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You might want to give God Wars II a try. It fulfills your requirements at least loosely, although there are some aspects you might not like, and I'll cover those below. The address is godwars2.com 3000, the website is and there's a new player's guide here: (although if you follow the in-game hints and read the 'newbie' and 'tutorial' help files, you should manage fine).
The average playerbase is currently 19.5 (calculated over the last 912 hours of uptime). It takes most people around 10-20 hours to class their first character, although skilled players can do it faster (people usually take around 4-5 hours the second time around, once they understand the system). Once you've classed, you can travel to the Nexus to continue advancing, and the Nexus has no PK restrictions.
The combat system is manual, and highly complex, using nearly ten thousand fighting techniques divided among dozens of weapons and fighting styles. The combat system and coordinate-based (i.e. roomless) movement system (which tie in together for things like weapon reach, leaping attacks, etc) are the two biggest stumbling blocks for new players who want something that's just a bit different, but don't want to learn a completely new playing style. If you like the standard Diku approach to combat and movement, you probably won't like God Wars II. On the other hand, if you're willing to put the effort into learning a system that depends heavily upon player skill, you just might like it.
While it's possible to defeat characters who are much stronger than you, this rarely happens in practice, because stronger characters do have an advantage, and they're usually owned by players who earned that extra power through skill. You'll occasionally see skilled players defeat mobs twice their own strength, but it's rare for players to defeat others player much stronger than themselves unless they are experimenting with unusual character builds.
After classing, grinding can become an issue, and there are two types. The first is grinding for equipment, because its randomly generated, and therefore you're always on the lookout for something better. Fortunately not all character builds need equipment - a vampire using Bat Form (i.e., they're a cloud of bats) doesn't wear anything, while a dragon doesn't care about the item stats, only the material, type and rarity, so that he can dump it into his treasure hoard. Many other builds only need limited equipment (for example Wolf Form can only wear a collar, Oni don't use armour and get a tetsubo for free, mages using Transcendence can only wear ethereal rings, and so on). Many builds are also able to customise or create some or all of their equipment via class powers, which further reduces the impact of collected equipment.
The second type of grinding is earning primal (the equivilent of experience points) after classing, and I've added a couple of things so far to reduce this problem. The first is 'boost' points, which you earn a few of each day, and which allow you to earn 2.5 times normal primal for a fixed number of kills. Boosts are primarily part of a system I introduced to deal with botting, but they also tend to reward casual play and reduce the grind. The second thing I added is 'maps', which require you to solve a puzzle, track down the location of a magical node, then slay the guardian to earn a decent reward - sadly, this has ended up becoming just another form of grind, although at least it's not quite as mindless or repetitive.
I am currently in the process of adding a one-shot quests with huge primal rewards, and the first of these should be coming in 19th July. I'm also working on an item-creation system (using glory points earned from a completely skill-based 'war' minigame) which should also help reduce equipment grind. However both of these solutions will only reduce the problem, not eliminate it entirely, so I will continue to look for further options.
As an aside: The earlier version of my mud had no form of character advancement at all, so that every player was on equal footing. While this resulted in some very enjoyable fights, the lack of advancement meant that nobody really played (a player would log on, see nobody else was around, and quit - then another player would log on, see nobody was around, and quit...and so on). It was only once I added advancement that people started hanging around, providing enough of a playerbase for some decent fights. It's a rather sad paradox that the best PK fights are between people on equal footing, but that people rarely hang around unless they can spend their time getting a foot up the ladder.
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