Actually I think the lawmakers shutting down is an indicator of government working as it should.
Theoretically you should have two opposing views on any issue, so you'd only get a majority vote approving something that was actually necessary/worthwhile. Obviously the parties are way too friendly in the US - they seem to constantly be passing new useless laws and pork projects. Normally this sort of behavior would be an indication that we need to oust them and get fresh meat in the system, but lately the American people have been extremely apathetic. Bread and circuses.
Another idea that might help are expiring laws by default... Something like: - All laws expire after 5 (or 10) years if not renewed - Laws can be made permanent on the third renewal if they are passed with an overwhelming majority (90%?)
That would allow 15 years to prove a law is actually valuable and necessary, and remove the effort of trying to get the votes to take bad laws off the books.
Foreign and international own approximately 28% of our debt, and China owns 24% of the international debt. This means China only holds about 7% of our total debt.
Second, and this is just my own supposition, I don't think China cares if they get repaid. As long as their economy flourishes they are happy to allow us to pay cents on the dollar for their items by undervaluing their currency and buying our debt. Think of it as China's "stimulus package" for their economy. Sure in the future they might try to call the debt as a strategic move to affect our economy, but monetarily I don't think it's an issue for them.
If the second item is true then all they need to do is keep us stimulating their economy while ours declines. At the point where they are selling to enough other countries that the loss of our business isn't fatal to their economy they can choose to make any move they wish that harms our economy. If you're playing the long game you only need your enemy to support you until you're strong enough to kill them without doing too much damage to yourself.
I wouldn't be surprised if China is the United States of the next century, in the same way that superpowers like England and Spain were overshadowed by the US.
I'd wager they're doing more with the game than just recruitment. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting studies you could run on a game like that. This doesn't mean it's tin foil nefarious stuff - a lot of academics would probably like to get their hands on that data set.
Behavioral factors, navigation patterns, learning and adapting.. I'm not even a scientist and I can think of all kinds of interesting offshoots from the game - I'd be pretty surprised if there were no scientists with government grants pursuing some sort of research involving it.
That may be the proper usage, but in 'common' usage it's usually GB = gigabytes, gb = gigabits
If we are actually talking about gigabytes then I retract my previous statement, but since I've seen a lot of residential cable and DSL with 100KB/s or less upload speed I wouldn't be surprised if he meant gigabits.
Is there really a problem with allowing your users to actually use their connection? By my rough calculations 2-3gb/hr is only 60-90kb/s upload. I really don't understand why you can't handle that unless you're massively overselling.
I would be a lot more sympathetic if we were talking about users maxing out fiber connections or something higher speed.
Conceptually I don't mind the idea of cloud computing - but it does have one huge issue - it raises the bar for market entry. If it was to become 'the' way to use computers then instead of just needing the resources to serve up an installer for your application you need the resources to allow the masses to run your application.
The only way I see to avoid this is if the cloud the user belongs to somehow downloads your application and runs it in their user space, charging them for resources rather than putting that burden on the developer. In the long run I don't see that benefiting the user though, they'd get a cheap 'computer' but probably end up paying more in (most likely inflated e.g. text messages) fees over time than the actual cost of a computer.
Either way I don't really see the benefit, except to the providers. Either you hurt the developers or the users - you know the providers are going to get their pound of flesh somewhere.
I believe (from a little experience dabbling in web design) that browsers generally run inline javascript as they encounter it - so since the ads are usually inline JS at/near the top of the page it prevents further loading while it's being handled.
Theoretically if you put the ads in the footer this wouldn't be such an issue since most of the page would load first - most places won't do that though since they want the ads prominently on the top/side of the site so you're more likely to click them (but seriously - who are these people that click ads??)
Well, most of the news content on Fox is AP stories, so Murdoch doesn't really have a whole lot to 'steal' anyway. I'm not sure who would think it was a good idea to give him money for 'exclusive' search engine rights to content carried by every major news site. Maybe the deal is more about getting them to use Bing for the embedded search on the Fox sites, not really for the Google de-indexing?
All the noise Murdoch has been making lately is just posturing for technologically-challenged people in positions of power - his lawyers no doubt told him he had no legal basis ages ago.
I think they have it backwards - more friends don't make you happier, happy people just tend to have more friends. My reasoning is twofold: people prefer being around happy people, and often when you are not happy it is more difficult to do things - thus less social interaction.
AOL is actually free now, but back when they charged it was more of a feature than a problem that they wanted to retain customers. As long as you were willing to call them every month or two you could obtain completely free service. Sign up for a trial and when it was about to expire just call and say you wanted to cancel - they would usually help you find an excuse to extend your trial by a month or two more. Once the extension was nearly up - call again. As far as I could tell you could do that forever - I tried it for about a year.
Story bonus: They also had little surveys you could fill out for discounts off your subscription fee... but if you were on a trial account they would actually mail you a check for the amount you 'earned'. It was only a few dollars but I found it amusing to get paid to have an AOL account.
I've been looking for a good way to get a bunch of old email out of my yahoo account for a while without paying for a premium account... this actually looks like a good option! Judging from the screenshots I can import my email into gmail and then grab it via POP/IMAP.. now off to try it:)
I like the part where the gay game reviewer dissed the reward involving a night with two (female) models, saying:
While I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, this stunt projected a view of your target demographic as lustful heterosexual males, when in reality a larger and larger portion of the gaming population are women and LGBT people.
I'm pretty sure a lesbian would be happy with that reward too. I guess they could have had two male models on hand for a gay guy/female winner, but to portray it as anti-homosexual is pretty unfair.
Not totally related but - why would you even make a 'gay gamer' site - do tastes in games really vary that much with sexual orientation? Seems like his whole job is built around being controversial and 'different'.
I'm not sure where you get your data, but from personal experience I was able to get into classes at one of the best community colleges in the country at 15, and transfer into a 4 yr college at 17 with half my credits already complete.
Many of my (home schooled) friends also started college two or more years before normal teenagers. Some of my friends went to MIT, others to law school. Now, you could argue that I just had an exceptionally bright group of friends, but that's my anecdotal evidence. In Illinois homeschooling is even less regulated than other states as well. (Some states parents have to get approval for their lesson plans, etc)
I actually asked to be home schooled in fourth grade, because I realized how much time I was wasting in (private) school. Turns out I could cover the same material they did in school in three hours on my own. Also consider your high school experience - are you really learning much that isn't a rehash of previous classes - information which you then have to "relearn" again in college classes.
There is a lot of wasted time in school, and having to help the slowest students just exacerbates the problem even more. That said I have no experience with "unschooling", it sounds like a concept that would work with children who were motivated to learn - though not all children fall into that category. Don't underestimate how fast a child can learn if they are interested in the topic though.
"Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user"
my first thought was "sounds like iPhone is designed to actually be used". Maybe in the future we'll get phones that are less and less locked down in terms of apps and restrictions, more like mini-PCs - that would be nice.
I doubt it was just a comparison between developer hours vs lost sales. More likely they figured in projected piracy and sharing numbers, and we all know those numbers are worthless - but it doesn't stop managers from basing decisions on them.
I really wonder what manager decided that taking LAN support out of the game was a good monetary decision. There is no reason for it not to degrade gracefully to a "could not connect to battle.net, would you like to start a LAN game?" option. (aside from DRM, which is a silly argument since pirates will patch battle.net out of the game in a heartbeat) Even Steam has an offline mode, and the ability to play your games on the LAN.
It clearly offends people to be told how they can use the game they legitimately purchased. How many developer hours would it cost them to properly implement LAN play, compared to the sales they will lose?
There are plenty of RTS and unless they offer some genre-breaking features I don't see any reason to purchase. When I play games with friends we usually have a selection to pick from, so not being able to play SC2 is no big deal.
It seems to me they're aiming toward rabid fans that will buy the game anyway, and gamers interested in online tournaments who will obviously have internet connections. This overall seems like a bad design decision to me though - games have always had an option for online play vs LAN play. If they don't like the "complexity" of having two obviously separate options then they should come up with a seamless option that allows both, without restricting LAN play.
If this decision loses them even 5% of potential sales on the game it is a horrible call. People will probably still play SC2 at LAN parties, they will just pirate it instead, the opposite of what Blizzard is trying to accomplish.
Since when were the construction tolerances of commercial airliners and spacecraft anywhere near comparable? If you wanted some credibility you could have gone for some of the high end military planes that have to survive extremely fast speeds and/or high altitudes, but that would have destroyed most of the argument for outsourcing since they are astronomically more expensive than a commercial aircraft. Even then it still wouldn't be a completely equal comparison considering the stresses a spacecraft goes through vs. a fighter jet.
Also, what the article is talking about is fairly irrelevant to most NASA work - NASA is about exploring and pushing the boundaries of what we can do currently. Commercial companies won't be offering to run spaceships to mars - they'll be offering to launch satellites and common things like that which happen much more frequently. Maybe putting space station parts into orbit could be done by a commercial company, but they're probably never going to be doing solar system exploration contracted by NASA.
Think about it in these terms - the things these companies are doing now are what NASA was inventing and perfecting back around 1960 - almost 50 years ago. NASA is just talking about outsourcing the grunt work that they figured out how to do decades ago.
If I was an astronaut I would prefer not to have it outsourced, purely from a logical perspective. Being in space is all about perfection and control, and NASA can build from that vision. Private companies always come from the profit aspect above all else, which at some point may end up causing a part to be less perfect than it could be. In space that just isn't a question mark you really want to have.
NASA yearly spending, according to Wikipedia is in the 15-18 billion range currently. US Military budget is 515-651 billion, in comparison. So NASA is 2.7% of the military budget size, which kind of makes you wonder why we're worrying about cutting spending on NASA and not other far bigger numbers.
I find the challenge aspect of games fun, as well as the exploration. Aside from Ulduar the exploration aspect after you hit 80 is done, so you're left with 2,3,4.
Ulduar itself is a hollow shell of what it used to be. My guild wasn't hardcore raiding, but we managed to get the first bosses down before any nerfs happened. Now XT is a joke compared to what he used to be - hard mode is slightly easier than normal mode used to be. Colosseum is a joke difficulty wise, so #2 is out the window.
#3 will always be around, and loot used to be based off raiding, but now they've made it based off grinding instead. So if your reasoning follows mine the question comes down to - do you enjoy grinding for items that will be obsolete in the next patch or expansion at the latest? Is doing that really more fun than all the other possible games out there?
Now as far as the 2/3rds number:
EoE(Maly)/OS/VoA are good for maybe 30 minutes of playtime each max per week if you actually know what you're doing. (Not sure why you mentioned Nexus since it's a 5 man) Even counting those though you're looking at 19 Naxx bosses + 5 Col bosses Vs. 14 Ulduar + 4 Other. So 57% rehashed endgame content.
I'm not even sure if it's fair to give them credit for Naxx in the 8 months count since it was released with wrath, as was a lot of the other content. If I don't count it that means they've only released a major raid every 4 months - which is really slow, especially for one of the raids being a 5 boss room basically. I don't think an average of a new boss per week is too much to ask - of course that's assuming they would actually make the boss hard enough so you could spend a night or two of attempts on him.
TLDR:
WoW has turned into a "hurry up and wait" of getting your gear in a couple weeks and then paying blizzard to not play for a couple months until they give you a new tier.
I loved BC, but quit recently because 2/3rds of WotLK endgame content has been partially or totally rehashed art and combat mechanics from BC or before. Why should I pay a company money months on end if they can't actually manage to produce new endgame multiplayer content.
Examples: Naxxramas (exact rehash) Colosseum daily quest patch before instance (yay grind content!) Colosseum (uninspired instance using old models)
That leaves us with 5 man content, a couple 1 boss instances and 1 full raid (Ulduar) in 10 months (since November 13, 2008). They just did a gear reset with the last patch, so now everyone gets to grind old content for a few weeks to pick up enough badges to buy a full new set of gear. Basically they've also just told you that once you manage to get the bosses down in Icecrown you can quit until the next expansion. No reason to grind it over and over when your gear will just be replaced at the next level cap.
I haven't played Guild Wars, but I'll admit that Guild Wars 2 looks tempting. After dealing with Blizzard I'd appreciate a game that could offer a lot of new content in a timely fashion.
No hurry, you've got a good six months at least - they still have to release Icecrown, and I'm sure they'll delay the expansion a few times "until it's ready".. figure maybe a year from now. They're just letting you know ahead of time that everything you do for the next year will be obsolete in the near future.
I see a lot of questions about Starcraft2 LAN play, but none that ask the salient question - even though you are designing it to use battle.net, are you providing a way to connect multiplayer games when an internet connection is unavailable, or (god forbid) battle.net goes down? I've played WoW for a while and know there are times when battle.net subscriptions couldn't sign on to some services while pure WoW subscriptions could.
Also I think there is something to be said for being able to set up an ad-hoc network with friends to game and not having to worry about getting it connected to the internet.
As a note to some of the other questions about battle.net LAN game speed, from what I understand battle.net is only involved in the authentication and matchmaking, after that point all the traffic goes between the clients, so the stress on an outgoing internet connection wouldn't be very big even if you had 20 people in a room on the same residential connection. (assuming they were all gaming with someone on the LAN)
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Actually I think the lawmakers shutting down is an indicator of government working as it should.
Theoretically you should have two opposing views on any issue, so you'd only get a majority vote approving something that was actually necessary/worthwhile. Obviously the parties are way too friendly in the US - they seem to constantly be passing new useless laws and pork projects. Normally this sort of behavior would be an indication that we need to oust them and get fresh meat in the system, but lately the American people have been extremely apathetic. Bread and circuses.
Another idea that might help are expiring laws by default... Something like:
- All laws expire after 5 (or 10) years if not renewed
- Laws can be made permanent on the third renewal if they are passed with an overwhelming majority (90%?)
That would allow 15 years to prove a law is actually valuable and necessary, and remove the effort of trying to get the votes to take bad laws off the books.
I'm not sure I agree with several of your premises. They're the popular views, but I'm not sure if they're actually true.
The first supposition is that China owns a large portion of our debt - this one I can factually dispute based on numbers from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
Foreign and international own approximately 28% of our debt, and China owns 24% of the international debt. This means China only holds about 7% of our total debt.
Second, and this is just my own supposition, I don't think China cares if they get repaid. As long as their economy flourishes they are happy to allow us to pay cents on the dollar for their items by undervaluing their currency and buying our debt. Think of it as China's "stimulus package" for their economy. Sure in the future they might try to call the debt as a strategic move to affect our economy, but monetarily I don't think it's an issue for them.
If the second item is true then all they need to do is keep us stimulating their economy while ours declines. At the point where they are selling to enough other countries that the loss of our business isn't fatal to their economy they can choose to make any move they wish that harms our economy. If you're playing the long game you only need your enemy to support you until you're strong enough to kill them without doing too much damage to yourself.
I wouldn't be surprised if China is the United States of the next century, in the same way that superpowers like England and Spain were overshadowed by the US.
I'd wager they're doing more with the game than just recruitment. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting studies you could run on a game like that. This doesn't mean it's tin foil nefarious stuff - a lot of academics would probably like to get their hands on that data set.
Behavioral factors, navigation patterns, learning and adapting.. I'm not even a scientist and I can think of all kinds of interesting offshoots from the game - I'd be pretty surprised if there were no scientists with government grants pursuing some sort of research involving it.
That may be the proper usage, but in 'common' usage it's usually GB = gigabytes, gb = gigabits If we are actually talking about gigabytes then I retract my previous statement, but since I've seen a lot of residential cable and DSL with 100KB/s or less upload speed I wouldn't be surprised if he meant gigabits.
Is there really a problem with allowing your users to actually use their connection? By my rough calculations 2-3gb/hr is only 60-90kb/s upload. I really don't understand why you can't handle that unless you're massively overselling. I would be a lot more sympathetic if we were talking about users maxing out fiber connections or something higher speed.
Again anecdotal since I'm not a professional web designer - but it usually fails silently if it tries to manipulate DOM that doesn't exist.
Conceptually I don't mind the idea of cloud computing - but it does have one huge issue - it raises the bar for market entry. If it was to become 'the' way to use computers then instead of just needing the resources to serve up an installer for your application you need the resources to allow the masses to run your application.
The only way I see to avoid this is if the cloud the user belongs to somehow downloads your application and runs it in their user space, charging them for resources rather than putting that burden on the developer. In the long run I don't see that benefiting the user though, they'd get a cheap 'computer' but probably end up paying more in (most likely inflated e.g. text messages) fees over time than the actual cost of a computer.
Either way I don't really see the benefit, except to the providers. Either you hurt the developers or the users - you know the providers are going to get their pound of flesh somewhere.
I believe (from a little experience dabbling in web design) that browsers generally run inline javascript as they encounter it - so since the ads are usually inline JS at/near the top of the page it prevents further loading while it's being handled.
Theoretically if you put the ads in the footer this wouldn't be such an issue since most of the page would load first - most places won't do that though since they want the ads prominently on the top/side of the site so you're more likely to click them (but seriously - who are these people that click ads??)
Well, most of the news content on Fox is AP stories, so Murdoch doesn't really have a whole lot to 'steal' anyway. I'm not sure who would think it was a good idea to give him money for 'exclusive' search engine rights to content carried by every major news site. Maybe the deal is more about getting them to use Bing for the embedded search on the Fox sites, not really for the Google de-indexing?
All the noise Murdoch has been making lately is just posturing for technologically-challenged people in positions of power - his lawyers no doubt told him he had no legal basis ages ago.
I think they have it backwards - more friends don't make you happier, happy people just tend to have more friends. My reasoning is twofold: people prefer being around happy people, and often when you are not happy it is more difficult to do things - thus less social interaction.
AOL is actually free now, but back when they charged it was more of a feature than a problem that they wanted to retain customers. As long as you were willing to call them every month or two you could obtain completely free service. Sign up for a trial and when it was about to expire just call and say you wanted to cancel - they would usually help you find an excuse to extend your trial by a month or two more. Once the extension was nearly up - call again. As far as I could tell you could do that forever - I tried it for about a year.
... but if you were on a trial account they would actually mail you a check for the amount you 'earned'. It was only a few dollars but I found it amusing to get paid to have an AOL account.
Story bonus: They also had little surveys you could fill out for discounts off your subscription fee
I've been looking for a good way to get a bunch of old email out of my yahoo account for a while without paying for a premium account... this actually looks like a good option! Judging from the screenshots I can import my email into gmail and then grab it via POP/IMAP.. now off to try it :)
While I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, this stunt projected a view of your target demographic as lustful heterosexual males, when in reality a larger and larger portion of the gaming population are women and LGBT people.
I'm pretty sure a lesbian would be happy with that reward too. I guess they could have had two male models on hand for a gay guy/female winner, but to portray it as anti-homosexual is pretty unfair.
Not totally related but - why would you even make a 'gay gamer' site - do tastes in games really vary that much with sexual orientation? Seems like his whole job is built around being controversial and 'different'.
I'm not sure where you get your data, but from personal experience I was able to get into classes at one of the best community colleges in the country at 15, and transfer into a 4 yr college at 17 with half my credits already complete.
Many of my (home schooled) friends also started college two or more years before normal teenagers. Some of my friends went to MIT, others to law school. Now, you could argue that I just had an exceptionally bright group of friends, but that's my anecdotal evidence. In Illinois homeschooling is even less regulated than other states as well. (Some states parents have to get approval for their lesson plans, etc)
I actually asked to be home schooled in fourth grade, because I realized how much time I was wasting in (private) school. Turns out I could cover the same material they did in school in three hours on my own. Also consider your high school experience - are you really learning much that isn't a rehash of previous classes - information which you then have to "relearn" again in college classes.
There is a lot of wasted time in school, and having to help the slowest students just exacerbates the problem even more. That said I have no experience with "unschooling", it sounds like a concept that would work with children who were motivated to learn - though not all children fall into that category. Don't underestimate how fast a child can learn if they are interested in the topic though.
I don't have an iPhone, but when I read
"Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user"
my first thought was "sounds like iPhone is designed to actually be used". Maybe in the future we'll get phones that are less and less locked down in terms of apps and restrictions, more like mini-PCs - that would be nice.
I doubt it was just a comparison between developer hours vs lost sales. More likely they figured in projected piracy and sharing numbers, and we all know those numbers are worthless - but it doesn't stop managers from basing decisions on them.
I really wonder what manager decided that taking LAN support out of the game was a good monetary decision. There is no reason for it not to degrade gracefully to a "could not connect to battle.net, would you like to start a LAN game?" option. (aside from DRM, which is a silly argument since pirates will patch battle.net out of the game in a heartbeat) Even Steam has an offline mode, and the ability to play your games on the LAN.
It clearly offends people to be told how they can use the game they legitimately purchased. How many developer hours would it cost them to properly implement LAN play, compared to the sales they will lose?
There are plenty of RTS and unless they offer some genre-breaking features I don't see any reason to purchase. When I play games with friends we usually have a selection to pick from, so not being able to play SC2 is no big deal.
It seems to me they're aiming toward rabid fans that will buy the game anyway, and gamers interested in online tournaments who will obviously have internet connections. This overall seems like a bad design decision to me though - games have always had an option for online play vs LAN play. If they don't like the "complexity" of having two obviously separate options then they should come up with a seamless option that allows both, without restricting LAN play.
If this decision loses them even 5% of potential sales on the game it is a horrible call. People will probably still play SC2 at LAN parties, they will just pirate it instead, the opposite of what Blizzard is trying to accomplish.
I understand your point - however I can imagine such a car company.
They're known as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, and of course McLaren. :)
Since when were the construction tolerances of commercial airliners and spacecraft anywhere near comparable? If you wanted some credibility you could have gone for some of the high end military planes that have to survive extremely fast speeds and/or high altitudes, but that would have destroyed most of the argument for outsourcing since they are astronomically more expensive than a commercial aircraft. Even then it still wouldn't be a completely equal comparison considering the stresses a spacecraft goes through vs. a fighter jet.
Also, what the article is talking about is fairly irrelevant to most NASA work - NASA is about exploring and pushing the boundaries of what we can do currently. Commercial companies won't be offering to run spaceships to mars - they'll be offering to launch satellites and common things like that which happen much more frequently. Maybe putting space station parts into orbit could be done by a commercial company, but they're probably never going to be doing solar system exploration contracted by NASA.
Think about it in these terms - the things these companies are doing now are what NASA was inventing and perfecting back around 1960 - almost 50 years ago. NASA is just talking about outsourcing the grunt work that they figured out how to do decades ago.
If I was an astronaut I would prefer not to have it outsourced, purely from a logical perspective. Being in space is all about perfection and control, and NASA can build from that vision. Private companies always come from the profit aspect above all else, which at some point may end up causing a part to be less perfect than it could be. In space that just isn't a question mark you really want to have.
NASA yearly spending, according to Wikipedia is in the 15-18 billion range currently. US Military budget is 515-651 billion, in comparison. So NASA is 2.7% of the military budget size, which kind of makes you wonder why we're worrying about cutting spending on NASA and not other far bigger numbers.
I'd break down the WoW players into a few catagories based on what they enjoy:
1. Exploration
2. Challenge (raiders)
3. Grinding (collectors/professions/achievements)
4. Rewards (loot/gold)
I find the challenge aspect of games fun, as well as the exploration. Aside from Ulduar the exploration aspect after you hit 80 is done, so you're left with 2,3,4.
Ulduar itself is a hollow shell of what it used to be. My guild wasn't hardcore raiding, but we managed to get the first bosses down before any nerfs happened. Now XT is a joke compared to what he used to be - hard mode is slightly easier than normal mode used to be. Colosseum is a joke difficulty wise, so #2 is out the window.
#3 will always be around, and loot used to be based off raiding, but now they've made it based off grinding instead. So if your reasoning follows mine the question comes down to - do you enjoy grinding for items that will be obsolete in the next patch or expansion at the latest? Is doing that really more fun than all the other possible games out there?
Now as far as the 2/3rds number:
EoE(Maly)/OS/VoA are good for maybe 30 minutes of playtime each max per week if you actually know what you're doing. (Not sure why you mentioned Nexus since it's a 5 man) Even counting those though you're looking at 19 Naxx bosses + 5 Col bosses Vs. 14 Ulduar + 4 Other. So 57% rehashed endgame content.
I'm not even sure if it's fair to give them credit for Naxx in the 8 months count since it was released with wrath, as was a lot of the other content. If I don't count it that means they've only released a major raid every 4 months - which is really slow, especially for one of the raids being a 5 boss room basically. I don't think an average of a new boss per week is too much to ask - of course that's assuming they would actually make the boss hard enough so you could spend a night or two of attempts on him.
TLDR:
WoW has turned into a "hurry up and wait" of getting your gear in a couple weeks and then paying blizzard to not play for a couple months until they give you a new tier.
I loved BC, but quit recently because 2/3rds of WotLK endgame content has been partially or totally rehashed art and combat mechanics from BC or before. Why should I pay a company money months on end if they can't actually manage to produce new endgame multiplayer content.
Examples:
Naxxramas (exact rehash)
Colosseum daily quest patch before instance (yay grind content!)
Colosseum (uninspired instance using old models)
That leaves us with 5 man content, a couple 1 boss instances and 1 full raid (Ulduar) in 10 months (since November 13, 2008). They just did a gear reset with the last patch, so now everyone gets to grind old content for a few weeks to pick up enough badges to buy a full new set of gear. Basically they've also just told you that once you manage to get the bosses down in Icecrown you can quit until the next expansion. No reason to grind it over and over when your gear will just be replaced at the next level cap.
I haven't played Guild Wars, but I'll admit that Guild Wars 2 looks tempting. After dealing with Blizzard I'd appreciate a game that could offer a lot of new content in a timely fashion.
No hurry, you've got a good six months at least - they still have to release Icecrown, and I'm sure they'll delay the expansion a few times "until it's ready".. figure maybe a year from now. They're just letting you know ahead of time that everything you do for the next year will be obsolete in the near future.
I see a lot of questions about Starcraft2 LAN play, but none that ask the salient question - even though you are designing it to use battle.net, are you providing a way to connect multiplayer games when an internet connection is unavailable, or (god forbid) battle.net goes down? I've played WoW for a while and know there are times when battle.net subscriptions couldn't sign on to some services while pure WoW subscriptions could.
Also I think there is something to be said for being able to set up an ad-hoc network with friends to game and not having to worry about getting it connected to the internet.
As a note to some of the other questions about battle.net LAN game speed, from what I understand battle.net is only involved in the authentication and matchmaking, after that point all the traffic goes between the clients, so the stress on an outgoing internet connection wouldn't be very big even if you had 20 people in a room on the same residential connection. (assuming they were all gaming with someone on the LAN)