I suggest creating new characters. People who use LOTR rip-off names are universally regarded as idiots or newbies and it may hurt your chances of being recruited into a high-end guild.
I played WoW pretty heavily last year. It's not a hard game to get into by any stretch; one might call it the "easymode" of MMORPG's. It's a very gentle game to start out in and the game sort of keeps you on "training wheels" as you level up--in other words, it's an excellent "first MMORPG". Starting out from scratch, it should take you 4-6 months to catch up with the high end, assumming you're competent. Competent players are highly in demand, because 90% of the WoW community is composed of dimwitted mouthbreathers.
SunKing evidentally doesn't understand the MMORPG genre. It's not for everyone. However, it's sort of silly to describe a game with ~6.5 million subscribers as being in a "downward spiral" while posting on the forum of a game which has never had even 1% of that figure. Sun--if you haven't checked out 'D&D Online' or 'GuildWars', you might want to try them. They might suit you better.
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Here is something to be aware of regarding WoW specifically:
The game changes once you hit 60. Go into it expecting this change, and don't act surprised when it happens. The guys who bought the game in November '04 may have had an excuse, but nobody buying the game now has any excuses at all.
If you expect to play an hour here and an hour there, you'll get to 60 and have nothing left to do. If you don't like gaming with ~40 other people for 4-6 hours nightly, you'll have nothing left to do. Don't even think about PvP; if you try to PvP without high end equipment, you're just fodder.
The Blizzard official forums are a hive of stupidity and retardation.
Feel free to PM me with any questions you may have of a specific nature, regarding anything from leveling to class balance.
J_A_B
