Starcraft – Do StarCraft 2 Guest Passes affect the World of Warcraft account

Guest pass answer for July 2010

When StarCraft 2 was released in July 2010 this was the correct answer:

The guest pass allows a guest to play StarCraft 2 for 7 hours of game time or 14 days from activation (whichever comes first).

Once over a retail version can be purchased.

Guest pass answer for August 2011

As pointed out by marco-fiset things have changed since that time. Now the guest pass gives you access to a "Starter Edition" of Starcraft 2 which gives you the following restrictions:

• The first four missions of the StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty single-player campaign, including Mar Sara 1-3 and the choice to embark on Tychus’s first mission or Dr. Hansen’s first mission.
• The first two Challenges: Tactical Command and Covert Ops.
• Access to the terran race in Custom Games and Single-Player vs. AI.
• Access to the following custom maps (map selection may rotate over time):
  • Xel’Naga Caverns
  • Shattered Temple
  • Discord IV
  • High Orbit
• No map editor.

All campaign progress and earned achievements are saved once you purchase the full edition of the game.

The 7 hour or 14 days time restriction does not apply anymore.

If you can run two monitors you can use wow in windowed mode and not need to 'alt-tab' or otherwise minimize the warcraft windows.

http://www.google.com/images?q=warcraft+windowed+mode

You can obviously do this without two monitors and have quick access to firefox (or itunes, etrade, etc). There is a performance hit with windowed mode, but it does have dynamic fps (frames per second) to degrade game play video quality to compensate.

Issue with this is that if you are using two video cards, some video cards introduce some issues when you drag windows between video cards or span windows between two different video cards. This isn't an issue with Windows7 any longer.

You also likely want to adjust the setting 'play sound in background' as when you wow window doesn't have focus it won't play sound. So when your surfing wowhead (or stackexchange) you won't notice chats, yourself being attacked, ready checks, etc otherwise.