At the time of this comment, the distribution is more of a bell curve, with 92% believing it will launch sometime between March and X-Mas 2008. (Why is X-Mas 2007 even a choice with neither a beta nor a release date? :P) Eyeballing it, it looks like the median response is Septemberish.

Quote "Green Armadillo": Why is X-Mas 2007 even a choice with neither a beta nor a release date?

Wishful thinking? But your right, unless bliz turns into Super bliz, WotLK is gonna need a lot of testing. Just look at BC, it still has bugs and exploits. Patch after patch after patch it seems fix one thing....break another. Also they cannot even manage to get the realms up on time after maintenance let alone support another expansion. I can guarantee it doesn't come out before summer '08.

The last real content added to WoW pre-TBC was Naxx, which went live on June 20th. At the time, TBC was still aiming for a 2006 release (~5 months) and it ultimately didn't go live until January (7 months).

We still don't know when 2.4 is even going to PTR's (supposedly this year), other than that it can't be until after 2.3.2 goes live (and even later if they need a 2.3.3). Say 2.3.2 goes live on Tuesday and 2.4 hits the PTR the next week for a 2 month PTR cycle (not uncommon for patches that launch a new raid). That puts 2.4 on the live servers in mid February. Six months from that gets you to mid August, but summer is supposedly a bad time for marketing game releases, and thus the majority of people seem to be guessing Sept or later.

Also bear in mind, the TBC alpha started up in mid August and beta began sometime late September-ish (again, with a planned late Nov launch and an actual January launch). If Wrath follows a similar schedule, the clock is ticking down very rapidly against a June release.

I don't think TBC sold less cause it wasn't shipped at christmas. WoW has 9M players and how many of them don't have TBC?
Maybe Blizzard sold less, but in that case any kind of delay would be harmful.

"They wanted to ship BC for christmas 2006, but it slipped and may have cost them revenue. The christmas buying season is to powerful of a draw."

You may be right. Modern business inexplicably seems to have a tight grip on the idea that what counts are immediate burst sales. It's sad that companies are willing to forfeit pre-holiday sales in order to catch the holiday-buying rush.

I can see reasons for timing the launch a certain way - to coincide with WOW's fourth (or, God forbid, fifth) birthday, to coincide with another WOW-related release, or to avoid releasing on the same day as a competitor - and while "catching burst sales" is on that list, it's near the bottom and it's not a very /good/ reason. (At the top of my list is "catching students going on vacation", which is why I'm thinking May or June.)

The 'grapevine' has been proven wrong by many blue posts. They have said, over and over, that they will announce when the Beta will begin.

Any registry emails for a beta have been proven to be scams. AND, even if there was an NDA, do you really think it would hold? I mean, look at the EQ2 NDA. Lots of stuff was on the internet the minute the beta was out.

You must have posted after I opened the browser tab. :) I agree, May/June '08 seems most likely to me.

I assume you're talking about Rob Pardo saying "While I'm involved with all the games here at Blizzard, I'm focus [sic] the most on the games closest to release like Starcraft 2."

A lot of people have interpreted that as meaning "Starcraft 2 is closer to release than Lich King", but I think that's jumping the gun a little. Pardo isn't setting dogma with that - "WE WILL RELEASE SC2 BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE" - he's saying that SC2 is /currently/ one of the "games closest to release". That could easily change if, for example, playtests reveal that the Protoss are unplayable in their current incarnation, and the whole race need to be reworked. (Not that I think that's likely to happen, but likelihood hasn't stopped it from happening before...)

Until we get firm release dates for SC2 and LK - and probably not even then - it's simply impossible to say with any certainty which is going to release first, and so it's not really reasonable to make judgments about when LK will be released based on the putative state of SC2's development.