Wildstar Free To Play

Wildstar, the MMORPG published by NCSOFT and developed by Carbine, went free to play on September 29th. As with most MMOs, I wanted to give it a shot. So I did, and here are my preliminary thoughts.
On Wednesday, the 30th, I tried to log in and create a character. This was around 9:30 central time, and the estimated wait time to log into the server was 8+ hours. So, I quit the game and went to play SWTOR.
Yesterday (October 2nd), I tried to log back in. I expected better results because NCSOFT opened up more servers. After creating my character, I attempted to log in, and was kicked back to character select screen after a short wait time. This happened maybe 10 times, possibly more or less, I didn't really count. But eventually, the game did load and after a cut scene I was spawned on the Dominion ship.
The gameplay is different than most other MMOs, which is a good thing. It reminds me of a slower version of Tera or a slight evolution of Guild Wars 2 with the use of the 'f' key to activate items and the ability to move around in combat without breaking activation times. The biggest problem I experienced with the gameplay is lag. I suspect that as time goes on, this will become a non issue. Basically what happens now is I accept a quest and it takes a few clicks before it registers that I've accepted the quest, same with activating an item in the world (both of which use the 'f' key), or gathering loot (with the 'v' key), or even attacking enemies (just today, I was killed by lag, which caused me to quit out of the game).
Onto the UI: overall, I like the UI, the transparent blue outline and hologram effects make the game feel sci-fi. And in a genre that is dominated by Fantasy, this is a good thing. By default, I would like to see the text boxes become less transparent, because as it is, it is kinda hard to read the text. This might be a thing that can be fixed in the settings, but I would have liked to see Wildstar follow the route of tradition MMOs and have a text box open up similar to WoW or the terminal dailies in SWTOR in this aspect.
I haven't really interacted much with the community, so I am not sure how friendly it is, but from the ingame chat, they seem friendly. Most of them were complaining about the lag.
To conclude, if you are thinking about playing Wildstar, wait a few weeks for the initial masses to die down and the servers to start working properly and you'll have a better time. If you jump in now, the lag could give a bad impression of the game, so take it with a grain of salt.