Burning predictions

E3 is upon us, and soon the gaming news sites will be awash with all the announcements that console and game producing companies made. For World of Warcraft that means more news about the Burning Crusade expansion, including probably the announcement of the new alliance race. Unfortunately much of the announced stuff will be marketing hype, with little or no relevance to the players. So instead of tracking E3 news, I'm giving my personal predictions on the reality of the Burning Crusade expansion, how you will actually experience it:

The Burning Crusade expansion will come out in the fourth quarter of 2006, with the official release date announced at the last possible moment. Blizzard doesn't like to set themselves deadlines, and they are notoriously slow, but their parent company Vivendi won't give them any choice but to get the expansion out in time for the critical christmas shopping period, boosting the sales and profits for the annual report. The release will be simultanoeous in North America and Europe, with Asia coming some months later.

It will be very hard to get a copy of the Burning Crusade expansion CD for the day of the release. People will queue up, shops will be sold out fast, Amazon will announce that they are sorry but can't deliver in time. Worst case scenario is arriving at your local computer games shop at midnight before release day, and finding *two* queues there, in which case you'll have to ask which queue is for the PS3 and which for the WoW expansion. :)

Getting hold of a copy of the expansion CD won't help you much anyway, because the account management server will be down most of the time for at least a week after the release date, and you can't unlock the Burning Crusade content with the CD key from the box. Login into the game, with or without expansion, will be a challenge, because there are already millions of people who have left WoW in the 2 years between the game start and the expansion release, and now many of them will come back, overloading Blizzard's infrastructure. There will be long queues on many servers, in spite of Blizzard raising the caps, because people will come back to their old servers, where they left their level 60's parked months ago when they quit the game. In spite of all promises in the battleplan 3 the servers will not be able to deal well with the increased load of players, and the will be lots of lags, disconnects, and crashes.

If you get into the game, you will find that everybody will be in the new zones, either leveling their level 60's toward 70, or playing a level 1 of the two new races. All non-instanced new areas will be heavily camped, and it will be difficult to do quests there, with accusations of "killstealing" flying in all directions.

About two weeks to one month after the Burning Crusade expansion is released, things will calm down. Everybody will have their copy of the expansion, and got it registered. The login servers will be accessible most of the time. Queues will have gotten shorter. And the players in the game got distributed more evenly over the new areas.

The funny thing is that most of us know that all this will happen, but we will *still* try to get the expansion on release day and participate in all this chaos.