Time for the Rumor Mill?

With Mythic Archimonde down, we find ourselves in a similar situation to the end of Mists (yes, Blizzard should be worried unless they can announce the beginning of the beta for the next expansion at Blizzcon.) While I wouldn't say we're "done" with Draenor (LFR raiders haven't had a chance to see over half of Hellfire Citadel, and the flying patch hasn't come out yet,) we're at a point where we can look at Warlords of Draenor as a final product.

While the expansion has been out for less than a year, we can be almost certain that this Blizzcon we will find out what the next one will be. That's always been the pattern, and the only reason I could imagine them announcing at a different time would be to get an initial trailer out at an earlier convention so that they can get the hype up before going into the nuts and bolts of the expansion at Blizzcon.

Previous expansion names have historically leaked as a trademark registration. This happened in my memory for Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor (at the time of Wrath's announcement I wasn't hunting for WoW news as much, and BC had already been announced by the time I started playing.) That said, these leaks can be misleading - recall of course the "Dark Below" trademark that turned out to be for Destiny.

The Warlords trademark was only discovered a few weeks before Blizzcon, so I'd hold off on jumping on those until the fall.

We will of course sometimes get leaks that describe the expansion. This, of course, is a field that's prone to trolling and presenting wishful thinking as fact. But this is not always wrong either. Cataclysm's old-world revamp and five-level range was leaked beforehand, and I definitely did not believe it until I saw the official announcement. Elements of Warlords of Draenor (specifically that it would take place in a past Draenor and involve a time-traveling Garrosh Hellscream) did leak briefly before the announcement.

So far, I've only heard one rumor for expansion six, which suggested that we would be going to the alternate/past Azeroth and fighting Gul'dan, essentially turning the Eastern Kingdoms south of Blackrock Mountain into the new "continent." I'd rate this as plausible, given Blizzard's comments that they really want the expansions to flow into one another, though I'd personally like to get back to the "real world." It would of course tie into the movie quite well, which is the kind of cross-media marketing that I'm sure a lot of executives would be happy about, but I don't think it would be all that great for the game. Also, it would most likely have us fighting more Orcs, which... let's have at least three expansions without fighting any organization that ends in "Horde" (except Alliance fighting the player Horde faction in PvP.)

But this is just the first of many rumors, and we've gotten plenty of those that never took root as it were.

We'll start to see more rumors crop up as time goes on, but ultimately it's all unconfirmed until Blizzard announces it for real.