Sadly some will choose the random dude with his own website, just so they can tell themselves that they don't need the expansion.

I was hoping it'd take as long to go from 60-70 as from 0-60. Don't get me wrong, I like raiding, but when you're an officer of a guild that's trying to grow, week after week of working to fill out raids can get trying.

It took me about 28 days /played over 4 months to hit 60, so I'm not exactly a power leveler, but I loved it. It was fun to just go out on my own and solo quests, convenient to be able to play for just a little bit instead of hours at a time. These days, once I sign on, I'm on pretty much for several hours. I miss the flexibility and independence of leveling. I like to take my time with quests. I like to stop and admire the scenery. As an earlier poster in the thread, I also sometimes skip to the end of the book to see what's going on there, but I always read the middle, because a book is as much about the journey as it is about the destination.

I'm not sure how long it will actually take to level to 70; probably not the same as 0-60 though. I'm sure I'll get used to the thought, and there will still be the UBRS's of level 70 to get through, but I do like going it alone, and I doubt there'll be much room or time for that in the expansion.

Oh, and I'll probably have to actually learn to PvP.

Is that a trick question?

In fairness the bit-tech article does have some other small inaccuracies in it, so it doesn't totally shock me that there's discrepancy. Their hands-on was in London, not California, so they weren't talking to the development team directly.

I give Blizzard full forgiveness for launch scalability failures, the system design was in place years before launch and yeah it was obvious they were not prepared for how many people would play. Of course there are still major hiccups every now and then (patch days) but for the most part its ok.

HOWEVER, I think the new forums clearly demonstrate piss-poor technical architecture on Blizzards part, and a reason why TBC release will be a nightmare.

They clearly know how many people read/visit forums, they have had a year to architect a system that is very robust and scalable for web forums, and there are dozens of products and websites that handle much, much, much more forum load than Blizzard that they could have built on.

Instead they release another half-assed attempt, which promptly starts failing almost immediately after they release it. Then they turn off search, which by the way, was supposed to be one of the major selling points of the new forum system. Search is still off as well (at least there are pretty new icons!). It gets so bad they have to shutdown the forums for 3-4 days and transfer the content on to a new server. Which will likely as well start failing in a few months.

Heck how many guilds don't raid on tuesdays anymore because of patch day issues? If Blizzard had managed to pull off a successful forum software change, I wouldn't be so skeptical. But their sheer incompetence at that makes me pretty wary of planning any long leveling vacations around TBC release time. Oh, I'm sure a few weeks later it'll all be great but the first few days...

So, just to briefly return to that previous point.. would it be possible to, say, level an Undead in the Blood Elf zones without TBC? In other words, are the non-Outland zones and quests fully accesible to the cheapskates?

First, under 18 is a minor, not 21. Secondly, I think you're crazy if you think 50% of WoW is going to wait until Christmas. Most kids 15-16 already have part time jobs and cars. I bought more games when I was a mid-late teenager than I do now (21) since I had quite a few less expenses to pay.