Following are my impressions of the game after about 35 hours /played across a
number of characters.   That's over the first 3-4 days of having the game.
It that's not an indication of the "pull" of the game, I don't know what is.

In a nutshell: so long as one isn't expecting WoW to be Diablo 3 in terms of
style and design philosophy, there's a lot to like and a lot to see in WoW,
and right now, I have absolutely zero intent right now to play LOD again.  

And now, the somewhat longer version...

First up, getting the beast installed off the 4 game CDs took about 3-4 hours.
The reason for this was, in addition to the straight out CD install, I also
had to do a large driver update, and then upon connecting to the WoW servers,
immediately got a 19 MB WoW patch update foisted on me, over all a dial up
connection (painful, to say the least).   Right now there's an additional 40
MB patch download coming down the pipe as I write this.   Once past the patch
download hassles, the game seems to run just fine over a dial up connection,
on a PC with 512 MB of RAM and a relatively old Geforce 3 graphics card.

Graphically, the game is pretty damned impressive, in a quint sort of way.
It kind of reminds me of Sierra's Quest for Glory title from years gone by,
just on a much sharper, larger scale.  And I've only explored the first zone
so far.   The style of graphics is heavy on the "cartoony" site of things, and
the 3-D graphics seem to be have fairly low polygon counts (for the lay
person, this means structures tend to look a little "chunky" around the
edges), but even so, it works very well.   The environments themselves are
pretty interesting.   In the first human zone alone (the race you pick for
your character determines your starting zone/map), you get a couple of quint
little settlements, a couple of farms, a logging encampment, lakes, rivers,
forest lands, some "castle" like structures, and lots of low level cannon
fodder to generally maul, whallop, fry, slice, dice or, in many cases, run
away from.   Wandering into the human city of Stormwind for the first time got
an "oooh, ahhh" out of me, especially when I noticed that a bell chimes of the
passing hour.   Since I'm playing on an East coast server, the time cycles
within the world follow eastern US time zone... if I log in to play around
lunch time here, the world itself is just darkening into early evening, and
mimics real time, minute by minute.   I don't really know how WoW compares to
other MMORPGs, but overall, it feels "worldy" enough to me, and makes LOD look
a little shallow in comparison.

In addition to starting a few human characters, I've also had a dabble with
the Night Elf and Dwarf side of things.   These races start off in entirely
different world locations.   The Night Elf starting region has a kind of
warped woodlands theme to it, while the dwarves start in a winter wonder land
region.

Creatures encountered so far in this handful of "zones" (and the game has
dozens more zones than I haven't seen yet), include various breeds of kobolds,
wolves, bears, giant spiders, bandits, various gremlin and troll like beings,
and the evil murloc, a maniacal, somewhat fish-like race of humanoids (top
marks to these guys for having the most overly dramatic death animations so
far)

Favourite character class so far - the rogue.   Now, the rogue in WoW is very
much in the old school dungeons and dragons mold.   Rather than being a ranged
attacker extraodinaire (there's a separate class the for that, the hunter, but
I haven't played that one yet), she's a canny melee fighter (with some
throwing skills as secondary), complete with charge up and finisher like moves
(reminiscent of the assassin in LOD, but without the keyboard gymnastics), and
stealth abilities, such as pick pocket and back stab.   These are fun as heck,
I have to say, and a very pleasant change from the pretty much hack and slash
mode of LOD.   Sure, the rogue can dish it out with the best of them in that
carnage department, but it's nice to have other options.   As an example, I
was quite successfully able to complete one quest (investigate a mine) without
killing a single foe - I simply engaged stealth mode and crept into the place
to have a look around, and then crept back on, and have had find tracking
boars and bears around and giving them a good old back stabbing.  

And on the subject of quests, well, I'm not sure if I entirely like them, so
far, but I must insert a disclaimer here that I've really only scratched the
surface of the game.  Maybe things get better later and the story of the game
will start to open itself up more.   Granted, there are a lot of quests to do,
and it's entirely up to the player to decide which ones to do and which ones
to ignore, and the experience rewards for many of them make them a fast(ish)
way to gain level ups, but too many of them have a "fedex" feel to them - go
here, talk to one guy, go somewhere else, talk to another guy, or go here,
kill X of these and retrieve Y of a special kind of item, go here, talk to
some guy to complete the quest, and so on.

Don't go into this game expecting LOD style rate of advancement, in fact,
don't go into the game expecting LOD-style *anything*.   The general pacing of
combat is slower than LOD, and you don't even get to choose where to allocate
your stat points on getting a level up, for example, it's all done for you.
Also,  you don't even get to start having much control about your character's
development until level 10.   It seems the focus is more on following the
story and experiencing the world than it is upon items and builds and all that
stuff.   I liken WoW to being more of a "world system" whereas Diablo 2 and
LOD are more of a "combat system", if that makes sense.   WoW feels a lot like
an old school adventure game with RPG elements and a huge game world.

Okay, back to rate of advancement... while the first half dozen level ups
occur pretty quickly, after that it slows down pretty fast.   My two highest
level characters are showing a total of around 30 hours played to get level 10
and 12 respectively.   Admittedly I'm a complete noob who probably spends far
too much time blundering around checking things out instead of focusing on
progressing (and far too much time recovering his body, hehe), but still, it's
much, much slower than Diablo 2 and its expansion.   It makes sense, though.
Blizzard don't want you finishing everything and seeing everything in the
first couple of weeks... they want to extract as many monthly charges out of
you as possible.   But, so long as the journey is interesting and you know
what you're getting yourself in for, I don't see this as a problem.

Apparently some people *did* manage to attain level 60 (the current level cap)
within the first 10 or so days of play, but one would suspect these are
ex-beta testers who do just what they need to do to advance through the game
based on past play experience, without stopping to smell the roses.   They
probably play quite a number of hours per day, too.   like, all the time.

The general philosophy of the game seems to be that of non-linear linearness,
at least so far.   What do I mean by that?    Well, within the starter zones,
you find various locales (sort of sub-zones) populated by goons with a few
narrow spread of levels.   For example, in the human starter zone, you face
level 1-3 kobolds and wolves, then further out there's level 3-4 bandits,
level 4-5 wolves, then further out there's spiders and bears in the 6-9 range,
and so on.   But while it seems you can go anywhere you want at any time,
there's somewhat of a limit to how comfortably you can explore unless you're
in a party, since your success against the enemies is tied a lot to levels,
and force of numbers definitely counts for something.   For example, while a
level 5 character can pretty much defeat a singular level 5-6 enemy, take on a
level 7 or higher enemy, and things can get hectic (especially if you're a
melee character that doesn't get to soften a foe up before it gets into melee
range).   And if you end up facing *more* than one enemy of this level at once
(and given that fresh enemies will occasionally "spawn" in right beside you,
this can sometimes happen through no fault of your own), you may well end up
respawning at one of the grave sites, all ready for a corpse recovery run.

I probably died more times in the first 2 days of playing WoW than I did in
the last two *years* of playing LOD, simply becuase I'm too impatient and want
to keep wandering around into new areas instead of grinding things out in the
safer areas amassing level ups.   This part of the game might be a real
turnoff for some, and I have to admit, I almost gave up early on, simply
because I wanted to head out and explore the lands but felt like the game
wanted to force me to play it on its terms.   I'm guessing (hoping) that once
I level up some more and gain some more power, I'll get a little more
flexibility in where I can go.

Grouping is, well, wicked cool.   :-)   I grouped up with 3phase and friend
last night and we headed out for a raiding expedition on a murloc village that
had been a bit too tough for me to take on alone at the time.   Lots of
carnage ensued, a real blast.   Also, you can sort of group up with random
people without actually grouping - run around, see some having trouble, run
up, "buff" them with healing or other spells or wade into melee range to help
out, and then be off on your way once you're done.   You won't get an
experience for these sorts of things, but it's fun, and the world feels quite
alive.

The interface of the game is pretty decent.   You can bind your special skills
to your action bars in whatever way you want, and use hotkeys to invoke them
as you'd expect.   The screen itself is nicely laid you, and things like your
character sheet and inventories can be opened up and positioned wherever you
want them, and will stay there.   The automaps mark the positions of your team
mates as little circles, so if you lose track, a quick peek at the automap
will tell you which way to go to get to them, even if they're on the other
side of the zone.   The little popup windows for configuring your friends
list, checking guild status, etc are nicely done, and there's a nice
implementation of the "/who" command included, allowing you to get a list of
all the players in your current zone, any zone on the server, matching a
certain name wildcard, level bracket, etc.  My only real complaints so far
would be that the movement of your character can only be controled by the
keyboard (unless I'm missing something here), and that the chat window text
starts off in a tiny sized font (which is painful, but easily changed once you
figure out how to do it.  :-)

Emotes are fun.   It's cool (there's that word again) to meet up with people
in a settlement and start dancing, and you can laugh, do the chicken walk, and
all sorts of other silly things.   :-)

Last up, the trade professions are pretty cool.   In addition to your chosen
class (which determines your basic "makeup" in terms of abilities, either ones
you start with or ones you acquire from class trainers, or buff further with
talent points later on), you can pick up any number of professions such as
fishing, skinning, leather working, mining, etc.   There's nothing like
kicking back for a spot of fishing in crystal like or the canals in Stormwind
as a nice change of pace.   :-)   Although apparently they've nerfed fishing
in the new patch, boo.

Overall, Blizzard have managed to do a little better with his new game then
I'd expected.   Top marks.