Have Blizzard dropped the ball?

[Bun-Bun]

Sounds like WoW is not for me.
WoW doesn't seem better than other MMoRPG's right now.

Ahem. Where's the better part? Instanced missions? That concept was patched into my last mmorpg and I'm not impressed.

I'm not in the beta, and as I am on dial-up.. I'm not going to. 2.6 gigabytes is insane. Do-able over 2 weeks of dedicated download... but with failed downloads going around--I am not going to be in the stress test. Impossible.

Um. Has WoW done anything right? I'm only seeing a half-baked lame attempt of a mmorpg. Worse, not better, than any other start I've seen.
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Despite all my kvetching, I think Blizzard has done a very good job at creating a MOG aimed at me - a somewhere between casual and hardcore, mostly solo player, who prefers PvE to PvP. There are other audiences it may appeal to, including the PvP crowd, but I'll leave assessments of that to the PvP server mavens.

You're seeing a lot of worry from people who expect great things, and are seeing the prospect of those great things being diminished by a rushed release. What you don't see is the tremendous amounts of fun the beta testers are having while awaiting those great things.

Some things they've done right:

1) The art is gorgeous (if you like the style - some don't)

2) The quest system is excellent. It's almost impossible to run out of things to do, even if you skip the awful collection grind quests.

3) The sense of a large world is well-preserved without forcing insane travel times. Travel is difficult enough to encourage working within an area, but it's not prohibitive to go across the world. Hearthstones provide the sense of working out of a base camp, and the option to get "home" quickly at the end of a session.

4) The Talent system gives considerable ability to customize your character. The druid tree (which I have the most experience in) is actually pretty well balanced and offers options on how to deal with combat and grouping situations.

One of the big beefs on the release date is that Paladin and Hunter talents won't get enough testing. I'm in that camp; it's pretty unlikely they'll do a 100% bang-up job right out of the gate. I hope to be surprised. :)

5) Tradeskills, for all their incompleteness, are interesting and fairly valuable. This is also something that can be tuned as the game economy evolves.

6) There's enough variety to keep the game fresh as you progress.

So I don't think it's a half-assed attempt. It's just a bit less complete than we'd like. It may not be for everybody; if you want more complex tradeskills or a less cartoony art style, EQ2 or something else may well be better for you.