Yeah it makes it a lot harder to play with friends. But most people played at least a couple classes. And since honorbuddy got popular I have (i think) 14 level 100s. I'd have to count to be sure, I have one of every class plus 3 druids and 2 shaman. And it's so easy to gear up a class now that you can really play anything you want. They've also instituted a system that makes it easy to find arena groups and I've had some good sessions playing with random people I've found that way.

Play on a PvE server and you cannot be killed by another player unless you choose to engage in PvP. There are dozens of them.

You clearly don't play WoW or know anything about the bot, what it did, or how it was used. You're assuming people used it to automate "boring, repetitive" parts of the game. This is true for about 2% of it's use. Most people used it for high end raiding (combat routines), battlegrounds and arena PvP. They used it because it played the game better than them. It did what most people consider the fun part for them.

First let's specify what bot we're all talking about: Honorbuddy.

BGs was only one part of it. High end guilds were raiding using the combat routines. A number of progression guilds broke up entirely because 90% of their roster is banned. It was also being used in arenas (look up "Gladiator Suite" on the honorbuddy forums). People were playing literally in gladiator range (2700+ arena rating) using the bot. It had perfect DPS rotations, CC'd, used cooldowns correctly and could perfectly kick any cast. It was also being used to farm professions (herb, mining, etc) and pretty much any other aspect of the game. Personally, I leveled one of every class to 100, including multiples of some classes (for arena purposes, so I could play with less skilled friends without affecting my rating).

Blizzard has never sold max level characters. They sell level 90 character boosts for $60. You still have to level from 90 to 100 to reach max level.

We had five people in our guild banned for botting with Honorbuddy. Every single one of them bought a new copy of the game and started leveling again. Most purchased a new copy on Thursday/Friday and I know of at least one that is already back to level 100 (took him 15 hours of /played). Blizzard is going to make so much fucking money off this ban. Not to mention people had to buy WoW tokens (gold) to buy their heirlooms and they will have to pay to merge the accounts together in 6 months.

Arena is still great, played a ton over the weekend. I've never found another game that has the same level of complexity or requires the same level of coordination between partners than WoW arena. We mostly played KFC (arms warrior / bm hunter / resto druid). Let me tell you the state of arena now vs 4-5 years ago, insanely different. The level of competition is in another league completely. For reference I was a ~2400 rated player in WotLK.

Of the people who play that I know, every single one of them bought a new copy of the game and leveled from 90 to 100 over the weekend. Some even bought gold from Blizzard (via their WoW Tokens). This was a huge cash influx for them. And in 6 months when the accounts get unbanned, they'll make all the money for people paying to merge the accounts back together to avoid paying two monthly fees.

So you think a government granted monopoly to a MSO (read: Cable Company) is a "free market" ? You're not a sharp one, are you?

We are never going to run fiber to ever single random household in the boonies. Ever. It's never going to happen. The cost of the labor alone makes it unfeasible. What we need to do is focus on deploying fiber in high density areas TODAY so we can start deploying the services of tomorrow. Then, overtime, continue to expand the availability of fiber. We cannot hold ourselves ransom to an unattainable dream of fiber to ever home and stop building towards the future. You create this false dichotomy that seems to imply we can't move forward with fiber in dense metropolitan areas because not every outhouse in Oklahoma has fiber. It doesn't work that way.

You can do 10Gb/s over "RJ45 cable". More accurately you're referring to 8P8C (8 position, 8 ccontact) modular connector that goes on the end of the cable. The cable itself has another rating (i.e. CAT5, CAT5e, etc). Category 6 cable is rated to carry 10GBASE-T, or 10Gb/S.

25Mb/s for a single 4K stream, which will be the defacto in a couple years. The price of 4K TV's has already dropped to the floor (just look at Vizio's new models you can pickup at Walmart). Now consider the standard family of four. Two to three simultaneous video streams, someone downloading something, add in some online gaming and you've got a normal American household every evening of the year and you're EASILY pushing 100Mb/s.

I guess it depends on your opinion of slow. I think really it's just expensive. At my company we buy a lot of broadband backup for satellite offices (many, many dozens) and work with every cable provider in the southeast, and we can get 100-150mb/s in pretty much any area that isn't the total "sticks". Unfortunately it costs $250-$300/mo (this is for commercial service, residential is typically about one third that price). So yeah, pretty fast in my opinion, just pretty pricey. This includes Comcast, Mediacom, Brighthouse, Cox, you name it. Almost all of them offer 150Mb/s service I think Mediacom is the only one that stops at 100Mb/s, at least in the areas we run into them.

Too expensive (cost per home passed). Money is better spent battling it out in high density areas with high demand for internet service. It's simple economics.

Sure, that's not abnormal at all. You can saturate 10GbE with a handful of off the shelf consumer SSDs in RAID. A single SATA 6G drive is capable of ~4.5Gb/s (550-575MB/s) of throughput.