I’m too busy but I’ll paste here an intelligent comment from a random guy on the beta boards:

No doubt some of their time is being spent discussing how to respond to this. The question is are they deciding how best to “handle” the PR issue (possibly by just not responding), or if they are honestly considering what seems a trivially easy-to-resolve situation. Prepare to be handled.

I want one, just one, die-hard Blizzard fan to come on and defend this from the community’s point of view. If this is the Blizzard you rave about, that always puts the customer first, then explain this. The problem is, you can’t. You can say that you don’t care, but obviously lots of people do (this thread is longer than anything in recent history). You can say that for isolated groups of players (who statistically speaking will be the ones who spend the least) there may be some pluses (eg: being able to pretend that the world doesn’t exist, not having to deal with those English butchering the American language etc. etc.), but you know you wouldn’t really believe it… You might put up a fair showing, but in your heart you’ll know you’ve been had. Blizzard, who famously “never releases a game until it’s ready” (interesting I haven’t heard that quote much recently) is obviously releasing this game to a timetable. I understand that, as I didn’t have any illusions to begin with. Blizzard is a business I have great respect and admiration for. One aspect of that respect concerns their business acumen. Writing and operating an MMORPG, however, is an exercise in pragmatism, and a completely different animal to a fps or even a multiplayer strategy game. As such it will test that acumen – specifically, are they capable of building a community. Time will tell – days, not weeks or months

Not different from what Dave Rickey wrote on F13:

It’s just another set of MMO developers about to take their trip through the meatgrinder. We’ve done this dance before, but they still have to go through the steps.

–Dave ($40M budget means they need 400K sustained subscriptions to make the kind of money VU wants….)

I’ll probably post an overall summary of comments and things I’m writing later.