this one.

There are a wide variety of mmorpg out there, some just take a bit of effort to find. Maybe start your search at mmorpg.com.