To give Harmonix some credit, they're probably thinking that Rock Band players are likely to already own several standard guitar controllers and that this kit is more attractive if it includes a bass guitar for a change. At least, that's the way I'm looking at it.

Interesting screenshot they used here. That´s the biker gang from TLAD riding in front of the Lost hide-out as seen in the basic version of the game (in TLAD, they changed the facade of the building to a red brick wall around that door).

Yes, after playing the expansion for a while, I loaded up the original just to see what used to be there...

I'm sure you're not the only one, but I happen to think it's perfectly ok.
Look at it the other way: doesn't it make sense that when you pay for DLC it would come with new achievements?

They did? When are they releasing that system?

Of course, the reverse situation is also true (and possibly happens more often): some households will have one PS3 and multiple accounts on it.

I don't see how the players have a case here. If EA was careful not to use their names or their faces, how exactly were their "likenesses" used? By using their heights and weights? Seriously?

I just looked up that post on the GH forums and to be fair, what neversoftBRIAN posted on Friday was: "Don't worry, the ION Rocker works fine in the Xbox 360 Title Update for GHWT. This update should be out at launch if all goes well."

You can never predict when these things will come out with any certainty, but it certainly looked like
1- they had a working patch for the Ion drums on Friday
2- it was already making its way through the certification process

Barring any last minute surprises, it looks like Activision may actually do the right thing on this one.

Just to add something else to the compatibility matrix: the ion drums don't work well with GHWT.

They are recognized as a 5-input drum set, but hitting the blue or green cymbal triggers both the blue or green pad AND the orange cymbal at once, making it impossible to play the orange notes (which don't appear at all when using a RB1 set).

That would actually make sense, and I hadn't thought of that. They're probably using the exact same export logic as with the RB1 disk.

Ok, so if that's the way it works, it's not quite as bad, but it's still a shitload of money for 18 songs, not all of which can be expected to be gems... Still no reason this couldn't have been just another album download of the week.

A completely unnecessary rip-off.

With regular DLC content, I can pick and choose my songs and when I play at a friend's place, I can re-download my stuff and have it available as long as I'm logged in to Live.

That won't be possible with this silly new method of delivery and to add insult to injury, because they decided to go this way, we won't see those tunes as regular DLC for a while (if ever), so we can't get them even if we wanted to. Bad move.