Tibia was great in the early days. It had phenomenal player driven politics where in principle anyone could kill anyone, but in practice people had friends, and some people had really powerful friends who could make life hell for you if you bothered them. Eventually the game operators restricted the pvp system and added a formal system for having guild wars. Today I understand why they did it, but it effectively killed any interesting player driven politics.

The server I played on was pretty stable for years because it had an ultra powerful ruling guild (the Liches of Archinare on Lunara). Eventually they were their own downfall, having persecuted enough people over the years -- myself included -- that the uprising, when it came, was overwhelming. And after that came endless wars as various factions vyed to occupy the power vacuum that appeared

I learned a lot about culture and power from that game. For instance, in the early days of Lunara, pretty much nobody targeted the friends and loved ones of their opponents during wars, and the idea was highly frowned upon. But in the beginning of the uprising against LoA, I opened that door, and it became standard practice after that in all the subsequent conflicts

Another aspect I particularly enjoyed about the game was the diversity of its player base. I learned Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese and bits of Dutch and Tagalog and other languages because I always had friends to practice with there. I even picked up a bit of Papiamento