Ok, this one's going to require a bit of explanation. Haven & Hearth has been around for 4 years now. As it's an indie game, it's not hugely well-known. Made by a couple of university students from Sweden, they still consider the game to be in the alpha stage. It's a MMORPG with a world that is permanent and is affected by what players do to it. (For example, if you chop down a tree, the tree is gone. A stump remains. After time, the stump decays, and the land biome will change if you chop all the trees in an area without replanting. If you build a building and it is abandoned, the building will stay but eventually decay.)

You start out with the clothes on your back, and a torch. Like Minecraft, you build your world around you. Unlike Minecraft, you do far better with help from others... so finding a village and asking to be a part of it is a good idea. You start out essentially at the stone age and as you learn and progress, you can create empires! And yes, you need to discover the wheel...

I think this game has great potential, but here are a couple of its problems:

1. Lag. OH MY GOD lag. The server is hosted in Sweden (I think) and it really hates overseas connections. Having said that, the majority of players seem to be from North America anyway.
2. (This is both a good thing, and bad.) The economy and rules of society are basically decided by the largest village created. This is awesome, because that means the game is completely user-run. The bad thing is that the game is completely user-run. Apparently, in the past, Team AVO had the largest city. Their purpose? Destroy everyone else's cities. But apparently they got bored and left after a while.
3. Occassionally, the writers need to wipe the map and start fresh (when they create new map generation, etc.) The world is currently in its 6th incarnation. But 6 map wipes in 4 years isn't that horrible. Consider some Minecraft servers who start over every week or so.
4. Bugs. Yep, it's still in alpha.

Big plusses for me:

1. Really cool crafting system. You can keep increasing your knowledge and abilities and craft really useful things.
2. The experience point system lets you take varying paths to specialize your character (ie: blacksmith, farmer, miner, trader, etc) to let you make the most out of your place in the village.
3. FREE TO PLAY.
4. Excellent user-made clients available if you don't want to play through your browser.

All in all, I say, give it a try. www.havenandhearth.com