Well, that's a subjective question if ever I saw one. I think no genre causes as much debate as MMOs.
If you want to play safe and dip your toe into online gaming again then you could play a game like Rift for free. Only downside is the game has been out for a couple years so you will likely find it a little lonely at low lvl. Having said that, if only went F2P last year and as an F2P game there is more likely to be newer players around.
I enjoyed Rift from release right up until its first expansion, so 18 months or so, for whatever reason I was not a fan of the expansion, or perhaps I was a bit burned out from leading a Guild and raiding. But it is a good game.
Another option could be Guild Wars 2, buy the box then no more costs (unless buying expansions if any come out). Not my cup of tea personally, I was a big fan of Guild Wars 1, yet I found GW2 to be very bland and struggled to stick with it for more than a month.
FFXIV is a fairly fresh game, if you like the Final Fantasy style then you may enjoy this, you have to pay for the game and then may the monthly subscription (I think about £7.50 for the basic).
I enjoyed the story line of the game and thought combat was fun - it will certainly be very familiar if you played MMOs in the past. THe fact that your char could be all classes (you lvl each class seperately by equipping its associated weapon) was actually fun, as was being able to use some cross class skills on a class (though this ability was too limited for my tastes, sure they will expand on it in time).
The big weakness was that quests are a one time deal for the most part, so when a class was 50, if you wanted to lvl another then you had to grind via dungeons or 'FATE Farming' (FATES are mini events that occur throughout the land where everyone around completes its task and gets xp). The game was enjoyable, I was on it for around 5 months, the only reason I left was probably just because I didn't feel like dealing with the farming of end game, so no real fault of the game (though the end game sounded a bit limited, but to be fair, it was new and even as I left more content was coming in the next patch)
Currently I am actually on Elder Scrolls Online, and enjoying it far more than I ever expected - back when my brother was on the Beta telling me about it, I wasn't really interested in trying it out. As it hapened, with me having no game to lay after leaving FFXIV, I decided to try the Betas and get the game.
It is not without its faults, that is for sure - but my opinion is that most of these faults lie with performance (combat lag, bugs, phasing due to the Megaserver technology) rather than with the actual gameplay mechanics. Performance issues I can live with as I knew this would happen, it does with every new MMO, the gameplay though really ticks a lot of the boxes. I won't go into detail as there is a thread around here with many many pages of details on the game.
One advantage to Elder Scrolls online is that it is still a new game (only a month old) so jumping back in the MMO pool with this doesn't leave you trying to 'catch up' and get to lvl 50 in order to actually find other players, you will find it busy with players of all levels and you can be part of the new game experience (warts and all).
The downside obviously is that it is a gamble, who knows, maybe in another 2 months the performance issues have not improved, maybe no balancing of skills has been done, at which point the game could quickly lose its numbers, and of course if they haven't improved these things, would you want to stay?
Given that it is a subscription game and a buy the box game, it is expensive, and it is early in its life to not know where it will go (course you can get the game from cd keys site for far cheaper)
So, those are probably the games I would look at. Course, if you liked WoW, you may be interested in Wild Star which I believe is out soon, not my kind of game, but then I hated WoW so what do I know
In terms of payment methods, these days its pretty much the same - you buy via digital download most the time (though you can buy the box), you subscribe via direct debit, choose recurring payments of 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or 1 year. Alternatively you can buy game time cards I think which you redeem to play for X amount of time (it works out the same kind of cost so no reason to do it unless you have major issues with online shopping and giving out card details).
Personally I never subscribe to the long term plans, only ever 1 month o 3 months at a time, the minor discount isn't worth it for the risk of not playing after 2 months when you have a year you have paid for.
Word of warning, subscription MMOs give you 30 days free with the purchase, however, in almost all cases they still get you to subscribe before allowing you to play (you don't get charged until the free days are up and if you cancel before then you are never charged, so it isn't an issue, but has surprised people in the past)
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