That article bothered me. Now, there's no "shill" or "fanboyism" at work here, but rather that it feels like something I would see on one of those Mainstream Media networks (Fox News, CNN, etc.) that simply report whatever negative thing they see. The issue is that IGN is a news website, and they fail to actually do any investigative journalism to find out
why it's like that.
How can you form an opinion with only a smidgen of the story?
What's even sadder is that reporting "Why?" doesn't even take any investigative journalism
because World of Warcraft's digital copy is the same way. Fortunately, as an old WoW player
who has run into this, I can tell you why Blizzard does it: gold farmers and hackers. The wait is there because the aforementioned people would use invalid (possibly stolen) information to purchase accounts. The information would fail days later, and the accounts would be revoked. However, the hacker already got to use them for a few days, which is good enough for them.
If Blizzard doesn't do this, you get more spammers and gold farmers in games, but if Blizzard does do it, people can become inconvenienced in other ways. It's sort of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
What's interesting is that you mostly listed MMOs there, and maybe that means I should add a number four in my list: "The Next Best Effect". I'd like to think this effect is mostly present in long-lasting games (hence why MMOs were mentioned), because people
do want new stuff, and if you mix that with the possibility of #3 in the list, you may end up getting a bit of hysteria over the two combined.
Although, I do think SWTOR is a decent example of user-based hype, which I would mostly attribute to Bioware being on the project. It wasn't uncommon for me to see, "Bioware is making it, and they make great games!" However, I'm not terribly surprised that this game is floundering. I wasn't impressed after I tried the beta. It's crazy how companies try so hard to "be the next WoW", but they don't even bring enough to the table. They think some gimmick like adaptive storytelling (i.e. slightly more interactive leveling
in a MMO) will help them succeed.
Vanguard just sounds like a bit of #2 and #3 though.