World of Warcraft is launching it’s latest expansion this Thursday with the release of “Wrath of the Lich King.”  Being the owner of several level 70 characters, I’m particularly excited, so much so that I’m taking off several days from work just to get my character(s) to level 80 so I can get into new raiding content as quickly as possible.

Our Guild, The Arcane Council has been pretty sucessful in term of seeing the new content from the LAST expansion and we weather the changes that came along with that expansion.  Raids went from 40 people to 25, which is a strategic nightmare that really made us change the way we ran the guild.  While there will still be 25 man instances there will be more importance placed on the 10 man content along with other mechanic changes that will probably change the game once again.
The reason for all this change is that Blizzard is attempting to make the game more accessible to the common player.  A friend of mine showed me an interesting stat that really supports a change.  Naxaramas is a dungeon added before the last expansion.  Blizzard put more resources into the creation of this instance than any other instance they’ve ever created…the problem is that only 4% of the WoW players ever got to see it.  So they’re opening up the game a bit, making the higher end content more “accessible.”

While this benefits my guild, which is probably a 6 on a 1 to 10 scale of “Hardcore-ness.”  I just hope that the vacuum left by the most hardcore of raiders doesn’t pull in gaming riff-raff, which could spoil the experience.

Anyhoo…it’s scheduled to be delivered to me on the morning of the 13th, and I can’t wait.

MiH