Here is my fair and honest review of WoW.
WoW is a simple game, it's about living life in a virtual fantasy land, but it's how the game executes this idea that makes it work. Simply placing a character in a land without a goal can work (morrowind), but in the end what the player really wants in a deep game is leveling and customization. In short, a reason to play the game for hours on end. WoW offers many different ways to level something up, whether it be with combat, tradeskills, or even just fishing. I found playing the game that the wide variety of options for things to do was a lot of fun, but had a problem with the fact that only one of them actually leveled my character, and that was combat. In that sort of sense, it made me wonder why any PvE player would ever want to go into PvP if it doesn't level you up (besides getting pretty armor).
The combat itself works, but I can't really say it is groundbreaking in todays market. It does a lot, and there are quite a few neat looking spells for casters, but it never seemed to do anything that made me say "whoa". I also found that most of the quests came down to simply killing X amount of creatures and then returning to the quest giver. This is alright, but it quickly gets repetitive. Not many times did i particularly look forward to another quest and even when i did the quest seemed too short.
I think a lot of the appeal to me (and what makes this game so unique) was in the games presentation. Everything simply feels extremely polished, the world feels like just that, a world, and I found myself gawking at some of the ways the designers took such a basic art design and made it work for them. Some of the dungeon areas look amazingly "screenshot worthy" and some of the armors look amazing as well.
All in all, WoW in todays market is a good game. While it's not really anything but a polished version of what came before it, thats not bad, because even so it does a majority of things right and manages to still be successful years later (something other games can't claim). If there's anything i could recommend though, play this game the way you want to play it, don't take someone elses advice. If you want to play an alliance dwarf, do it, this is an open world of adventure that you can create for yourself. So be what you want, have fun, and most of all try to look past the fanboys to see that behind all the hype really is a decent game. World of Warcraft is in some ways a victim of it's own fame, but it deserves the right to be looked at on face value as a game, not as a pop culture reference.