So, in about 2 months or so I will have finished my final exams and will be free until I start College, so for the days where I'm not camping or getting drunk, I want to play an MMO. I'm looking for suggestions.
I currently have a Runescape account in limbo between Free and Members; I can play Free, but I won't get anywhere since the bank is way beyond free capacity full of members only items. I can play members, but I'm afraid of paying and not playing (exactly this happened early last year).
I used to absolutely love Puzzle Pirates.
Guild Wars and DDO are ruled out simply because I really, really hate them. And I play real D&D anyway.
WoW is ruled out because of the ridiculous price tag (and now the incoming microtransactions, £10 for a fucking horse?!)
So, what can the free spirited people of GOG recommend? In gameplay I tend to prefer economics and diplomacy over grinding, or a mixture of the two. But that said, I have The Guild for that. If it's a P2P game that you suggest, could you try to include the monthly cost as well?

WoW all the way!
Microtransactions? lolwut? This is only for cosmetic stuff, it DOES NOT have an effect on your game in anyway.
The price is not ridiculous, it is totally worth it. Once you start playing WoW, I doubt you will want to switch to other MMOs, they just don't have enough features compared to it.
(but thats just my view.)

I've just been informed that it's $15 USD a month. I spend $19.95 a month on my VPS already. I don't really want to double that, more or less.
We've also just been discussing RuneScape in IRC, and damn, it sounds more attractive than it did a year ago...

Not your usual MMO, and it's made by one person alone. Drop me a message if you want to try this out, I'll show you the ropes. It's got economics and diplomacy (diplomacy to a certain extent, since you can own camps aka player-owned towns once you build up enough wealth).
It's USD20 for 3 months, so one month is approximately USD6.66?
I played Runescape back in 2002 when it was still relatively new and you were one of the "cool" kids for playing it. I loved it, but eventually as more people came in, and with scant moderation of player behaviour, it all fell apart quickly. I quit in 2003, was a bit sad as I got to know quite a few players personally in there, but well what can you do when the developers don't seem to care about the community.

Runes of Magic is pretty good by free-game standards, but roughly at the bottom rung of acceptability by paid-game standards. In most respects it's a WoW clone, though it's better in some respects (polygon count, for instance) and not quite as good in others (combat isn't as smooth).
It's definitely not about economics and diplomacy, though. It's a pretty straightforward quester, so you'd do just as well to load up Sacred Gold.
I don't think I've played another free MMO that is really worth spending time on, though be sure to stay the hell away from Entropia Online.
I play Everquest 2 exclusively, but that's a paid game, and probably not the sort of game you're looking for anyway. What exactly are you looking for when you say "economics and diplomacy?"

I don't play MMOs (I get addicted), but Eve online always looked interesting to me. What about just playing regular games over the net, you don't need to pay to play and you have a wider variety of games to play.

Allods online is free and i heard it was sorta like WoW. If your willing to pay eve online was pretty good and you could eventually end up playing for free.

EVE has interested me for a while. What's that like on the bank balance?

There's a mild-mannered web video series available on Youtube that reviews free-to-play MMOs. I think it's called Questing; it might be worth a look.

- Perfect World
- Second Life
- Ragnarok Online
-Eternal Lands**
-Regnum Online**
** = Also playable in Linux
Those are pretty much the most noteworthy, free-MMO games. There are dozens more, but those are the ones with larger communities.

Love the MMO: http://www.quelsolaar.com/
Wurm online: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/24/pitchfork-media-a-portrait-of-wurm-online/
But really if you do not want to pay monthly or with microtransactions or something like that you won't find easy to play and fun mmo's, free mmos will often be dumbed down or very difficult to learn, I would rather get a quality multiplayer game or something like that.

$15 a month but you could play it for free by buying things called PLEX which can be used to get extra game time or you can buy one in rl and sell it in the game for ingame currency so if your were making enough money ingame you could buy the plex and not have to pay the monthly fee. If you get the retail version you get 2 free months of play with it.

Runescape! /dickmove.
Allods, Atalantica Online, and Wonderking...All I think u might enjoy.

The only MMO's I put any time into were WAR and STO. Warhammer Online is not bad but I didn't feel it was worth the monthly fee. Pretty much the same with Star Trek Online so I let both accounts simply run out. They are both far better than WoW IMO but I guess i'm just not an MMO player.