Helpful review, thanks!  I have the game now, and no regrets.  Love the old-school MMO RPG feeling.  Best thing since Vanilla WoW for me, or EverQuest in its early days.  And the quality just shines.  Shame they're having another tough launch - with this one they got it right.

The best free-to-play MMO's right now, in my opinion, are EverQuest 2 and Lord Of The Rings Online. EQ2 has a huge amount of content, very polished gameplay, and a great community. LOTRO excels with the story-based quests, and the wonderful gameworld of Middle Earth. It also has a very generous implementation of free-to-play.

Thanks Megotaku for the thoughtful post - its the most useful information I have seen yet on the new expansion.  Blizzard is not stupid, and WoW is very important to their bottom line.  One could argue with the direction they are going - I certainly would - but as you have pointed out, they ARE continuing to evolve the game. 

I have really been enjoying Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO). Middle Earth is a great setting for a role-playing game, and the game stays true to the lore from Tolkien's epic story. I like the more realistic graphics, compared to something like WoW, and the community is refreshingly mature and helpful. Good crafting system, too. LOTRO is "free to play", but a lot of the content is locked unless you subscribe, or purchase it from the in-game store. Definitely worth the download to check it out.