No chat rooms, region locked, no LAN, no clans

There is a huge interview from IncGamers with Frank Pearce. The interview mentions many things we were scared of: no chat rooms (and no plans for it), region locked (you need to buy another sc2 license to play in another region), clans and groups wont be out until the next expansion, so on and so forth.

Another thing I thought you'd promised was chat rooms within Battle.net...
Nope. No plans for specific chat rooms at this time. You'll be able to open up chats direct with your friends, and when we add clans and groups there'll be chats for your clans and groups, but no specific plans for chat rooms right now. Do you really want chat rooms?

Loads of people within the community are wanting Looking For Group chat rooms, and that sort of thing.
Well, if we've done our job right in terms of the matchmaking service, then hopefully they won't feel like they'll need it for that service.

I have one more question. I know you said you're not going to support LAN play with StarCraft, but there has been rumours that there might be some semi-offline mode – log on once to make sure that you have the client, and can connect. Are there any such plans?
The offline mode would be for the single-player component, so if you want to play the campaign offline, if you validate the version on Battle.net and then you play offline for campaign.

If you have a really bad internet connection, but you have a couple of friends there...
That functionality's not there. Our goal is to make sure that connectivity to the Battle.net servers is such that that's the experience that people want.

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