So, I finally got my hands on the game that I drooled over for months. What do I think about it? Well, I already knew what I was going to be playing, so I went through character creation rather quickly, just touching briefly on looking at the other races and the customization options. The game is definatly not City of Heroes with it's limitless supply of character designs. That being said, the game also is not Lineage 2 (with it's 15 or so available options. It gave me enough options that I was satisfied.)

But before I go on, I'd like to mention that we actually get to see the server population numbers in World of Warcraft. Now, I don't know if this is a beta only thing, as almost every (if not every) other MMOG blocks people from seeing how many people are playing. I got home around 2pm PST and was in the game by 2:30. Throughout the first and second days, despite a little bit of overcrowding in the newbie areas and some of the beginning quests (to be expected on a fresh server) I think this stress test is going great. So maybe Blizzard was even more conservative thinking they needed to be and were "too" prepared. Hell, some games like Shadowbane released with less than 100,000 players and had uncontrollable problems with their servers for weeks afterwards. But that's something I've thought about. If their is 100,000 players in the stress test, why aren't there more people logged in. The most populated of the servers has 2700 people in it right now, the least populated has around 1400. I expected things to be much more crowded.

The game was extremely playable up through the first 2 days. Then, in the afternoon of the second day, Blizzard cut the number of servers in half for a 2 hour period. The servers managed to stay up without crashing while I played, but the lag was really bad. Still, it was playable.

Day 3 had more and more people are playing at night (Saturday). I guess we're all just a bunch of nerds with no social lives /cough. The lag situation is worse today, but the game is, of course, still very playable. Then at one point tonight, every server crashed and was shut down or unplugged at the same time. Howeverm, everyone stayed in chat for a good 4 minutes or so unable to do anything except chat with one another. But they all came back about 5 minutes later. No harm done I guess. The lag situation seemed to improve after that though. Also, in an attempt to get the game to run alot smoother on my computer, my hard drive was "thrashing" alot and it caused me alot of headaches I switched the game over to OpenGL mode, and things ran a alot better, while still not running "great" it was definatly alot better. Maybe I'll buy another 512 megs of ram. While the game may look OK, we also learned that they disabled some of the cooler graphics options for the stress test. Why did Blizzard do this? I don't know, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

Anyway, I'm working hard on leveling up and experiencing as much of the game as possible. I'm currently a level 16 Tauren Hunter. While I originally thought I had a shot at the contest for winning a closed beta slot, I've seen people on my server as high as level 21 (horde) already. One thing that I'd like to see addressed is definatly the desparity between horde and alliance quests. The alliance are in general higher levels and better equipped atm.

As far as pvp is concerned (I'm playing on a pvp server) I haven't really seen too much of it. I know that over in Kalimdor the Night Elves have come out and raided ratchet several times both last night and tonight. Didn't get to see any of it though.

While still months away, World of Warcraft definatly looks to be a tough cookie to beat. While many balance issues remain such as talents for those of us missing them. The game is already in a much more finished state than others I've played and threw away within a month after their releases