Blizzard announces second World of Warcraft expansion

Blizzard today announced that the second expansion for their best-selling MMORPG World of Warcraft, to be named The Freezing Jihad (TFJ), will come out in January 2008. This expansion will offer an exciting list of new features:

• Level cap raised from 70 to 80.
  
• A new continent, Iceland, with three exciting new outdoor zones, with hundreds of new quests. For the sake of simplicity and symmetry there will be only neutral cities and quest-givers in Iceland.
  
• New teleporting mounts, available at level 80, for the low price of only 20,000 gold. Due to technical restrictions these will only be usable in Iceland.
  
• Two new races, one for each faction. The Leper Gnomes joined the Horde, while a new, previously undiscovered race of Pink Orcs is joining the Alliance. New starting zones that will allow you to level these new races up to level 20, then its back to the ever popular Barrens and Stranglethorn.
  
• Due to popular demand a new class will be introduced, the monk. The monk is martial arts expert, dealing high amounts of melee damage, but wearing only cloth armor, and using only fist weapons and staves. He has some fascinating psionic stealth abilities, and will be able to open locks with just the power of his mind.
  
• New tradeskill, woodcrafting. Players with this profession can kill treants to gather wood, and craft it into an exciting range of bows, arrows, and staves. Craft exclusive epic bows and staves from wood dropped only from raid dungeon end bosses.
  
• Many great new loot and quest reward items. Green quest rewards at level 71 will be superior to old Black Temple epic items.
  
• New, more challenging dungeons. After listening to our core audience we decided to make all dungeons much harder, so that only the best can expect to beat these encounters.
  
• New raid dungeons, all capped at 10 players. New raid interface that only allows 1 player of each class to join a raid group, and that only if he has put at least 41 talent points in the talent tree marked "raid talents" for his class.
  
• New Permanent Elite status. One week after release of TFJ a special event for level 80 characters will become available, lasting only 1 week. Everybody who succeeds in this event will receive the Permanent Elite status, giving him exclusive access to the raid dungeons, and a floating Elite gold star over his head. Don't miss this chance to finally distinguish your elite skills permanently from the masses.
  
• Yet another total revamp of the PvP reward system. New battleground added for level 80 players.
  
• New Looking for Group interface. Drawing on the developers vast experience with meeting stones, global chat channels, and LFG windows from the past we came up with a new Looking for Group interface which will finally work, we think.
  

With all these exciting new features, carefully tailored towards what our players most vocally tell us they want, and based on what worked in the past, we feel that The Freezing Jihad will be a smash success, selling millions of copies again. Will it?