I'd imagine so - Wrath just release and may have intrigued many people who haven't played yet. Obviously they can't do Northrend or a DK yet, so they have to start at ground zero.

The new players tend to roll on the first server that comes up, ie the ones set to Recommended for the type of realm they want to be on. So once a server has more than a medium population, they wont see new players unless they deliberately pick it from the list.

I don't really understand it either. I realize there's likely a surge of new players, sure, but it usually takes a player quite a while before they start finding great resources like WowInsider, Wowhead, Curse, Wow-pro, and so forth.

I have to wonder how many truly new players stumble across these guides. I can't see it happening without a veteran giving them a link or something, and usually in that case the veteran can explain in person just as easily.

Not knocking the guides, just question whether anyone is actually getting any use out of them. :)

Just responding to AyaJulia's comment. I just recently started playing WOW and find these articles as well as other sites like WOWhead and thottbot very useful. I find that having a hunger to learn more and be better at a game drives one to research and find out more. I've discovered a lot of information(thanks google ^_^), without having to beat people up to tell me about good sites. We Noobs may be ignorant but not entirely incompetent. we'll get there...eventually.

I am glad to see that new players are coming on board as many of us "veterans" are approaching burn out or apathy towards the game. Between the "noob" articles, class-specific columns, and patch notes there is a lot of good information. The posts about fan movies, machinima, or other superficial (subjective) information are less useful in imo.