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I also had the mouse pointer lock up a few times, about ten seconds into the session, and it's reportedly related to how the game deals with nVidia's mouse acceleration on 6800 cards. You can use software mode, but it's a little sluggish. I found that if I just spun the pointer around until I felt I was clear, I didn't have any issues. The 9800 Pro on my work rig did not have this issue.
Last but not least is the full-screen bloom effect. While it gives the game a warm glow, it also makes textures blurry, removes antialiasing, and makes the names above people's heads difficult to read from a distance. I found that *not* using bloom made things sharper and more vivid. If you like it, then more power to you, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Sound is also a large part of the WoW experience, and they've done an excellent job with the score--the music just doesn't get old. It's apparently just subliminal enough to withstand hundreds of hours of play. Each zone has its own distinct theme, whether it's the sad strings in Westfall, the tribal sounds of Stonetalon, or the slow dreaminess of Ashenvale. You can also disable music and play your own stuff in the background, as WoW cooperates very well with the ALT+TAB and CTRL+ESC command. Running in the background, WoW usually takes up 70-90MB of RAM, so you can quickly pop onto the forums or check out thottbot.com if you need a quick answer to a tough question. When the queues were bad at launch, I just let WoW sit in the taskbar while I checked out the latest forum topics. On a side note, you can quit the game immediately, instead of having to wait on the traditional 20-30 second timer, unless you're in combat.
And not only is Azeroth an interesting place to explore, it's pretty easy to go about things under your own steam. You see, the usual MMO model is that you pretty much have to group up in order to continue at a reasonable pace, because the mobs that give reasonable experience start getting really tough, and eventually they're impossible to fight alone. This is not the case in World of Warcraft, although there are many "elite" quests where you really can't go alone. Still, you can spend most of your time just puttering around, beating on bad guys, getting cool loot, improving your trade skills, and trading at the auction house. It's actually a pretty pleasant way to while away some gaming hours.
What's also cool is that each player gets a "hearthstone," for free, which allows them to bind themselves to a large town or city and teleport back there once every 60 minutes. I'm bound to Ironforge, where the Alliance auction house is. The underground train and the flight paths make it a quick trip back to anywhere on the continent--no more than ten minutes, unless you're heading out to the fringes. And the Mage can teleport to the capital cities under his own power starting at level 20, which can take as little as one weekend to reach, if you're serious about reaching that goal. At higher levels, he can even open portals to certain cities that his or her party members can use for a quick trip back home. Similarly, the Warlock can eventually summon a fellow player from anywhere in the world. Getting to where you need to be never takes a long time in WoW.
Now, I have to say that the player classes are not perfectly balanced, and each one went through significant changes over the course of development and will very likely continue to evolve. You long-time MMO players will be familiar with the "holy trinity"--mage, priest, fighter--and the same pretty much holds true here. A mix of those is pretty much all you need for any given group quest, and the poor Rogue is the one who often gets left out in the cold, to the point of general party invitations informing rogues in the vicinity sometimes that they need not apply.
You see, the rogue dishes a lot of damage in a short amount of time, but he or she can only wear leather armor at most, so he also gets a lot of pain dished back, making him the focus of the priest's attention. At the same time, his skills don't include much "aggro hold," meaning he can't keep attention away from the priest who's healing him, or the mage in the back who's also dishing a lot of damage. So he ends up complicating things a lot, and many players would rather do without the complication. The rogue can knock out an enemy, but this ability has to be used before combat has begun, and it can be resisted, and he has to creep up slowly to the mob. And the mob may be close enough to a buddy so that sapping in general will get their attention.
The other classes, like the warlock, hunter, and paladin, do all right here, because they can fill in the gaps in the trinity. The paladin is a hybrid class, since he's a fighter with some healing, buffing, and protection abilities, and he's usually next in line to the trinity. Paladins are always welcome, since they can boost people's stats on an individual basis and cast a single aura the whole group benefits from and that doesn't expire like the buffs do. The warrior doesn't do as well as he used to, since his Charge ability, which allows him to rapidly close the gap and stun a mob, can no longer be used after the combat phase has begun. He also no longer has the Pummel ability, a close-range attack that allowed a warrior without a shield to stun a mob.
Now, you pretty much have to have a shield to fight a spellcaster, a situation where stunning them (and thereby canceling the spell cast) a matter of life and death for the whole group. Having a shield gives him or her more armor, but it also means less damage, since you're only using a one-handed weapon. The warrior also misses a significant amount of time, which is frustrating since he needs to land a hit in order to generate Rage (their version of mana) and use all of his special attacks. To top it off, his only way to generate Rage without fighting uses up 100 points of health, which used to not be the case. He needs some love.
The warrior is also a gear-dependent class, since he gets hit a lot, basically, and needs all the boosted stats he can get to stay alive and be effective. I had to take up the Mining profession and stop often to pick up ore from the nodes placed throughout the zone, just so I could turn around and sell it at the auction house and pay for new armor and weapons. Being in a guild helps, but someone still has to go around and make a lot of money to keep him nice and shiny. Thankfully, the auction house is intuitive, and it uses the in-game mail system to deliver your goods the minute a successful auction has gone through. You can mail items and money to other players within your faction, with an attached note, and it takes about an hour to arrive, and you can grab your package from any of the mailboxes scattered throughout the world. And you even get a new mail notification in the interface. It's really a great system.
At the auction house, you get an estimation of how much longer the auction will last, who's selling it, a pop-up describing the item in detail, and the seller can set an instant buyout price (which has to be at least the cost of the item). You just click-and-drag the item from your bags to the auction interface, and the game sets a basic price for it, which works out to twice what a vendor would pay you for it. You can set this number to anything you like, and you will see some outlandish prices set by people who really have no clue, or just have no space left in their inventory or at the bank, but prices are generally competitive. Since a mob will almost never drop an item equaling the level it's at, you'll want to stop at the auction house from time to time to pick up the best stuff you could get, which is either crafted or obtained by a higher-level player.
Speaking of crafting, I have to say that, although it's great that a failed attempt doesn't make you lose materials, and you can now click once to craft multiple items, there is still a definite problem with your character progressing faster than the skill. As your skill increases, it takes progressively more and more material to make a higher-level item, so it takes you longer and longer to gather all the materials when you'd probably rather be out questing. People will offer to make you the item for free, as long as you provide the materials. This way they don't have to gather their own materials and waste them skilling up to what they really want to craft, and you don't need to have the crafting skill to make the item. But if the scaling was just a little gentler (or, dare I say it, the character leveling a little slower), I'd be more inclined to take up crafting.
Also, I think it's a bit unfair to the leatherworkers and tailors that their blacksmithing friends can make weapons as well as armor. Blacksmiths can also take up Mining as their other profession and thereby get almost all their materials "in the field," whereas leatherworking requires both Skinning and materials collected with the Mining skill. This wouldn't be so bad if you could do more than two professions at a time (with your skill resetting if you unlearn it and re-learn later on). But to be a Leatherworker requires you to buy stuff. And tailoring recipes will eventually need leather and Mining materials as well.
Does this make the economy stronger Sure, it probably does, but the fun factor is also reduced. I'm still debating which option I'd take. Alchemy and Herbalism go together, but they're both Primary professions, locking you out of trying out other stuff if you want to be able to get your own materials, which most people do. Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. But I like fun, and World of Warcraft likes me to have fun, and that fun factor gets a little inconsistent here. It feels too much like work.
PvP could also use some more fun factor, to be honest. Currently, you don't get any experience, or additional abilities, or money, or items from fighting the other faction or dueling other players, so it ends up feeling tacked on. They have plans, which include PvP arenas, but it's pretty undercooked for now. There's also no free-for-all PvP, which is good or bad, depending on your tastes--just an FYI. Personally, I prefer not getting ganked by my fellow players, which happens a lot when a group from the enemy faction comes rolling into town, looking for trouble and averaging ten levels above the players questing in that area.
Closing Comments
World of Warcraft, like any MMO, is a tough game to score. Your play experience will have no concrete resolution, and content and character class balancing will make for a slightly different experience from one month to the next. And WoW had some debilitating issues at launch trying to handle the record-breaking number of people filing in for subscriptions. After having written about the extremely long queues, they have dwindled to almost nothing, even at peak playing times, and the game has become much more stable. I still get the occasional crash, but WoW still has a polish that puts most other MMO launches to shame. Almost a victim of its own popularity, World of Warcraft quickly found its feet, serving up no fewer than eighty-eight servers across the country, with more likely on the way.
If you're new to massively multiplayer online games, or PC gaming, and want to see what the fuss is about, WoW is an excellent place to start. If you're a hardcore grognard who takes masochistic pleasure in grinding away on the same monsters in the same camp for hours at a time, you'll be better served elsewhere. If you're in between, I think World of Warcraft is the MMO we've all been waiting for. It does not blow away the genre, but it does hone it to near-perfection. I think the biggest problem you'll have is managing to play it in moderation.