Yes, that may be interesting, however:

Well, I am confused too.

Someone at Blizzard needs to get fired over this. There is a reason so many games come out close to Christmas. How many people planned on buying the game as xmas present and will now just stick with the old version, get bored and quit? Especially younger kids who are dependant on their parents pockets for gaming? While one could argue that thinning the herd a little could do the game good, Blizzard (which never gives release dates) was adament about a 2006 release date until very recently and people have made plans around that.

What am I supposed to do over xmas now, with my family a good 6k miles away, raids not happening due to attendace, friends not being available and the TV program being utter crap? Blah.

In the category of amazing things that will never happen but would be a totally sweet kind of brilliant:

If they'd patch in the new races. Load up on warning labels, once the expansion "goes live" the characters will be unplayable until the expac is installed, but from patch to patch, you can get a head start on that paladin/shaman reroll you've been hungering for. A treat - a present - a reward for being such patient little eager consumers.

A mountain of CSR woes for greyed out characters on the select screen launch day, though.

Stop and smell the roses!

Maybe the blizzard guys will release just the PvP changes early, so there is something for gamers to do (although it will suck for the honor grinders, but for the greater good...)

Since there are no new shows over the holidays, you could consider buying/renting/downloading a season of a good TV show, like Lost, Prison Break, (both have one season on DvD) or 24 (4 seasons on DvD). I plan on watching season 5 of 24 during part of the holidays.

There are good TV shows (although only a handful) out there.

Two things.

First, WoW is release date proof. It will sell like mad regardless of when it comes out. Most games come out at Christmas because people buy a lot of games then. WoW doesn't need to. This delay won't kill the game.

Second, please stop asking for them to release the Draenei / Blood Elf starting areas. That won't happen, because those cities are stored on the expansion servers with the new Outland zones, and you won't be able to go there or make BE or Draenei characters unless you own TBC. It's not like game system content like UI changes, honor system, and talents that can be pushed regardless of whether someone has TBC or not.

Seattle in December = not a lot of roses to smell. I guess I will take the other advice and get a netflix subscription. But honestly I never watch TV without playing wow (or vice versa). Thats how I got into the game in the first place - something to do while feeding my TV addiction.

Redesign your loot system to suck less? :p

People will buy the expansion when it comes out. Personally, I'm glad we'll have a little more time to work on Naxx; just having started 4H over the last week or two, I was getting worried I wouldn't get a chance to see Sapph before the xpac came out. Now, I'm not as worried.

Except about them breaking Detox, which from what I hear would make Sapph a lot more of a pain when we do get there.

It won't kill the game but it will cost them. Nothing is release date proof. Even Vista (which is way more dominant than WoW is in its space) will suffer from missing xmas. I just fear that some people who made plans around the release date (eg leveling alts of classes they want to play in the expansion) who are already considering taking a temporary absence will not convert that into a permanent one.

They might actually release some sort of a pre-order similar to what they did with the EU pre-orders that included closed beta keys. That way people could actually play the new races earlier and have shaman/pallies at 60 when TBC is released. Vivendi would probably also be happy since they'd still sell a lot of pre-orders at exactly the same price that they'd sell TBC, even though TBC isn't ready yet.

Why are people acting like Blizzard just woke up last night and made this decision? This is a huge corporation we're talking about here... remember the decision to give both Horde and Alliance paladin/shaman? That decision had been made *months* before they released the information to the public. I'm staking money that they've known for awhile now that they were pushing this back.

Now the only thing this doesn't exactly jive with is how my guildmate said he verified the cds/boxes were already printed and sitting in distribution centers.

Hah good point. San Francisco has a way of distorting your view of seasons (they don't exist). :P /derail

Well, that could still be true. I assume there will be a big preload patch for the expansion -- the CDs and DVD are probably mostly art and pre-rendered cut scenes. Having the CDs sitting in the distro centers already makes a lot of sense.

Oh man I can't wait to download a 700 MB patch the day I install BC from the CD/DVD.

I doubt it'll be that big. Every single Everquest expansion I ever bought (and I was a loyal SOE customer up until Gates of Discord) had a patch on expansion day, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion in the life of an MMO when you installed an xpac from media. The only time a patch is usually that huge is when they're pushing new art, new models, and new world objects, all of which should be available on the CD/DVD itself, the only thing that would really need to be patched our side would be the client, and I'd be surprised if that exceeded 200 megs.

Also, keep in mind that Blizzard has developed the habit of pushing content early so patch day isn't so slammed. More likely than not, we'll have any stuff that we'll need that might not be on the CD weeks before patchday, so that all they have to do is boot the servers with the xpac activated, push a small client patch to us, and then it's off to the races (we'll find out whether or not their hardware upgrades are able to handle the load, I remember opening week, I'm skeptical)

You mean a few weeks before you install BC, when you upgrade to WoW v2.0 via the pre-TBC patch.

This is when you learn the truly wonderful trick of going to a library computer and downloading it there, then burning it to a disc and taking it back to the dorm.

Also, that's an absolutely draconian policy and your school's IT department should be ashamed of themselves.

Oh right, I forgot, you'll just download the 500 MB WoW 2.0 patch and 200 MB of the pre-download TBC patch. Even though I've only seen Blizzard Background Downloader being useful only like... once ever. :|

I'm almost certain they'd downrank Steady Shot just because I sincerely doubt they're crazy enough to introduce the expansion changes without any prospect for Hunters to get the one skill which is supposed to help make up for the loss of the aimed/multi cycle. Who knows, though?

Traps in combat on Gluth will be pretty damn nice.

This is my expectation as well. I made a post on our guild forums breaking down what has/has not been confirmed to be part of the 2.0 patch and my speculations from there. I'll repost it here if the rest of you are interested.

Though, of course, only time will tell.

Library? what is that word? Im pretty sure that the library has rules about downloading as well, but I will have to check that out because that may be feasible if I want to spend 8 hours waiting for the Blizzard Downloader to finish, as that is strategically firewalled by the IT clowns. I completely agree that the policy is absolutley retarted and unnecessary but its the rules, just like having to live in the dorms again and take the required classes =/.

At least we don't get any snow!