07.27.06

Installing And Updating

Posted in Gaming, The Unbelievers, World of Warcraft at 7:23 pm

6:55pm: WoW installs on five CDs. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that the installer scared the hell out of me four times. See, instead of the benign little “ding” you normally get from a program saying “Hey dipshit, insert the next disc because we were too lazy to offer a DVD version for everyone”, WoW uses a very ominous-sounding THOOM. At random times. While I’m doing other stuff witing for the install. Like, you know, eating. Or giving myself the Heimlich from the last gorram time it THOOMed at me. In any event, the final install time was 40 minutes.

Then I went through the account setup process. Pretty straightforward; the Blizzard site is secure, which is always a nice thing to be. At least one form of payment is required before they let you go forward, and believe it or not even if you want to use a Game Card that you’ll purchase once you’re sure you haven’t just wasted $30-$50 on five disc-shaped turds you still need to have the card right there. CoH/V doesn’t require you to have the card; they believe you when you say “I’ll wait and see”.

So after that, and then trying three different account names (I couldn’t use either of my primary aliases, so I had to fall back to a variant of my old AGFF name), I finally had a working account. I was ready to rock! I started up the game and watched the damn pretty opening movie. “Ooooooh,” I said. Yes, I did actually say that. Blizzard has always been good with the cinematics. I was digging it as it ran, and was actually excited to log in once I had the chance to. I did so and waited for the first patch to download, which I fully expected.

7:08pm: And download it did. After unblocking the Blizzard Downloader (about the only good thing XP’s ever done was to ask you to permit programs to go Outside) I figured it would only be a short while before I could play. Well, that was twenty minutes ago and the Downloader says I still have 75% to go. Here’s the thing– the patch they’re downloading is 454 MB. ‘Round these parts of the Interbutt we don’t call that a “patch”. We tend to call that THE GOD DAMNED SIXTH DISC. If Blizzard is producing new copies of the game, why are they not releasing them with marginally more up-to-date versions of the software? The box I got had Version 1.0 of the software. And obviously it’s not a first-run of the game; it has a “Game Of The Year” sticker on it! The lovely part of all of this is that the Downloader does use BitTorrent technology. While that would be a comfort for me, as the patch is downloading a hell of a lot faster than the CoH/V patches/updates do, I dislike the idea that there’s no way within the program to specify different ports. I’ve had my suspicions that SpeakEasy’s packet-shaping BT traffic on the default ports, as the usual reasons for me to use BT (fansubs, lol animu) tend to be not good on the default ones, but this pretty much confirms it.

7:21 pm: I’ve spent quite a while writing this, and I’m only at 40% now. MUST. GO. FASTER.

7:34 pm: 66%. Thrill to the awesome power of liveblogging totally pointless and stupid things!

7:43pm: 84%. Ironically “about seven minutes” is both the time left on my download and the amount of time with WoW that I’ve enjoyed myself thus far.

7:47pm: 91%. I have been reduced to singing the Download Hash code to the tune of Old MacDonald. “Dee seven two seven eff cee two… six five aay three cee!”

7:51pm: Completed, now patching. Let’s have a look at these patch notes, huh?

“You will no longer fall through a chair you are sitting in if you eat or drink.”

8:01 pm: All right, most of the patch notes don’t make any sense whatsoever to me. Except the eat or drink one. That’s just plain wrong. After all, depending on how much you drink, there’s always the chance that you will fall out of your chair. Anyway, finished patching, so let’s log in for reals.

No more updates tonight, but tomorrow I’ll take lunch and have a good idea of how the first night in Azeroth went.

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