Hm.. i lived in J-ville, florida for about 8 years. odd how they call it the sunshine state .. yet it rains a lot. but supposedly it gets the most sun of any other state averaged throughout the year. lol..
as for this game though, it lacks a lot of content than any other game i have played. and the lag issue is really bad. if they at least add in some quests that are quite good and involving it would be nice and i would probably concider staying around.
But as for World of Warcraft, i must say that i have never been interested in the RTS series. i'm into more of the turn based strategy games, ie. Civilization 3, Disciples 2.. But a friend of mine bought me warcraft 3 and i played it.. and it was enjoyable. and when i seen they were making a mmorpg about it.. i was extremely skeptical. because blizzard has never did a mmorpg. and generally on a companies first shot they don't do so well.
But after playing the stress test beta not long ago, i'm utterly suprised at how well they have designed that game. it has tons of quests to do, albeit they maybe mostly 'tasks' but they do have some real nice quests that are involving to the point that requires you do do a multitude of operations with different objects to NPCs. Some even into instanced portions of a dungeon where instanced being it's only for you and your party. so you don't have to worry with camping/over crowding.
It has hardly any lag up until they get about 3500 people on a single server.
the crafting system is nice, you can find unique recipes out in the open and make items that are unique to only you. which makes the items crafted better than store bought.
the graphics may be cartoony, but truthfully graphics don't make the game.. plus they did it all very well imho.
So as they are still in beta and have 1 month till they are supposed to be released.. they have tons of content, music, mounts .. pretty much everything that Ryzom is saying they "will eventually have" .. are already in WoW. and i know from personal experience that it all seems to work correctly and seems to work very good.
Not to mention the PvP in WoW seems very natural and it isn't very hard to tell right off who your enemy is.
Then of course the age range on WoW is extremely wide .. from 15 to 45. i know some personal friends that are 45 and have played warcraft since the first one came out. so it's not just a youngins' game.
So you basically will have to server hop until you find one you like.. or you can do like me an many of my adult/mature friends and play on the test server
So we can all be in cahoots with the folks at Blizzard. which i think will be fun and nice.
So you can stick with Ryzom's wishful thinking game.. but i pay for what i can do and see. not for what they "might have" or "plan to have". it goes to the old saying.. hope in one hand and poop in the other and see which one fills up first.
ie.. WoW has pooped and Ryzom is still hoping...
i know how Anarchy online did.. and this one is doing the same thing. it has huge chunks of the game missing and they are trying to do it while it's live. and once you get a few updates of content and such it'll all be buggy and you have to spend months working out all the issues.. which should have been done in beta. so you are looking at least 1 year from now before this game is actually in full swing with most things .. that it plans to have.
but of course that is my 2c .. imho of course..
have a nice day