Since i never planed on buying it anyway i dont mind. Infact if it makes zerg rushing Korean's rage then could be fun to watch things play out :D
Oh and the pic is my face when i think about raging starcraft addicts.
All i want now is for Blizzard to compleatly stop supporting (online etc) starcraft and make comps of it illeagle.

I'll stick with the Diablo franchise. Hopefully they don't screw 3 up.

well could be worse lol

Blizzard are making huge upgrades to their Batlle.NET feature. World of Warcraft owners already got a taste as we were required to make a BNET account and merge our WoW account with it. You can also register all your Blizzard games, starting from WC2, to your BNET account. After registering a game, you can even download the game data.
There will be achievements in all upcoming Blizzard games, and of course these will be tied to your account as well. Your BNET profile will contain all your stats and achievements for each game.
I'm not negative towards there being a constant BNET uplink while I play. I'm getting SC2 to eventually play online anyway.
What puzzles me more is the charging-for-community-maps feature. Does anybody have good hands-on information about what this really means? You'd think it was obvious such a feature would kill a community overnight.

Even with this sort of offline-mode, it still feels like they've put an extra unnecessary hurdle between me and my single player experience.
It just bugs me. They better do this right, or I'm gonna be as annoyed at them as I am with C&C4.

I used to take Blizzard as one of the best game makers right along Bioware, Interplay and Firaxis. Not so much anymore. In fact Firaxis is only one left. I'll stick to the originals, got all the best Blizzard games anyways already, only first Warcraft and first Diablo are missing.

Call me controversial (Hi, Controversial!) but is this really such a terrible thing? With games like StarCraft II, a big part of the experience revolves around online. Not just multiplayer, but also comparing your own achievements (not just Achievements, but... you know) with friends... plus (and of course this is a generalisation but hey) many people who are into gaming have "always-on" broadband connections anyway.
It's not a case of having to be constantly updated to tweet "OMG JUST KILD 300 ZERGLINGS LOL" but it is neat to be able to communicate with friends while playing. Plus, if they make the service work like Xbox Live or Steam, there'll be an "Appear Offline" option so if you don't want to be disturbed, you don't have to be.
The advantage of a system like this is that, say you fancy a game of StarCraft II and you don't mind whether it's single-player or multiplayer. Perhaps you've already completed single-player and are just playing a map to try and improve your score. Your friend (let's call him Horatio) comes online and boots up StarCraft II. Both of you are in a similar situation. Horatio sends you a message and invites you to a game. You begin playing. Simple.
If you don't have Battle.Net in place all the time like this, then the process goes more like this:
You boot up StarCraft II and play for a bit. Horatio boots up StarCraft II and plays for a bit. After a while, Horatio decides he wants to play some multiplayer, so he sends you a text message or phones you. You agree that playing some multiplayer would be "da bomb" or something similar, so you agree to set up a game. Horatio then phones you again to get the game details and password. You give him the details. You wait in the lobby. Horatio phones you again because he spelled the password "boobys" instead of "boobies" and just wanted to check spelling. He hangs up. You wait in the lobby. Some random stranger joins. You kick them. Horatio eventually joins.
(Exaggeration, I know. But sometimes it happens.)
It works, but it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to playing with friends. I'd much rather be able to see if Horatio is online, right-click him and say "Invite to Game".
I'm sure there'll be some DRM discussion around this, but since I don't pirate PC games anyway I don't feel particularly strongly about that particular issue myself.

In defense of Blizzard, I will say that they don't release games before they're ready, which is a huge problem across the rest of the industry - but as to the actual games, they don't interest me anymore. It's just the same damn IPs over and over again in the same two stale genres, plus one MMO (which is just a different spin on left-clicking-for-loot, anyway). Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo. I am so sick of those same three names.
Starcraft Ghost could have freshened things up a bit, but they shut it down, and when they finally start working on a new IP, it's another MMO.
To be honest, I still think the best game they ever produced was The Lost Vikings.

See, my problem with this is that I'm a single-player gamer, always have been, always will be. There are plenty of folks like me.
If they want to make a multiplayer-only game, they should go for that, but if they offer a single player experience then it shouldn't require things which are for the benefit of multiplayer gaming.
Also, I hate "achievements" and "trophies" and other online "mines bigger than yours" contests. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I just want to be able to put the disk in the drive, install, and play. No log in, no additional client, no constant net connection.

Funny... I thought I was the only one :p

I wasn't interested in it anyway. Despite being a huge RTS fan. The more I hear about it, the more I dislike it. Both they and Activision seem to think that they're producing the gaming equivalent of god. While there may be no shortage of those that agree with them, I'm not one of them.
Didn't you hear? They're "monetizing" Battle.net. Yeah...

Sounds like Fable again.
I haven't paid any attention to this game - what's so off-putting?

The being connected online thing kind of worries me but if you can play in the guest account without actually having to go online for singleplayer I'll be fine with that.
I was also under the impression that the community maps you will have to pay for will have to go through some sort of blizzard screening process. They mentioned something like defense of the ancients would be free but something bigger and better won't be free. Now I hope people don't actually buy the stupid community maps, the last thing we need is for micro transactions and needless dlc to start showing up on the pc.

I just wonder why you should need to sign in as guest for offline play? Surely they can have one shortcut which will just run the offline single player, and another to load up Bnet and all the extras that brings. Thats just the way I would have done it.
Oh and congrats on the third star btw!
Well my concern is if they force you to be connected to the internet (such as C&C4) or if they force you to have a steam-like app running all the time.
It seems like neither of these things is happening, so it should all be okay.

You'll love this game.
-Mnemon