Then no offense, but your friends suck. There's still no way sitting at home alone in your basement playing with friends online and yelling at them over teamspeak compares to packing 12-15 friends into same basement and duking it out all night long. Sure, you can trash talk over the mic, but there's still going to be times you just need to grab something soft and wail it at your friend when he curbstomps you... Or the joys of building a massive tower of dew from everyones empties.. or waiting to see who crashes first and then raiding his hard drive for that uber pr0n collection he's been hiding....

Don't get me wrong, broadband has changed the world, but there are some things that just aren't the same even with broadband. Hell, my wife's computer is upstairs in her own little room, and I always feel bad that's she's getting left out of the fun when the party's at our place (I keep trying to convince her to move her gear downstairs for the even, but no love).. it's a world of difference being in the same room together versus even being on separate floors, let alone zip codes. (yes, a wife that enjoys lan parties... granted she's more apt to enjoy the simple classics, ala Q3 and Unreal then "complicated" ones in her opinion, like TF2.. but it's a start).

Overall, I think this is a mistake on Blizzard's part. There *are* those of us who still do actual physical lan parties, and in some instances, network dependency in a game can be a BITCH... case in point, new fangled games that have *one* way to patch, direct from the internet. You have 15 people sharing a broadband connection, you know how long it takes for each of them to download a separate 1-2 gig patch? And if it's an EA game, good lord, forget it, I think they're using C64s as their patch servers.... Before all this "lets assume everyone is connected to the internet all the time" mentality, one person could grab the latest patches (from home, before the lan party), bring them to the party, share out the EXEs, and everyone could patch direct from that... now, especially with Steam games, it's always a crapshoot to see who all is upgraded to the latest and how many people will need to download (at the same time) slowing everyone to a crawl. Even trying to plan ahead you can still get burned (last lan party I think it was, there was a TF2 update that came out the night before before the lanparty.. some people had patched the previous weekend, but nooooo, we still had to sit through the mess)

Let the federal government appoint one company to manage it all for a small cut of the fees

Yes, yet another government appointed monopoly, just what we need.

As for the slippery slopes you object to, really, this is the tax man and our lovely appointed representatives we're talking about, they know what's best for your money, and they definitely need it (see also California), this is one slope they'll not only slip down, they'll be bobsledding to see who can get down the hill fastest, because at the bottom is going be all that free money they need to X (bail out failing auto companies / make state payroll / pay for their trips to argentina / line their pockets)

You really want the states deciding they can tax based on a FREAKING LINK?!? Remember that story that broke a few days ago about some old newspaper people complaining about people linking to their sites? Guess what, every CFO in the country now has a valid and compelling reason to sue *anyone* who happens to link to *anything* on their site.. because you know, a link, that's enough to trigger the Nexus problem with the state those random people happen to live in. Your link to my site could cost me money when I suddenly get audited by your states tax man, because you posted a link to my site, thanks guy.

Yes yes, I know, "But affiliates make a small commission, blah blah".. they're contractors, outside vendors, nothing more. Last time I checked, the state of Georgia has a 4% sales tax, and "over 400 taxing jurisdictions" (their tax mans words, not mine).... the average "jurisdictional tax" is another 3-4%, but it varies. Based on this wonderful theory, almost every entity in the US needs to track/file/pay for any sales occuring in those 400 jurisdictions.... Why? UPS's headquarters is in Georgia.. find me a company that doesn't use UPS for anything at all... even if you don't use UPS to actually ship your product (because remember, this is the states trying to claim that Amazon has a nexus in their state, and taxing *all* sales in that state, not just the affiliate generated sales)... you use them, you pay them for a service, so hey, thats a nexus! Awesome for the state of Georgia, not so hot for everyone else.