I've been playing with computers, and specially games since I was 7 years old, That is about 13 years ago, and one thing I've learned is that you can't be a "Lone Fortress" specially if you want to work on an industry, find something that you *really* want to focus on and join a mod team, or work on a Open Source copyleft project, that is one of the best ways you can get experience, and specially, work on the industry, get a copy of the Alien Swarm SDK or the Source SDK 2013 and hack on with others

The MMORPG genre is a *very* unstable genre to work on, but I recommend you to read some documents about game design, there are excelent ones spreaded through the internet, the MIT makes most of it's courses available online, if you really have interest you should read them

http://gamelab.mit.edu/study/