Clearly you've never been on the Star Trek Online Forums if you think that was an over reaction.
I never said the devs were stupid, just the decision.
And a large chunk of the D&D fan base are FR fans, so while it might not be a majority, its will be a significate minority that is really upset. Big enough to hurt sales.
Significant? Hurt sales?
If I thought you were overreacting before, now I am sure of it. Both you and LB are overreacting. WotC might lose 10 or 15 players who are upset like the 2 of you, but significant?
First off, the Monster Manual and DMG are not even out and people are bellowing for a campaign book. Could you give them time to take a breath?
Second, the realms after the sundering are going to pretty much be similar to the ones before the sundering. For the most part, they are going to throw the 4E canon out the door. That means that DMs can pretty much play their FR campaign as if it were the 3E one and not much will upset it.
Yes, the Anauroch desert will start blooming again for the first time in thousands of years, and a few gods will be different, and some gods will be back, and Abeir will split from Toril probably taking a lot of shadovar with it, and Maztica might be gone, and a few NPCs should of died of old age, etc., etc., but most of that should be semi-irrelevant to most campaigns.
It's your campaign. Set it up how you want it to be in the meantime. I doubt the Ed is going to make the realms so non-recognizable that it won't work for most DMs.
And give WotC the time to take stock of players reactions to the game so that they can make good business decisions for future product.
The sky is not falling in and I seriously doubt that this will hurt sales. In fact, it will probably help sales because so far, Mike's team appears to be making good decisions.