Hey, that means us east coasters standing in line have time to download the thing before servers are actually up!

.../starts planning for a REALLY late night.

This makes me want to just wait until the next day to bother with it. If I could play at 12:01 local time (EST) it would be "beneficial" (except for the sleep loss). But there's no real point in standing in line or pre-downloading it if I have to go to bed before the servers are available.

I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

according to the mmo-c post the upgrade doesn't go into effect on your acct til 9:01am

Just a guess but maintenance that day could very well begin at midnight server and not come up until 5pm or so. Kind of negating either format. I think I will stroll over to my local gamestop at 10 am and pick up my pre-order then grab some food to munch on while I DL it and prepare for....nothing. At least for a good 6-8 hours :)

By the time you're done patching, it'll be closer to server start up anyway. Do what everyone else does...put on a movie, play xbox, or Sleep.

Paid Time Off FTW

and if I'm doing timezones right, New Zealand has to wait until about 8pm. QQ!

The bit I'm interested in is whether this 12.01am PST launch will apply to those buying retail as well, because it's really going to put a dampener on midnight launches in places like Australia and New Zealand if after queuing up at midnight they then have to wait up to 20 hours before they can play. Considering what they did with Starcraft 2, it seems very unlike Blizzard to want to cause this much trouble for their retail partners.