World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Beta Signups Underway

Blizzard posters today announced on the World of Warcraft official forums that the invitation process for the upcoming The Burning Crusade closed beta test is underway. Players from different playing areas are welcomed to sign-up for a chance to get a first peek at the new exciting content in order to help Blizzard better balance out the first World of Warcraft expansion. The plan is to introduce additional players to the beta test in subsequent waves, thus people that don't make it in the starting lineup can still have a go at The Burning Crusade prior to launch. Testers are to be contacted in due time.

An interesting piece of information comes from another blue poster, which signaled out that level 70 will be limited to The Burning Crusade owners only. This eliminates a series of concept problems and although it was to be expected, Blizzard never quite made it official. "Players will in fact still need to purchase the expansion in order to level to 70." With the announced change in the level-up and experience system, players could have reached level 70 in the Outlands only, and that's expansion territory.

Today was also a patch day, bringing World of Warcraft to version 1.12.1 after the downtime. Changes include various bug fixes, tweaks to the newly introduced World PvP in Eastern Plaguelands and Silithus areas, along with complete voice-overs and sounds for Warlock pets in all languages.