said by CapinPete :

Valve has its own content servers so you never upload anything.

said by CapinPete :

What Blizzard did is BS. The function should have been disabled by default, not the other way around. It's unfortunate that these companies get away with things like this because your average joe doesn't have a clue to what's going on.

said by dadkins :

Don't care if it's this or Steam... It's garbage!

Let *ME* download/upload if *I* choose.
Let me play my games how and when I wish!

Another Lost Sale...

EDIT: Typo

said by G_Poobah :

So, one day, some middle level manager, whose not smart enough to code, but not crafty enough to avoid doing work, comes up with this new idea. "Why should Blizzard pay for bandwidth, when we can make our customers do it!"

So he makes up a big fancy excel spreadsheet, calculating the cost savings with this new 'viral' feature they will roll out. The numbers look good, and there could be a bonus in it for this manager! He makes up a big powerpoint presentation, schedules the conference room, gathers up the bean counters and the clueless suits, and makes his pitch. It's a HIT! "Wow, we'll save all this money doing it this way!" shout the bean counters. "Bigger bonuses for us!" cry the suits. "It's a feature" yells the marketing dweeb. And so it is done.

The problem is that none of the customers signed up for this. See, part of the cost of the subscription price includes download the patch. In fact, they aren't even FREE patches, you have to pay every month to get them. So, as the customer, what execatly do I GAIN from having this virus run on my system. It doesn't matter if it's only using 1kb or 10mb or my pipe, I didn't sign up for it, and I don't want it.

Blizzard made the classic mistake of letting a middle manager set policy. Saving money isn't the best way to increase profits, if you piss people off. They can't let 'greed' be the defining force of their company, otherwise they will end up like SOE, and we've all seen how well that works out.

Solution: Fire the manager who came up with the idea, and punish everyone who approved it. Then, make an OFFER to your customers, say, $1.00 off your subscription if you agree to upload 100MB of data or something like that. Make it so the savings of this idea are passed on to customers who WANT the savings, not to the middle managers bonus, or the clueless suits new porshe. Pissing off customers is a bad idea, and unless you are a monopoloy like verizon or comcrap, the net result from the negative publicity far outweighs any savings you may get.