Hellfire Peninsula

I was playing D&D yesterday, and because I have infected all the players in my D&D group with World of Warcraft, we were talking about that game a lot. And our DM pointed out that if you look at the map of Outland, you notice that it only has one entry point, only one zone marked as being level 58-63, Hellfire Peninsula. So given that more than half of the players of World of Warcraft have at least one level 60 character, and that there will be lots of people resubscribing, and player caps for servers will rise to about 4,000 players, we can expect over 2,000 players in the one Hellfire Peninsula zone in the first couple of days after the Burning Crusade expansion comes out. Ouch! Talk about crowded.

There will be undoubtedly major problems with the typical "kill 10 foozles" quests when hundreds of players are trying to kill the same foozle. That will be unpleasant enough on a PvE server, but you can expect people actually killing each other over a foozle spawn on the PvP servers, as Hellfire Peninsula is the entry zone into Outland for both Horde and Alliance.

One solution around the problem will be Hellfire Citadel, avoiding the crowd outside by going into an instanced dungeon. Of course that depends on Blizzard having put up solid enough hardware, which doesn't break down when a thousand players want to play in the same dungeon.

You might think of making a blood elf of draenei character instead of leveling up your level 60 character, but unfortunately the two new newbie zones won't be any less crowded, and there will be no dungeon there to lighten the load.

What might be the best solution for the first week or so is going back to the old content, zones like Silithus, Plaguelands, or Winterspring. Once the level cap is raised, you will again get experience points for killing mobs in the upper 50s, and even for doing the high-level quests there. Maybe not the most interesting activity, but could end up being less frustrating fighting over spawns in Hellfire Peninsula.