The only winning move is... not to play.
The best reason I can think of not to join is so you can actually do something with your life besides work and warcraft. $13 per month is only cheep if your time is free. I've never met a 'casual' wow player. They are usually on for hours every night. My two cents anyway.

J pointed me here to give some first hand WoW advice but I see you are looking for reasons NOT to play. If you truly have time to spare, I can't think of any reasons.

If you do choose WoW and are more interested in the social aspects of the game I'd suggest a Warrior, Mage, or Priest. These classes are the most sought after for the group dungeons.

Don't worry about people having already leveled. There are always new people joining and most people who reach max level just make alts and do the whole thing again.

Sorry J and John. Guess you'll just have to play as well if you ever want to see Paul.

Do you think that Burning Crusade a necessary part of WoW at this point?

Well, you should wait until you hit level 58 to see if you are still interested in the game. If you are still 'into it' I don't imagine there is much activity going on in the end game stuff for the original level 60 cap. You'd need to push on to level 70 to get with everybody else. Should only take a couple months of semi-casual play to get there.

You were all ineffective: my copy of World Of Warcraft arrived today. See ya in the next life.

It's been nice knowing you. Since you won't be playing 360 anymore do you want to sell it cheap? I can put it to good use.

"He who dies with the most toys wins"... I'm going to win.

Not now you won't. You're going to become a WOW zombie. You're going to become a shut-in, locked in a room with nothing but your computer, zip lock bags and rows of 2 liter soda bottles. We'll have to slip you 'flat' foods under the door.

You seriously need to watch this South Park to see what being a champion at WOW will take!

Any update on this? Did it suck you in?

I've yet to install it since I've been busy getting rid of a bunch of computers and junk, which is lots of backing up and transferring data and stuff. But I'm pretty much done that, so I'll likely try it out this week.

There seem to be a lot of realms/servers to choose from, how do I go about picking one where I don't get worked every 5 minutes? I'm not necessarily opposed to PvP, but I want to play for a bit before I have to respawn.

I chose a 'normal' server because I'm not into the PvP stuff at all. There are always battlegrounds you can go to if you want PvP, but just getting ganked while out picking flowers never appealed to me. Go real hardcore and pick a role-playing PvP server.

I finally got around to installing it last night and played I for a while, managing to get up to level 3. There weren't very many people around, but then it was kind of late. I'm playing a night elf hunter in the "Echo Isles" realm.

I cranked all the graphics up to max on my iMac at 1920 x 1200 resolution, but the textures still had that old school Half-Life / Counter Strike look. This isn't a big criticism, since WoW is more about the online aspect than the realism I guess, and the overall atmosphere has that very stylized Blizzard look.

I've got a free month to play, which isn't bad for $20. I'll give it a shot for April and see if it's worth continuing.

The one irritating thing that happened was during the install process. I did a clean install from the CDs (5 CDs, no DVD!) so I had to install patches, which WoW takes care of automatically when you start up. Since I was running version 1.05, it upgraded me to 1.12, which is a ~500 MB download. Then when I started up again, it downloaded the 1.12 to 2.01 patch which weighed in around another 500 MB. Then there was the 2.01 to 2.03 patch, followed by the 2.03 to 2.05 patch for a total of another ~100 MB. That made for 5 restarts of the game, with each one requiring me to click accept on 2 long agreements (where I had to scroll to the bottom of the agreement before the "accept" button was enabled) and 5 logins. It's a terrible first play experience, since the downloads, patching and CD install were incredibly slow; literally over 90 minutes from opening the box to staring the character creation process.

I'll post more about WoW as I get further.

EVE-Online is apparently coming to the Mac this year, as well as a new graphics engine (tailored for Vista and DX10 on the Windows side). The graphics are already really good for a massive online game considering that there are no "realms" in EVE: everyone plays on the same server. Of course, they don't have 8 million players like WoW. The EVE client is available as a free download with a 14 day free trial. I'll probably give that a shot once there is a Mac version.

Level 6 now.

I can see how the addiction sets in: each character starts in a home city, and there are plenty of starter quests that you can find there. Each quest doesn't take too long, and getting through the first few levels is easy, but! There is always, "I'll just do one more quest..."

Each level takes longer to get to, so you play for longer and longer... I've only seen a few other people in the game so far, so no party/guild action yet.

Yeah, I can imagine you aren't seeing a lot of other characters yet. Those Night Elves are pretty isolated out there and even their big main city is a ghost town. Once you find Ironforge or Stormwind City you'll never go back to that island. Getting your pet soon. Very exciting.

I meant to play for an hour last night, starting at around 11:30pm. When I finished doing "just one more quest", it was 2:30am. Doh. Almost level 9 now, so I guess I should start getting professions and stuff.

I like that I can set the pace for doing quests versus just wandering around. Oblivion has the same kind of thing, except in a single player game.

The graphics, at least in the night elf starting point, make me feel like I'm walking around in an impressionist painting, except with cool music filtering through in the background.

Addictive or not, it's pretty fun!