World of Warcraf's patch 3.3.2 went live this week and with it, the Lich King encounter was finally unlocked. WoW players can now tackle Arthas, leader of the scourge, fallen prince of Lordaeron, the Lich King, and also known as the angry-looking frozen guy on the game's box.

It's been over a year since Wrath of the Lich King went on sale, and Northrend has kept adventurers busy fighting in Naxxramas, battling the blue dragonflight, clearing the extensive Ulduar and defeating the old god Yogg Saron. Then Tirion Fordring opened the tournament grounds to allow adventurers to begin training, preparing themselves for battle with the scourge, and starting up another set of challenges. But the end is finally in sight, and Arthas is going down. In fact, he has already gone down, thanks to an exploit discovered by raiding guild Ensidia. They've since had their victory rebuked, but you can see the cut scene that plays when Arthas is defeated, which is filled with spoilers, over on IGTV.

The full patch notes for 3.3.2 also reveal that changes have been made to many instances to make them quicker. Several bosses now only perform their special ability once instead of multiple times, and some trash mobs have been removed or re-pathed. A number of class changes have also taken place.

So how long will it be until WoW's next expansion Cataclysm is released? We're still guessing some time towards the end of the summer, maybe Autumn, but according to the latest rumours, Blizzard's annual convention BlizzCon is set to take place in October. If it's true, could this indicate Blizzard's intention to either announce a launch date during the event, or for BlizzCon to coincide with the launch itself. Still guess work of course, it may also see announcements on StarCraft II or Diablo 3, or even the new top secret MMO.

Aion is still doing very well in Southern Korea, over a year after its launch date. Figures from recent investigations show that it is by far the most played game in internet cafes over there, way above other online games such as FIFA Online 2 and World of Warcraft.

Finally, Star Trek Online went live this week and it's proven to be very popular. Hundreds of thousands of players were desperate to get their hands on beta keys during the game's testing period, and it seems most of them have transferred over to the live game, since Atari announced that over one million Cryptic accounts have now been created. That figure includes Champions Online accounts too, mind you.

Regardless of that, the STO servers are struggling to cope with all the players, and many people are finding themselves unable to log in. As a result, Cryptic is planning to increase server capacity this weekend, so if you have hours of STO planned over the coming couple of days, you shouldn't have too many problems.

That's it for this week folks, don't forget to tune in to our podcast where we discuss one or two of the stories mentioned here; the Mortal Online beta and WoW's newest patch.

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