Err..... WoW never was and never will be a PvP game.
I'm not sure I would recommend WAR. I played it at release and LOVED it, but the population has been on the decline ever since. The 1st page on the forum has posts dating back to february 26, so that gives you an idea of how active the community is.... But I gather that they consolidated a bunch of servers so the game is pretty active now. I also played DAOC for 6-7 years, it was the best and probably still is.
You might want to look into Darkfall or Mortal Online. Those are both, I think, FFA PVP, full loot games, and in a first person perspective. FFA PvP means that politics are player-driven rather than laid out by the game (ie horde kills alliance). You gotta group up with people to protect yourself against other people. Guilds typically live in separate areas of the game world, which to me is really cool.
Both are similar to UO in that any character can use any skill, and you level up skills by using them. However, Darkfail has no level caps, so basically every character is the exact same. Mortal Online isn't out yet, but supposedly there are caps so that you can only get a certain amount of total level points, which forces characters to specialize.