I will give my own review on this "World of Warcraft", you speak of...
A score is at the bottom of this post.
Graphics
As far as the graphics of WoW are concerned, they do the job. They are not fantastic, but they do look pretty at times, and can really take the breath away from the unsuspecting person walking, say, into the forest to the West of Thousand Needles.
Character models remain somewhat clunky, and I would suggest that they *finally* get around to releasing a higher-end model set for those with better computers. Yes Blizzard, we know that you're just trying to appeal to every one of those 11.5 million players and are therefore just going with the bare minimum specification requirements as you can handle, but we'd like our hard earned characters to look nicer than the, oh, probably 600 polygon monsters they are right now.
Along with higher resolution textures, this would really give the game a huge boost to it's already reasonably pretty atmosphere.
Music/Sound
Blizzard has been pretty well off as far as its musical side of things goes - it's not Nintendo (Zelda), but it got the job done. I have no complaints, except that I can't choose my login screen - I miss the original login music. It felt like I was entering a world of war and mystery, now it's just a big ol' blue dragon. We saw the cinematic, we don't need to be reminded that she's still there.
Apart from that, grunts and clanks are realistic enough. A nice clonk with a blunt weapon, a shink with a sharp weapon. All is good in the world.
Programming
The programming of the game, as far as lag issues and such goes, seems to be good enough. But either new, or split servers between zones, should be considered. You have boasted, Blizzard, that you have a good 11.5 million players. Perhaps you should actually, I don't know, consider... EXPANDING, for that player base.
Gameplay
One can not simply talk about the gameplay of an MMO and say "good" or "bad". Here they are in broken down forms.
-PvP
Added in as an afterthought (surprisingly enough, since it IS called "world of WARcraft") one will often find themselves rather useless in any battleground situation unless they are levels 18, 28, 38, 48, 58, 68, or 78, in their respective tiers.
Not only this, but actually accessing a Battleground is a fairly clunky process, with one having to run into a main city, right into the PvP area with stationed battlemasters, and queue up for a battleground through them.
As such, many of the player base tend to completely ignore battlegrounds until they are at the level cap, so that they can just do so at their lesiure, while waiting for the raid group to come online, or something like that.
Actual combat in PvP is in a constant flux due to Blizzard, having changed from the immovable mountain into, instead, a flimsy tree.
The developers will constantly overfix something in an attempt to placate those who blew in their direction before, but as soon as they do, more people are blowing in the other direction, causing a constant maelstrom of nerfs and buffs to all classes and, shockingly, races, as of the new patch.
In order to fix this problem, perhaps for anyone considering a future release of an MMO, you must remember not to bow down to anyone. Do not obey the mighty dollar (otherwise known to you as "the whinging player base") and do not give them treats. People are ravenous vultures, and the constant changes to classes over the last four years of WoW have seen many, many ability and game mechanic changes to all classes.
In summary - the PvP battlegrounds are likeable, but mostly innaccessable, and require you do be at the top of your tier to do any good. And the class balance is constantly flying around, much like a roulette wheel to choose which class will be the "flavour of the month".
-PvE
What once was a large adventure of epic proportions, where one could not possibly succeed without a well planned group of Forty people, has dwindled down to Ten people, tanking and spanking with a few odd, if occaisionally cool, strategies.
Once again, with the constant class changes (mostly due to Blizzard not making up their mind about whether this game is a PvE based, or PvP based one) classes are thrown out of and into raids at the whim of whatever Blizzard seems to feel like this month.
Boss fights range from simple and stupid, all the way up to grand and epic, adventurous and magestic... but are for the most part lackluster nowadays, with the player base being young and greedy, honourless and devious, and most of all, lazy.
When one argues "A raid should not need forty people!" you should be arguing "that is how we have designed it, it is a large battle of epic scale, and concentration and actual skill will be required to defeat this particularly strong boss of ancient lore", not "ok, we'll cut it down to ten and make them all weaker."
The grinding is boring and repetative, and is only glanced at once you have reached level 60, where the game gets a little fun, and is once again looked at well at level 70, where the most recent expansion has managed to get many who had left before hooked, once again.
In summary - the PvE is alright, for those who just want to sit back and press a few buttons with little effort, but the skill and organisation and management of players and classes has very much disipated with time and laziness. The gear acquired from PvE is less than spectacular, and loot ninjas are still rampant, very often making one question what they just spent the last four hours doing.
Class Variety
The classes range from melee dps, ranged physical dps, ranged spell dps, melee spell dps, damage over time spell dps, pets, tanks, healers, and of course, hybrids. There are now four hybrids - that is, four healers, who can DPS if need be.
Class variety is decent, if not great. There is still a distinct monk-type class missing, but with nine* classes in the game, along with three distinct talent trees with each class, the choices are out there and are pleasantly viable (except when the class has fallen victim to recent nerfs).
Customisation
Blizzard has fallen far from the tree here, with games such as Runescape having done so for years, Blizzard has finally sucked it up, and allowed hair changes, among other things.
I say "Took 'em long enough..." angrily here, as it should not have been a hard thing to do, and should not have taken four years to implement. Along with generally awkward looking Tier sets for players to cookie cut themselves into, the gear and look of people's characters is far from what I would call customisable.
But, looking at it from the very beginning, yes, you can choose any class with any appropriate race for your faction, along with hair, face and skin colour, but for such a prestigous and well known game, surely they could have done better by now.
A simple scaling for height would have been appreciated by many, I'm sure.
Crafting/Professions
Crafting is around, and, while leveling up your character, is a good way of acquiring some decent rare gear, if you're so lazy that you can't get a five man group together to do an instance.
But apart from the "for the grinding part" factor, much of the gear gained through crafting is fairly useless at endgame.
Leatherworking is mostly used for the ability to add little enchantments to armour pieces (especially to lower level Twinks) that range from 8 armour, up to 40 agility and 30 stamina type bonuses.
Blacksmithing gives the player a nice arsenal of armour and weapons for the mail/plate wearing classes.
Cooking really came out of nowhere in The Burning Crusade and gave it a viable use for Raids and PvP, and is now considered probably one of the more important and useful professions, even though it is secondary, and fishing, well, as long as there are Deviate Fish, there will always be fishermen out there.
The other crafting skills, engineering, tailoring, alchemy etc. all have their usefulness, whether it's making potions, bombs, bags or food with great buffs.
It's probably one of the better crafting systems I've seen in a game, and works quite well, even if it is a bit bland and lack-luster end-game for the most part.
Adventure
If one takes a moment from killing things repetatively and mind numbingly and looks around themselves, they will find a vast, beautiful world. I spent a lot of time in my level 40's just wandering, having fun with my explorations of the world. I was saddened to find that if I tried to swim out to sea, I would just hit an invisible wall at some point and be "fatigued" after a short while... I would have even prefered the wierd sea creature from Spore eating me alive, than that subtle way of telling me that I "should probably just take a zeppelin".
The World of Warcraft zone of Azeroth, holding Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms and, just recently, Northrend, and the zone of Outland, are beautiful places to just walk or fly through. Unfortunately, far too few see this as they rush to level 60, 70, and then 80 in a desperate attempt to play "the game", at 80.
Adventure is its' own reward in this game.
Player Base
11.5 million people. What's the problem here? People are inherently good, right?
Well, let's just say that, oh, one in five people are jerks.
There are over 2 million jerks in World of Warcraft.
And there are far, FAR more idiotic, or young players... thank you Game Time cards.
Griefers, ninja looters, and groups of high level characters destroying flight masters and such are all too common, and take every little thing they can get their hands on.
To be fair, you can nearly always find a group of people to level with, or do some PvP in a battleground with etc., unlike some other good, if unpopulated games... but you can not be assured that they will not be idiots or jerks, and I personally have been ninja'd, argued with, and badly tanked/healed too many times to count. So many terrible players play this game, and they ruin it. If you find yourself a guild with some decent people in it that know how to spell, consider yourself lucky and be proud of your achievement.
Overall, if I were to dumb this down into terms of numbers, well, I'd give it numbers like this.
Graphics - 8/10 - good, if dated.
Sound - 8/10 - gets the job done, but not inspiring
Code/Servers - 7/10 - works, but often lags, disconnects people, and has an easy-to-reach player limit.
Gameplay - 6/10. It is one boring grind after another, with so many changes being made that, what you're playing today, might be completely different tomorrow. And after four years of development, one would think that it would be somewhat stable but... throwing in the Death Knight class has once again completely screwed any semblence of balance that dwindled in the winds of the past.
Overall score - 73/100.
