There is a plus side, it might force some of us(I know it will for me) to spend time with the family.

As for comments on younger gamers and the need for parents, nothing is going to stop an iou =) And on that note, I'm still looking for a good Western Canada store to reserve my copy at, the local wally/future shop has been lacking for years, ended up getting my retail from Amazon...

Patching in WoW 2.0 well in advance of the expansion itself would be a horrible horrible idea. The changes would basically force us to relearn the current raid content or simply give up raiding until the expansion. Many of the changes understandable and fine, given that there's all new content to learn it on and said content being balanced around it. Relearning the current content in the month or two before the expansion would be excruciating, given how many guilds are already hemorraging players due to the anticipation of the expansion and the nullification of all current progress.

Well if it comes out in January that would be okay. It was expected to be the end of November, but more likely it was thought to be first 2 weeks of december. If it is only one month pushed back, as somewhere in mid january that would be fine. If it gets pushed further back to Feb or gods even March like some were hypothesizing in the NDA thread, that would be a major blow to the current game. Blizzard has to realize how their current game is suffering from the news of the stuff in the Beta.

I'm curious about Blizzard's intent with this patch. Are they going to try and balance it at all? Or is it just a patch strictly aimed at tiding over burned out players until they can get TBC released? I can see a poorly done patch creating an unbalanced, bizarro world of warcraft environment where pretty much everyone just screws around waiting for the expansion. If they do this right though, it could be very appealing. My concern is that they are going to put in some of these new mechanics without considering that there isn't a level cap increase yet to accompany them, which might hose some existing Naxx encounters. Wouldn't be fun for any guilds trying to hurriedly finish up Naxx before the expansion.

So we will have 1.13 called 2.0 (looks like blizz dont like number 13). This patch will be kinda like "TBC is out but i didnt bought it". So we will have everything that will have anyone that will not buy TBC when its out. That include new honor system, new talents, new non-expansion items (like new arrows), skirmish arena (not sure about this), new buff/debuff limit, new derank spells system, pet scaling, new hunter mechanics etc.

I suppose that it will be released somewhere near previous TBC date (so in like 1 month).

According to the blue posts thats been posted later today, it looks like that will be released closely before the expac. Which might be 1-3 weeks, which if the expansion is pushed back to January or later, won't alleviate the current grind very much. It seems that the blizzard posters are very confused on what is really happening.

Well the data for Jewelcrafting, graphics, stats, etc, should also be in the patch. Non-BC players will interact with AHed gems, and socketable items, inspecting other players, that sort of thing. They may not be able to equip them but they need to be able to see them at least.

Is this confirmed?

It's the only thing that would make any sense. I don't think this mysterious "1.13/2.0/whatever" patch is going to be seen any time soon. But the above description of it being "WoW if TBC had come out but you didn't buy TBC yet" is pretty accurate based on everything they've said. I think the idea is to get everyone patched up in advance and have the new engine running, and so forth, a little bit in advance of actually selling the TBC boxes and the keys which will unlock access to TBC-exclusive content. That will make for a much smoother transition, one would think, than having everyone installing TBC and patching to a new client version that breaks all their mods, etc., all at the same time.

It sounds to me like some wires got crossed and the CMs somehow initially interpreted the above as being an intermediate patch to "tide us over," when it's really not going to be anything of the sort.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not betting on it.

Actually it'd be pretty darn easy to put the profession code in with the push, but not make it accessible to the players until xpac.

Just don't put in the trainer npc's.

I never wrote/posted the part that you attribute to me above, fwiw.