I figured we have so many "name a game that.." threads here, could do with something more interesting 
Subject pretty much explains it. People play MMORPG's for different reasons, I'm interested in hearing what you would consider important to make the "perfect MMORPG", and how to achieve that.
Some people want raids, some want story, some want pvp etc.
Long nostalgic rant about Rohan up ahead, skip if you aren't interested
For me, I would have to say that to this date the only long time MMORPG experience I had was from a game named Rohan. Horrible company running it (YNK), ran that game to the ground, but the base game was good at first. What made this such a good experience for me was the open world PVP. It managed to perfectly tie together PVE, PVP and guilds - and making all of these elements relevant. That game had a really nice community with many different groups being good friends, enemies, etc. For me, it's not about raiding dungeons (concept didn't exist in that game), it's about pvp and interactions with other people.
So you needed to grind for levels out in the world, and someone would occasionally kill you for your spot (there were these hot spots with the highest amount of mobs). So you needed friends and a guild to protect you in times like this to get your spot back. There would be guilds of "rpkers" that ran around killing everyone, and other guilds would make alliances to take them down. Guild members would get into arguments with other people that would turn into fights, which would extend into year long wars between different guilds. But that created such an amazing sense of belonging. You felt like you were fighting for something. There were these instanced capture the flag type tournaments as well, and the winning guild could set a tax percentage, and people selling to NPC's would have to pay that percentage to the guild. So if a guild would set a really high tax, other guilds would team up to win against that guild etc.
So you had to utilize PVP in order to PVE, but at the same time you also had to do PVE to gain levels and get items in order to be effective in PVP. That way neither part of the game got left aside, like in GW2 for example where they're completely irrelevant to each other.
Another thing I liked about Rohan was the skill tree system - every level gave you a non-resettable point (unless you paid a lot), which you could use to level up skills, and based on what skill you unlocked, different new skills would unlock. It sort of allowed your character to highly define you as a player and you got attached to it. And deciding how to build your character mattered a lot, because you'd be stuck with it for a long time. It wasn't just a case of picking whatever seems optimal and then changing later if necessary.
So to me a perfect MMORPG is one that combines PvE and PvP together in some way while encouraging a lot of community interaction. Of course, Rohan wasn't without problems, the grinding system was very dated, it was very pay to win, especially in the end, it had bugs, etc. But it had something magical about it, that I haven't been able to capture in any other game [recommendations are welcome?]
Subject pretty much explains it. People play MMORPG's for different reasons, I'm interested in hearing what you would consider important to make the "perfect MMORPG", and how to achieve that.
Some people want raids, some want story, some want pvp etc.
Long nostalgic rant about Rohan up ahead, skip if you aren't interested
For me, I would have to say that to this date the only long time MMORPG experience I had was from a game named Rohan. Horrible company running it (YNK), ran that game to the ground, but the base game was good at first. What made this such a good experience for me was the open world PVP. It managed to perfectly tie together PVE, PVP and guilds - and making all of these elements relevant. That game had a really nice community with many different groups being good friends, enemies, etc. For me, it's not about raiding dungeons (concept didn't exist in that game), it's about pvp and interactions with other people.
So you needed to grind for levels out in the world, and someone would occasionally kill you for your spot (there were these hot spots with the highest amount of mobs). So you needed friends and a guild to protect you in times like this to get your spot back. There would be guilds of "rpkers" that ran around killing everyone, and other guilds would make alliances to take them down. Guild members would get into arguments with other people that would turn into fights, which would extend into year long wars between different guilds. But that created such an amazing sense of belonging. You felt like you were fighting for something. There were these instanced capture the flag type tournaments as well, and the winning guild could set a tax percentage, and people selling to NPC's would have to pay that percentage to the guild. So if a guild would set a really high tax, other guilds would team up to win against that guild etc.
So you had to utilize PVP in order to PVE, but at the same time you also had to do PVE to gain levels and get items in order to be effective in PVP. That way neither part of the game got left aside, like in GW2 for example where they're completely irrelevant to each other.
Another thing I liked about Rohan was the skill tree system - every level gave you a non-resettable point (unless you paid a lot), which you could use to level up skills, and based on what skill you unlocked, different new skills would unlock. It sort of allowed your character to highly define you as a player and you got attached to it. And deciding how to build your character mattered a lot, because you'd be stuck with it for a long time. It wasn't just a case of picking whatever seems optimal and then changing later if necessary.
So to me a perfect MMORPG is one that combines PvE and PvP together in some way while encouraging a lot of community interaction. Of course, Rohan wasn't without problems, the grinding system was very dated, it was very pay to win, especially in the end, it had bugs, etc. But it had something magical about it, that I haven't been able to capture in any other game [recommendations are welcome?
]