First off I'm one of the people who have had VERY few problems connecting, staying connected, playing with relatively low lag ect...
So with that said its a fun game. I like it a lot, but I do have to say that some of the "conventions" that they say they are casting aside as not really all the different. The events and such are just like quests the only real difference is you don't always have a clue why you're doing something when you first come up on it, if you don't go talk to the person like a normal quest you don't know what's going on really, and they don't tell you specifically how much you have to do to complete it. The idea that you can do 2-3 different things to complete the task is kind of nice because you can't do something else if you don't like picking up things or fighting those mobs.
I admit I'm avoiding the storyline a bit because I don't want to really ruin it for me. I've already pre-ordered it and I know I'll play it at least for a while.
I would say the creatures and the character models are much more detailed than WoW, but the landscape textures and layout are kind of disappointing. It's not bad per se its just not what I would have expected for a game that's been in development this long. I would have expected the world to be pretty well fleshed out, but the ground look pretty barren and the textures don't do a very good job of covering it up. Again not the worst I've seen, but it is a little disappointing.
They group play with complete strangers is great! You don't have to say a word and you can help each other complete things, but if you want to play with a friend its a nightmare. The whole concept of the overflow server doesn't make much sense to me. It's almost like a hybrid between a single instance like WoW and a channeled instance like a lot of F2P games. Except there doesn't seem to be any way to select which channel your character is playing in and there doesn't seem to be a way to pull someone into your instance with you. The PVP is the same, you have to queue at the same time to hope that you get grouped together. For a game that wants people to group together and play together it doesn't seem to have a very organized group mechanic.
I get the distinct impression that this is going to feel a lot like a coop single player game to an extent. Instead of your single player battle being filled with mindless NPC's fighting along side you, you have human strangers fighting along side you. On first impression this idea is really neat, but in practice the interaction with those other players is as much or less than what you would with an inanimate NPC. I tried a number of times to have conversations with people and they just ran off to do their thing. No real interest in the social aspects. Only when someone couldn't complete a task on their own did I start to see people call for assistance and grouping. Often times people just left the content behind and moved on to the next.
From the achievement whores point of view this game is a wet dream. Everything seems to be well laided out and tracked as to what you have and have not completed. So you can be reasonably sure when you leave an area that you have it complete. This does a pretty good job of giving you lots of pieces of candy to eat as your led around the world.
Finally I'll save combat for last. The combat feels very action oriented with dodging and the life, but its a bit of an illusion. Spells and missiles do often impact enemies even though they dodges, and hits will land on you when you are clearly not near mobs. The dodge mechanic is VERY limiting in the amount that you can jump around and dodge. This isn't a complete action button masher as much as it appears to be one. It can be pretty difficult to know what exactly is hitting you in a larger battles. A lot of times you end up spamming buttons or just running away because you are getting hurt. I'm sure in time people will figure out the best means of fighting in an organized fashion, but right now its quite the cluster when there are a lot of people around. The scaling doesn't always seem to be correct either. It feels like at times its only scaling the amount that people have to complete rather than the actual difficulty of what is there. The mobs still die in 2-3 hits, now you have to kill 100 instead of just 10, but you don't know that because they only display a bar with no indication as to how much it will take to fill it.
I like the game and I won't be cancelling my pre-order of it, but its not the game that people hyped it to be by any stretch. It will be fun to play as a F2P jump in and kill some stuff, but I highly doubt that it becomes a real long term player. Much like the first game ended IMO.