Now that you mentioned Mortal Kombat, 3 things:
1)Aoc isnt exactly real time combat, ranger can shoot arrows from their back as their abilities are locked to their targets so long as the finisher has been triggered, combos finishers are hitting the wind for full damage no matter if the targets is 50m away after 3 sec of animation, you can miss direct white hits on a moving character if you dont tab target it etc... it's a hybrid combat system without auto-attack.
2)There is no pvp level, magic pyjama or any gear grind in Mortal Kombat, only skill prevail. (oh and no capture the flag...)
3)There is a 8 years old f2p online game called guild wars 1 with more people playing pvp and even pve without gear scaling than there are players in aoc, but it's an old game, the sequel however ressemble more a pve fairytale WoW hybrid in gameplay with only a single conquest mode and a level/stuff based zerg v zerg.
I admit easily it's not the same kind of fun to play pvp to truely oppose your skills against other players and be rewarded with the thrill of battle, ranking, title, vanity, fame, bragging rights and even gold or to play pvp to farm your opponent with overwhelming power advantage and be rewarded with more power if you dedicate more time to grinding generic pve.
however a mortal kombat mod for AoC focusing only on combat with balanced characters, abilities fix here and there, no hack and no 1g potions would be truely awesome, funcom please share the source code and i make this
this game simply doesnt cater to me anymore as i have done everything and i am over with power farming and generic grinding. you are from the US so i cant tell with player issues in ... minigames......