The chart is not the first instance that a WoTLK Gold title has prevented World of Warcraft from the top spot. The previous expansion in the series, Wrath of the Lich King came in at second place following its launch within the same week as World of Warcraft back in the year 2008. It was the first World of Warcraft expansion, Burning Crusade, had a more clear path to the top spot in 2007, after launching and leading in the UK charts in the month of January of the year.

Blizzard expects the world-changing Cataclysm expansion will bring an influx of new players and returning lapsed players to its 12-million-subscriber MMOG. To handle the influx of players and to reduce the overcrowding of server, Blizzard will reduce the cost of transfer of characters between specific realms until the 22nd of December.

Review in progress: World of Warcraft : Cataclysm

A few days ago, I stayed up late to be one of some of the players who joined my servers who began playing the brand new content of World of Warcraft 's Cataclysm expansion. We'll publish our complete review in the next few days however, in the meantime I'm going to offer everyone an update on what I'm doing with the game.

After playing with three characters at level 80 to find out how they'd changed since the latest updates, I first thought that my night death knight from the elf world was the character I would explore the Cataclysm content first. As expected, shortly after midnight the server struggled to handle the load (and eventually was unable to function for a while) when thousands of players were congregated in the same areas for their Cataclysm journeys in motion. Personally, I chose to stay close to a flight simulator in Stormwind to learn how to fly on the first cheap WoTLK Classic Gold continents before heading off to one of the brand-new zones. It was my first mistake and, as you see in the image below, many other players had the exact concept.