EPThttp://www.the-ghetto.org/content/battle-net-2-0-the-antithesis-of-consumer-confidence
I'm only posting this because it seems like a lot of people don't know why Blizzard is acting strange. If you're like most people here you probably can't explain Blizzard's decisions behind Battle.net 2.0. You may remember back when the no LAN issue was a big deal, and a Blizzard employee responded by saying something along the lines of "we're going to make BNet 2.0 so good you won't need LAN." They used more fancy words, though.
The reason Blizzard doesn't make any sense anymore is because Activision is making the decisions behind Bnet 2.0. In the same way that Infinity Ward wasn't given full creative freedom behind Modern Warfare 2, Blizzard is being restrained from adding necessary features to Bnet 2.0. The exact same thing that is happening to SC2 happened to MW2.
MW2 had no dedicated servers, along with several other features that were present in MW1 but not its sequel. When one of the lead designers had a developer chat before the game's release, he spouted what amounted to illogical bullshit, the most famous being:
zach426: What was your guy's logic behind removing the lean feature for PC, a feature that was a mainstay from all of your previous call of duty titles?
Mackey-IW: The game is not balanced for lean.
Despite clearly knowing enough about a PC game to create the first Modern Warfare, the same developers apparently forgot how to do exactly those things. This is identical to SC2 having no LAN and no cross-server play. Remember that the merger was Activision-Vivendi, not Activision Blizzard; the name was used due to brand familiarity.
As for the aftermath, over half of Infinity Ward quit when Activision sent in a private security force, an incident you should be well familiar with. Will that happen with Blizzard? It's actually quite possible. There have been a couple unconfirmed reports of lower-tier employees posting on low-profile forum/message board sites saying there's a lot of tension between Blizzard and Activision, and that a wave of staff resigning may come soon. The upper-tier staff will stay (unless forced out) because they've put a lot of work into their franchises, and leaving the company would put those franchises completely into the hands of Activision.
In any case, just take away that Blizzard (as much as I want to say it) isn't as dumb as the choices they've made with Bnet 2.0. The decisions are being made by people who probably haven't played a video game in their life, who think profits will be maximized by removing these features.
