If they can come to the forums or blogs for a "little explosion", they can come there for some info as well.

I've been thinking the exact same thing. Blizzard is putting so much effort into making the game newb friendly and yet they haven't implemented a way of conveying important information to players in-game. They should get on that. In the past, people could read patch notes while the game data was being installed, but even that is gone with the new updater/installer.

It wouldn't be too difficult either. Just add a dialog box that pops up when we log in. Or even have a section called announcements, and every once in a while its button would light up and say something to the effect of "there is a new announcement!"

A LOT of players are completely oblivious to patch changes anyway. Just take a look at /trade the first days after a new patch.

Let them eat their own ignorance.

The main reason the point-conversion seems somewhat dangerous this way is thus: Blizzard never tells anyone exactly when the patches will be out, at least not officially. There are leaks, yeah, and they'll mention unspecified "maintenance" but they tend not to spell out "tomorrow is the patch - get ready to convert." Granted, they could simply put this in their log in message, and maybe they will, but I'm not really expecting it...

On the other hand, there's probably only a pretty small number of people who have more than 4k JP/VP who don't follow forums and patch notes and so forth. To have that many stockpiled probably means you don't need any of the gear, which probably isn't the case with very casual, newbie sorts of players.