I played the game for a while I've been in beta for a number of months. I've tried many different careers leveled a few up to about level 18 or so. 

It gets hard to level something when you know next week all that work is going to be wiped.  So I spent more time poking around the different systems and in general getting a feel for how things worked. 

I started to try crafting, realized that it was something that will take a good amount of time investment in and figured I'd be better off focusing on systems within the game I could experience and get a good impression.  My impression of crafting, albeit limited was that it was nowhere near the quality of the crafting experience in SWG but is more complex than that in WOW (then again scrambling eggs is more complex than WOW).

Right at the start I tired  play Dwarves, unfortunately the class I wanted to play they've removed from the game.  However some very basic things I realized very quickly, the models of the characters when they run doesn't really match the ground they cover, its like the ground is sliding as they slowly lope along.  It's distracting and worse it looks primitive.  unfortunately as I moved on to the other races I noticed many similiar problems with the other races, making them all fairly primitive, the best models are the elves, but even there, things are not great.

That leads me into the next issue I have, the combat, its VERY obvious this is a turn based combat system so much so that you spend time waiting for your next attack to go off, unfortunately this also means that people can see attacks winding up and run away while your stuck in animation mode.  And yes this means you don't hit them.  (Some abilities you can run while in the animation, others you can't, and frankly in a PVP oriented game if you can't move while attacking, the game becomes a great excersize in frustration)

Collisions are turned on but only sometimes there are other times you can run right through people, now I'm not sure if thats intentional or not, I think it is because mostly collision only matters in combat, not out of combat running through another character who is blocking the door to an inn.

Combat feels clunky, every game I've played or beta tested since SWG (beta) has seemed to go  out of its way to give a feeling of realtime combat even though its turn based (SWG, WOW, DDO, CoH&V, Tabula Rasa, etc etc)  not so with WAR.  With war it feels as if I'm taking 3 steps back in generations, now this may be due to diagnostics running in the background but I doubt it.  Essentially combat was step, swing, wait for opponent, swing, wait for opponent, swing.  Not much fun, and completely destroyed my hopes for the game.  Basic gameplay just doesn't feel up to the other games out there.  Sure the number crunchers will go nuts with stats and all that but those who are a bit more used to the quicker gameplay styles won't enjoy this nearly as much.  It flat out feels clunky.

It really pisses me off to say that too because WAR has so many other things going for it, the Public Quest system is by far the greatest organic way to form groups I've EVER seen within a game.  The fact that you can enter into RVR scenarios at level 1 and only level in RVR is fantastic. (I don't recommend it but you can do it) 

The guild management tools are some of the best I've ever seen.  I like the artistic style I'm hoping the low-res crap that I've seen is only because of beta and not how the game is going to look when it goes live. (I'm hoping so because they wanted to save bandwidth on downloads) 

The chat system flat out sucks, SOE so far has the best chat system in their games to date, maybe someone else will get a clue and emulate them. 

I've not seen anyone doing UI mods for the game and I hope those are released fairly soon as the default UI is adequate but after years of having WOW UI mods custom feeding me whatever information I wish, WAR definitely falls short there.

The RVR is interesting but as many others have noticed, it looks like there is going to be large discrepancies btwn Order and Chaos which pretty much invalidates how much fun that aspect is.   when you log in you see that there are 1500 chaos and 450 order, it's little suprise that one side is in total control of a zone.

Basic quests, they are your typical, go here, grab this, kill this.  I saw very little in the way of ingenuity.  However they do put large colored areas on the map so you know where to go to complete your quests (this is a good thing, as many of the quests are extremely vague)

My overall impression of the game to date?  It's so so, I think PVP nuts who only want to PVP would be much better off playing WAR than WOW.  But those people in the middle who like a balance and those who are into PVE should stay away as the game just doesn't play well enough for them.  The game isn't going to be the WOW killer I think many of us on these forums are hoping for, I do think it will be a small MMO with a good fanbase but nothing more than that.

I'll try to answer any questions people have as honestly and as frankly as I can.  I will however completely ignore ravenous fanbois.