It's awesome that you're giving WoW a shot - it's a great game. Make sure you fully soak up the leveling experience, especially with Cata's release.

something something dark side......

I too have had friends try to drag me in...... I like the concept. Hate the implimentation.

monthly fees = X

jumping up and down with auto attack with 20 other people to kill a monster = X

cartoon like smurfs for characters = X

non-gamer heaven. Every drip on the block plays it = X

endless collection and grinding = X

mounts are just fuzzy dolls that do not help in a fight = X

men are never equal, men of possibly the same skill and size have stats. So one is like a demigod and one is not. there is virtually no chance for real skill to give an equal fight. Its all about the time you have put into grinding = X

etc etc. Call me when they have an improvement on mount and blades sword fighting and mounts. 

nice name BTW Dragonlance was awesome.... go solamnia and the knights on silver dragons. Now that would be an awesome mount if warcraft got its act together and allowed dragon battles. Not stat based crap

WoW is a great game - good design, lots of interesting things to do. Some of the most fun I've had was with an undead warlock who.. enjoyed fishing, especially in the green goo in the center of the undead city. (And exploring areas with a floating eye)

However, for my part I was very, very finished with it when I finally did finish with it, and ten demons with chains and whips can't drive me back into it.

My current poison is Pirates of the Burning Seas; it's good without being so strong a time nexus.

Yeah - pm the server you are on and all that.  No idea if I'm going to stick with this for a long time, but I'm definitely going to give it a month at least. 

I would recommend LOTRO instead since they've introduced a way to play without paying subscription.  Obviously you will pay for features that you do want (they aren't giving everything away for free) but since a lot of the stuff you buy is account-wide, it basically means that you can play as much as you want or as little as you want without burning lots of cash.

This is what we call a "Vanila forever" attitude. That game was terrible. Now its all fun quests and story and jokes. Then some progression at the end (either PVP or PVE or whatever if you like that sort of ting).

The Attunement requirements for Burning Crusade's 10 Man Raids and higher ruined the end game content.  While the 40 Man Raids were difficult, often requiring Guild Partnerships, attempting to attune 25 people through to the Black Temple was a bad joke.  The preparation Grinds extended some 400 hours for a single run through.  That never existed in Vanilla WoW.
Combined with the shift in focus to Arena Combat that Blizzard implimented, meaning Battlegrounds were now filled with AFK Honour Farmers, meant that both PvP and PvE were left desolate; provide 10 hours a day to Grind to prepare to run the End Game content, or Grind games for Honour to get gear to be attuned to then grind 10 hours a day to prepare to run the End Game content.  The PvP aspect devolved into "lose faster so we play more games of honour" and the PvE aspect devolved into "grind to prepare to grind for reputation to gain access to the grind for attunement so you can grind to prepare to run a dungeon".
Sorry, but vanilla was significantly better than that.

And they were tuned, then removed, during BC (and don't exist in Wrath of the Lich King at all).

Attempting to get people sufficient gear to run Vanilla Naxx was a bad joke, since you needed 39 other people to go run an otherwise obsolete raid. Now you can get up to one tier behind using 5 mans, which means you can pull someone into a raid and have them be useful without having to go farm the previous raid tier.

No, you just had people farming level 40 dungeons like Maraudon and the only available to one guild a week world dragons for Nature Resistance gear in order to do AQ40. Certainly no grind there at all. And of course there was no grind in the massive amounts of consumables used in high end vanilla raids (which was also fixed in BC).

... you mean the PvP system was bad, in comparison to the old ranking system where the only way to get to Grand Marshall was to have other people play your account so you could do the necessary 90 hours a week of grinding battlegrounds? Or the battlegrounds that were great right up until a team of Naxx geared players showed up and obliterated everybody because there was no way outside of raiding to get competitive gear? PvP players got shafted in vanilla, and as much as I hate arenas for other reasons, that was the one thing they did fix. (Cataclysm has done a better job of that with rated battleground play.)

Unless you were a Paladin or Druid who wanted to actually use that tanking tree Blizzard gave you. Then you learned that it was only there for pretend purposes, and raid tanks were Warriors. Period. Or you were a Priest, Paladin, Shaman, or Druid who wanted to use your DPS spec in a raid. LOL! Shut up and heal.

Saying that vanilla is better then the expansions requires the worlds most powerful pair of nostalgia-tinted glasses. Or for people who liked addons that could play the game for you. Those were removed in BC too.

srsly.. much better job at summing it up then I did.  Also:

so fucking true.  Shortly after they removed the hyjal attunement, I finished leveling my alt lock.  The next day I was in Hyjal topping meters w/ the gear I acquired that day from instancing and crafting.

heroic mode is what made the fights somewhat challenging.  Heroic LK was actually very difficult and took several weeks before world first.  Even after the 30% zone nerf many guilds still struggled up until cata release

Congratulations to you OMG_pacov! You have done a very good thing! I started playing WoW two weeks after the game first went live. Still the greatest computer game ever made, IMHO. I quit playing about a year and a half ago only because I had run a Druid and a Hunter through Wrath of the Lich King and decided to give it a rest. I will be playing Cataclysm, but not for another couple or three months. I have other fish to fry at the moment in Guild Wars.

WoW is a very complex game that you learn one easy bit at a time. Do not try to level up as fast as you possibly can. Each level is fun, and you want to play for the fun you can squeeze out of it. The game does not really begin at level 85. Max level is where all you have learned while leveling up comes to fruition in some very tough end game raiding and PvP. If you have not learned, you will be toast. Initial report on IGN confirms that they have made end game much much harder than end game in Wrath of the Lich King. Be prepared.

Look around at every thing. Read forums, checkout addons from Curses; these are legal and can be helpful. There are wikis and fansites galore; you can always find help.

The MMO world is like The Hotel California. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave! Because from now on there will always be another MMO out there you will want to try.

MMOs are well maintained. Bugs get fixed, like right now! When you finally need a break from WoW, there are lots lots more. Most do not have a monthly fee anymore. WoW still does, but WoW is still the undisputed leader in MMO. No argument. And WoW gives you so much that in Blizzard's case I think the monthly fee is still justified.

Late next year Guild Wars 2 will be out. With the GW series you buy the games, but they are free to play online with no monthly fees or other charges. The company store is purely optional; nothing necessary to play the game there.

I would not bother with GW 1 at this point in time. But GW 2 is worth knowing about, if for no other reason just to see how it all turns out. See the GW 2 Manifesto.