I played it.
I had a lvl60 undead mage and a 60 tauren druid.
I stopped playing when I reached lvl60 on the mage. But I found the game incredibly challanging and incredibly good way of passing spare time, I made a lot of friends over the last 2years I played and had a lot of fun questing with people and playing online with my friends.
The game involved skill and a lot of time/investment you almost become part of the game logging into a totally diffrent world and you work on your character. He/she has her own proffesions for making money and the whole game has a full in game economy totally specific to the 'realm' you reside on and items sell and value for diffrent ammounts on diffrent realms.
I found it really enjoyable but sometimes it was very very scarily addictive. I dont generally play video games and I didnt play games for approx 8months before playing this but I did a few times find that I had played for 10-11hours one day.
when I have some more spare time I may play again but right now I'm working full time on top of running a business so have no time for video games.
www.wow-europe.com/en usually offer a free trial which I believe you can download.
As for the subscription of £8.99 a month I believe this is reasonable as it is solely online and you are paying for the up keep of the servers/bandwidth.
Dean.