A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Blizzard were selling a special “10 day trial” edition of World of Warcraft for just a couple of bucks.
Being savvy, I checked online, and sure enough, if you are willing to download the client, you can play for ten days for free. I figured I had nothing to lose. At best it would keep me entertained for a week, and if I really liked it I could ask Sunny to get me a subscription for Christmas.
So I started to download…and that’s when things started to go wrong.
You see, I have a 5mbit connection. The download was 3.6 gigabytes. As long as the download isn’t throttled at the other end, I can usually get an average download speed of just over a gigabyte an hour.
That wasn’t too bad. Watch a movie, maybe an episode of Doctor Who and I’d be in business.
The download app said “Time remaining : 8 hours”.
Effing great. They use a Bittorrent delivery system.
Now, my computer hates Bittorrent. It doesn’t matter how many seeds and peers I connect to, I never get above a 50-100k download speed. Plus, even though it only uses about a fifth of my bandwidth, it completely cripples the rest of it.
Long story short, if I’m downloading something at 10k per second on Bittorrent, despite the fact I have around 500k per second bandwidth left over, my computer acts like it’s running on a 28k dialup modem.
In other words, no internet and no surfing while I’m waiting.
So I keep my self as entertained as possible until the download finally finishes. I wait impatiently through the install, it starts up…and closes down again.
Guess what? I’ve just waited about 8 hours for a 3.5 gig download…now I get to wait while it downloads 700mb of updates!
Anyway, I finally get the thing installed, up and running and spend about 30 minutes running around trying to get my bearings, find where I can get quests, where the traders are, etc.
I finally find something to do, start leveling up, getting some better equipment…can you guess what comes next?
“Rolling Restart. Server will close in 5 minutes”.
World of Warcraft? Your first impression was not a good one.
2 comments:
Ouch. Sounds painful.
But maybe this is good. I mean, WOW could ruin you. So long hobbies! So long life!
At least that's what I assume could happen. WoW and other such MMO sound right up my alley, but I avoid them like a recovering alcohol avoids the liquor aisle... too temping.
ha! rolling restarts!
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