The World of Warcraft Expansion has finally reached the shelves.  Many stores opened their doors at midnight to begin selling the game.   This is both a News and WoW blog post.  I will give only a brief overview of the game's features because if you want to know in full you can visit countless other websites:

The Burning Crusade Short List of FEATURES:

- Increased Level Cap, to 70
- New Eye of the Storm Battleground for 61-70
- New Continent of Outland
- Blood Elves and Draenei (including Alliance Shamans and Horde Paladins, and new starting areas for each)
- 2v2 3v3 and 5v5 PvP Arena System.

    You may form teams, like guilds are formed, and compete against others.  The more  you win in a week the more Arena points you receive.  You may use Arena points to purchase Epic PvP rewards comparable to raiding rewards.  Most people don't understand the change to the old PvP system.  They made the old system easy to obtain rewards because the old system only gives Blues at level 70, the new Arena system, which will require some co-operation and skill among players gives the good gear.

- And much more

I will likely post WoW blog updates on these new features as I experience them.  So, this is just a brief overview! 

On Dalvengyr, only a handful of people actually seemed to have it last night.  I did /who Hellfire Peninsula, found a single person, then /who "Blood Elf" and found there to be a single Blood Elf on the entire server.  For me, there was no way I would possibly stand outside in the deep freeze we've been experiencing to get a copy of the game at midnight.  I also started the new semester today so I wouldn't have had much time to play last night anyway.  One of my co-workers logged on a little before midnight and whispered me, informing me that he was at a Starbucks near the GameStop.

Yesterday: 

Yesterday I decided to drop Engineering on my Hunter (since i never use it) and was looking for a new profession.  I rummaged through one of my ridiculous-tusked, brightly-colored-mohawked Troll bank alts to find I have been unknowingly saving a decent amount of materials for Jewelcrafting, of all things.  I decided that I would log on the next day and become a Jewelcrafter.  To prepare for this I spent much of yesterday farming 192 Copper Bars and 160 Iron Bars, plus stones, and several kinds of gems.  So right now I have my bags entirely full, including an Onyxia Hide Backpack, several 16 slot bags, and five bank slots.  Plus I have a plethora of Jewelcrafting materials in my mailbox since they will no longer fit in my bags.

After all this farming I promptly made my way to the Eastern Plaguelands, far north, past the Blood Elf NPC appropriately named "Adon," to the portal to the Blood Elf area.  I decided I would visit Silvermoon City first thing following my installation of the game. 

Today:

I pre-ordered my copy last week through Best Buy, expecting it to be a problem to obtain a copy.  I walked into Best Buy this morning to pick up my pre-order to find a display full of them.  Then I was off to class.

After class I proceeded to work.  I had my laptop with me so I proceeded to install the game.  Once I reached Disk 2, the installer froze!  I couldn't close out of it or anything.  I ended up fixing this by copying all of the CD installation files from all four disks to my hard drive...  I have not yet been able to log in since the firewall at work does not allow it, but I have seen the login screen, and I can't wait to get home tonight to try it out...

 TO BE CONTINUED!!!

(Note: Subsequent WoW blog posts will not appear on the main page!  Click the link in the left navigation bar later for more updates!)