@Aranyszin:

It's not an announcement, but after Cataclysm, Blizzard had to know that people would pick up on it right away, so it is tantamount to leaking a tiny piece of information.

As far as trying to control the information that's getting out there, there are a lot of better ways to do that. First and foremost: just not saying anything. Then, there are the ones Blizzard has been known to use in the past: serious sanctions for employees leaking information, cease and desist letters, etc.

Plus, if they did want to leak false information, there are a lot better ways to do it. A few anonymous words to a blogger, some leaked concept art, something like that. If they really wanted to see how people would react, wouldn't they leak something that actually told us more about it than just a title? What kind of market research is that? "We didn't let them try it, we didn't tell them anything about it, we didn't give them any information about the product at all, but we gave them the name and they hated it, so obviously the whole idea is flawed."

Besides, there's still the big question of the gaming press, and keeping up good will with them. Deliberately putting a false lead out there for them to follow, then refusing to say anything about it pretty much guarantees that when the real story comes out, every article is going to have a paragraph about the deception. Why would they want that distraction at a time they want all the focus on their new features?

No, I can believe that it's not the next expansion; it could easily be something else. (In fact, Pandaria seems like the kind of thing they'd want to explore in a smaller environment, like a Facebook game...) However, I absolutely cannot accept that it might be a deliberate fake that they don't intend to do anything with. It just has so many ways to blow up in their faces, and the benefits of it are nonexistent.