World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade is currently in the last content patch of the expansion. The next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has been officially announced.
World of Warcraft first launched in 2004 and since then has seen 9 expansions, the most current being Shadowlands. The 10th expansion, Dragonflight, is currently scheduled to be released by or on December 31, 2022 according to Blizzard. World of Warcraft: Classic is a relaunch of the original game with minor tweaks, and is currently on its first expansion, The Burning Crusade.
In a blue post on the official Blizzard forums, it was announced that World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade servers will be receiving an experience boost in the coming weeks in preparation for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. The experience buff is expected to arrive just before the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch, Patch 3.4.0. The buff is planned to last between 6-8 weeks and will end right when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion officially launches. The buff will also apply to fresh realms being added for Wrath of the Lich King.
There are no official launches dates for the pre-patch or for Wrath of the Lich King itself. With realm merges scheduled for The Burning Crusade servers on August 9, 2022 and the fresh Wrath of the Lich King realms planned for the same day, players will be able to utilize the experience buff when leveling a "Death Knight" as soon as the class releases with the pre-patch.
The addition of fresh realms for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is meant to entice players to come back without being at a massive resource disadvantage compared to those who have been playing since the first day of World of Warcraft: Classic. Adding an experience boost for all players, and not just those on the fresh servers, shows that Blizzard also wants to give its players an opportunity to level alts for those who want to. Blizzard has been tackling the issue of faction imbalance across all of World of Warcraft, and have said that these servers will hopefully stay more evenly balanced for a longer period of time.
Fresh realms offer a clean slate for prospective players, but players are still skeptical. There are specific limitations on these fresh realms, such as, characters cannot be transferred onto or off of these realms for a period of 90 days. After the 90 days players will be able to transfer their characters onto the servers or off of them. This can inflate the population and ruin the economies of each specific server or allow a massive influx of one specific faction causing imbalance. If too many players choose to leave the servers they may run into the issue of dying out entirely.
World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade is currently available to play with a subscription on Mac and PC.
Source: forums.Blizzard.com