January 16 is a marked day for every World of Warcraft player. Why? It's because that day marks the release date of the MMORPG's much anticipated expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. As early as now, Career Linked speculates that the lines for the Burning Crusade launch could be bigger and longer than that of the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 combined. Whoow, that's one heck of a long line.

This is merely a speculation, but then again you will decide if this could happen or not. According to the Career Linked article, every WoW player and even former WoW aficionados won't dare to miss the January 16, 12:01 opening of stores. But that's not all good news for Blizzard.

The problem, according to them, is that this will equate to a 25% land mass increase. Let's say that majority of the eight million WoW players buy BC and most ex-WoW players re-activate their account, what will happen is that every BC buyer would be expected to zone into a small area only a quarter the size of the original game. In layman's term - that is something impossible to do without clogging the game and the servers .

The article speculated that this would be Blizzard's gameplan to prevent that from happening:

Blizzard is going to ship a limited number of expansion packs to the general public per week. I am making a guess that they will be distributing only a small amount ranging between 400,000 and 600,000. This, through the power of numbers, will be able to limit the people that can play the expansion upon release and not give an incredibly horrible gaming experience to gamers via bottle-necking the game and the servers.