World of Warcraft -- Final Opinion.

After playing Ragnarok Online for however many hundred hours I spent playing it I stated I'd never play another Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game again as long as I lived. Even still I always said the genre held great potential. Potential that's almost entirely fulfilled in World of Warcraft. The game was sold as the solution to all the genre's woes. It doesn't quite get all the way there. It falls short in the spawn rate and aggression rate of the creatures. Still too many creatures that suddenly appear out of nowhere or latch on to you from large distances. Most of our deaths came from this rather than us doing something wrong or stupid. It does a much better than average job at dealing with soloing or playing in small groups as far as most of the general quests are concerned. It falls apart considerably in the instanced dungeons. You need to either be too high a level for the dungeon or be in a large group of players, where again it becomes too easy. So it's either damn hard, or too easy. No middle ground. Like all online games lag plays a role. We had our share of lag deaths and server crashes and down time. Blizzard seemed to always be on top of it in at least they were constantly active and there and working on things. Player versus player is probably the aspect most hurt by lag within the game. With hundreds of players fighting each other at once, and a good many of them lagging, it's just going to take some fun out of it. Too bad because what's there is generally very entertaining. Like Ragnarok Online, I've just spent too much time with this game. I have twenty some unplayed console titles sitting on the shelves waiting to be played. Tempers have started to flare and I have at least decided to play out the remaining time on the account by only playing a few hours a day and will focus on the console side of things. I have thoroughly enjoyed World of Warcraft, much more than I ever thought I would. I'm going to give World of Warcraft a 9.0. I'm most likely going to be back for a couple months more of play when the expansion pack is released.