Wow, way to deeply misrepresent and boil your comments down to something so simple
Short of something Godwars II level, you're unlikely to find a game, especially from the Diku branch, whose combat has as much depth, strategy, and things to do in it as End of Time does, and especially when you consider the myriad elements that makes the combat anything but run of the mill, from the multiple angles even the most basic forms of combat have multiple tools of their disposal (even excluding class skills), to the endlessly intricate and strategic facets of the magic system (from the casting itself, to the elemental system, to all of the strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited), to the various ways in which group members can interact to accomplish goals (including skills designed specifically for playing off one another, to the dual/triple/quadruple etc. techs that can be discovered and performed).
Of course, if someone were to quickly breeze into the game or was generally uninterested in exploring the depth the combat system has to offer, it could possibly be misconstrued as "run of the mill" or "standard" combat. End of Time carries with it enough of a learning curve as is, there are various elements about the game, intentionally so, that can be played by only scratching the surface. You can enter combat and forgo things like assault, tension, attack, defend, using your limit breaks, ignoring the enemies' weaknesses and modifying the room's elemental fields, you can use skills with reckless abandon without considering and planning out the balance between the cooldown for the skill and the associated wait times, without ever even noticing the techs that can be performed, or without ever modifying a spell, or stacking them, or combining them into vastly more powerful affects. You can sit in one spot and "bash" ad nauseam or cast a spell and sit back and watch it fire just like on other Diku branched MUDs. You can fight in a group and ignore the fact that you have specialized skills for guarding your Mage who should probably be fighting from the back row to minimize their threat level to the NPC and the damage they take. You can neglect pretty much every aspect of the additional and "optional" aspects of combat, but you are missing out on being a much more effective player of the game.
The tools are there, and there are many, but it's up to the player to use them or not. Generally easing someone new to the game into all it has to offer tends to work a bit better than slamming them or forcing them to basically relearn how to play something. And besides, that's what our multi-pronged, optional Newbie School is designed to do, for those that don't decide to skip it and consequently miss out on early advantages of a lot of this type of thing the game has.
Our skill system also has far more to offer than just a "train/practice" game. Far removed from our Diku roots, we have no effective stat cap. You could pour every bit of AP you get into a single stat and you won't ever "max out" to the 255 cap. Aside from having no need for a "trainer" to increase your stats, we also have no "guildmaster" type of mobs like your typical "train/practice" game. You won't go to a single mob to learn everything, nor will you find the same requirements to learn a skill. There are dozens upon dozens of teachers scattered throughout the game. If you are a Knight trying to find that Power Break skill, it could be on that Elios, the Wandering Knight in the town of Karnak, or it could be over in Mysidia, a reward given to you tasked for solving the Orc problem deep in the caverns of the nearby mountains. You may find it in a hollowed tree in Macalania Forest, but the ease of the task of learning it from the guy who lives in that tree may come at a cost of money or only learning it to a lower proficiency than if you quested for the other guy. As a result, a more invested player, seeking the nooks and crannies of the game, will find things, including skills, that the more casual player may not. You can't take for granted you just find a teacher mob and BAM, everything you'll ever need to pick up as a skill is waiting for you. Aside from all of this, since so many skills do require AP, since there is no effective stat cap, and since every point of every stat matters and counts for something, this makes AP far more valuable and definitely worth more than your typical "trains and pracs" on other games. You won't find yourself maxing stats by level 10 and then having a ton of throw away skill points after the fact on EoT.
And that's just for the skills that require being taught. Many are class default, which of course are learned automatically upon a certain level. But plenty of others can only be unlocked after mastering other skills. That fireball spell you learned as a Red elemental aligned Knight is nice, but once you max that spell, you'll automatically learn combustion at a higher than mid level of proficiency. And as a Knight, after maxing fireball, you also gain access to the flame sabre spell, yet another way to take advantage of elemental strengths and weaknesses presented throughout the game, both for yourself and your group members. Did you pick up Tremor as well, being a secondary green element? Well, you can learn "magma splash" automatically after you master tremor along with fireball, as both are allied elements. Of course, this doesn't touch on actually combining a casting of tremor and fireball to create magma splash if you don't have the spells mastered yet. This isn't even to mention the most powerful spells in the game, beauties such as Meteor, Comet, X-Zone, etc., can only be cast by discovering and casting their secret combinations. There are even spell and skill trees that are unlocked by mastering the necessary prerequisites. This isn't limited to just spells, either. Thieves, upon mastering skills like sneak and backstab, can unlock skills such as shadow step. Fighters don't have to go all over the place to find their blitzes... spend a bit more than normal AP on picking up the blitz base ability, and the rest of your blitz techniques are learned automatically upon reaching the required level. This isn't the only "skill set" available in the game. This is even it's own method of progression, as skill usage and especially improvement, bonus experience. Many players get a significant chunk of their experience from their skill training, and there are plenty of players who have taken a bit of a focus on skill training over gaining levels, and managing to unlock quite a number of powerful abilities at lower levels than many of their peers.
As far as the community size? For a game basically just getting started in trying to build that sort of thing, especially doing this in 2014, I think being able to log on and see nearly a dozen people connected at various points in the day (and it not JUST being the same handful of players in and out) isn't doing too bad. You compare our numbers using a site like Mudstats and we hang pretty close to the other games in the Final Fantasy theme, too, games that have been around and establishing their communities for far longer.
We have a very strong, very unique game to offer players, and as we are really just beginning to build a core playerbase and community, I have little doubt that we will have great success in building a strong playerbase.