How i'd like them to be if you didn't pay: You can get this Sacred Zweihander (The 3rd most powerful sword), but you can't get Excalibur. Also, here is a pet Cerberus (The 4rd most powerful), a big Mansion and yeah, you can create a clan...but you have to work very hard! (You're lvl99)
How i'd like them to be if you did pay: Just like how they really are, except people should work hard to get their gear, just like the guy who didn't pay, with some benefits, of course.
You might try Age of Wushu. Its free-player penalties are extremely reasonable, and mostly things you can play around. There are some secondary skills that aren't available to free players, but they're the cosmetic ones that you wouldn't want on your main character anyway. Some dungeon items only drop for paying players, but those items are all tradable, so as long as you have one paying player in your party, those items will drop. And if you don't you can simply trade for them on the market. The worst of it the offline "xp" (AoW has a totally different character building system than anything you've probably seen. It doesn't have xp. But we'll call it xp because you'll know what that is) penalty. VIP players get "xp" and their market stalls continue to operate while offline. If you're an every day kind of player, you probably won't even notice very much. And if you do, you can afk a bunch. And there's other misc stuff, like secondary gathering skill rates that are so insignificantly much less than a VIP player that you probably won't even notice the difference, you have to be I think level 5 before you gain access to global chat (anti spam measure more than a free player restriction), there's purely cosmetic "display armor" that...you
get as a free player, but to put it on you have to manually put it on, whereas paying players get a "show my cosmetic armor" button on their paper doll that they can press to instantly swap it on or off. Minor stuff like that. The game is very playable as a free player.
Another possibility:
Eve Online is a monthly fee game, but game time is a tradable in-game item. So, if you're skilled and have the time, you can fund your gameplay by playing the game. Note however, that while playing for gametime is
entirely realistic, and lots of people do it., I've done it, plenty of other bay12ers have done it..it is
not realistic to expect to be able to do it from day 1 with a trial account. You will definitely need to pay for at least one month, and more realistically, probably 3-6 months. There's both skilling up your character and personal, actual-you learning the game curve involved.
But, the methods for doing it are very well known, and there's no secret about any of them. If you want to play Eve for free, you can, and plenty of people can hand you recipes for exactly how to do it. Just decide what your timeframe is, 1 month, 3 months, six months...decide how much you want to play...if you're willing to average an hour a day, absolutely that's more than enough time to fund an account. Probably 20 hours a month is enough. We even had somebody in our bay 12 Eve thread a year ago or so who, if I recall correctly, did an extended 21 day free trial, payed for one month, and then was able to fully fund three accounts with in-game currency averaging 2 hours of play a day. I recommend you don't take it to that kind of extreme, though, because doing that drains all of the fun out of the game.