Cataclysm HINT

[Svpernova09]

Retailers have NEVER had accurate ship dates this far in advance, why would they start now?

Incoming Speculation:

With the drawn out gated release of ICC. the date is kinda later than what I was thinking, they'll bug fix until the first cataclysm patch (4.0.x). But there will be an entire Beta process that I imagine will start near march / april. If everything goes "well", ICC will be opened over 4 weeks, maybe longer. That puts no one downing Arthas until Dec 29th at the VERY earliest (assuming 3.3 is /this tuesday) The last BC patch (2.4.3) was released on 7/15/08, we didn't see 3.x until 10/14/08. So 3 months from last BC patch to first Wrath. Ulduar was released 5/14/09 and we got ToC on 8/4/09 so 3 months for an entire content tier. Assuming Dec 8th for 3.3 ICC, that puts 4 months for the ToC content tier. Kinda long for such a small amount of content, probably because it was nearly a month before anyone saw Anub. I'd say with the ICC gating their going to stretch 3.3 to 5-6 months. This would put the first Cataclysm patch (updated talents, not actual release) around May / June 2010. Any longer than that, and they're going to seriously risk subscriptions because of lack of content / stale content.