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Well, first, it's NOT a WOW Clone
Because WOW is almost instantly compelling and addictive, and Alganon... isn't.
Clunky graphics, poor interface, etc.
Alganon, in many ways, embodies an awful lot of MMORPG.com threads -- it thinks it understands WoW, and doesn't. It reminds me of the woman who tried to sue JK Rowling because she (the woman) had long ago written a failed and inept children's book that happened to contain a character named "Harry Potter" (and another, unrelated, book that used the word "muggles"), that otherwise had nothing whatsoever in common with the Harry Potter books, but decided that she had been ripped off because the name "Harry Potter" was clearly what made Rowling's books so popular, and Rowling was SO uncreative that she stole the name from this obscure book published in a different country that no one had heard of, and all the REST of the series (several thousand pages of characters, creativity, and wonder) was irrelevant, because ANYONE could make that up once they'd come up with the hard-to-create name of "Harry Potter". In terms of Alganon, judging from my early experiences in the open beta -- and if you can't grab someone in the first hour, you will never grab them at all -- the developers have borrowed some fonts and some icons and a few aspects of the style, and they seem to think that's it, that it's the surface flash that makes WoW popular.
I've been in early-public-betas before, so I know what to expect. Vanguard and Star Wars Galaxies, buggy and incomplete as those betas (and, hell, releases!) were, managed to hook me into playing them for hours on end and then starting all over again when the actual games shipped. So it's not a case of "ZOMG! This isn't release quality!" Rather, there's no THERE there. There's nothing that makes me want to kill one more wolf in order to find out if I get to kill boars or panthers next -- and in a well-done MMORPG, there would be. Those early quests, the "learn the interface" quests, set the tone for everything else, and if you can't get those right, in terms of look, feel, and pacing, odds are, you can't get anything right.
I'll try to give it a few more hours, to be fair, but it's not looking good, and that's a shame, because I really like to root for the small company trying to give it a go in a difficult marketplace. And there is nothing wrong with a "WoW Clone" -- WoW, after all, began in many ways as an Everquest clone, which was just a graphical DikuMUD, which was a computerized implementation of Dungeons & Dragons, which was a variant on medieval wargaming, which grew out of military training exercises, chess, and a book by HG Wells. ("Little Wars") Originality is overrated; doing the same thing everyone else has done, but doing it WELL, is a lot better than doing something original that isn't any good. Worse still, though, is doing what everyone else has done... but doing it worse.
Comments
You and many people need to learn the difference between a clone and borrowed. When you borrow something, you use a modified version of it to fit your needs. In general, someone came up with the idea of the microwave, and then a lot of people said I can do that but better. That's what creates innovation.
In the case of Alganon, even as much as David Allen wants to say they hand crafted everything, if you take a Samsung Microwave, slap a different brand name on it and sell it as Algasung Microwaves. You really haven't created anything at all.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
Haha so true