I spent most of last night (from 9PM to 4AM) at the local emergency room with supervenusfreak’s sister (which is what happens when you’re the only one in the house who drives) (she’s fine, btw…it’s just an intestinal bug). So I figure that three hours of sleep is going to completely unfit me for work and call in sick. “Oh, boy!” I think. “A whole day of playing World of Warcraft!”
Yeah, right…
First of all, fuck you, Blizzard, for having a patch downloader that can’t find its own ass with three robot arms and a high-powered LED flashlight. Fuck you for having a downloader that operates almost exclusively on the principle of P2P networking, because those of us who happen to be able to log on during non-peak hours are going to spend EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE HOURS TRYING TO DOWNLOAD THAT PATCH! When there are 300 people on the server, ain’t nobody gonna download anything fast. I had average download speeds of 2 Kb/s. For a 60 MB file. I was downloading from roughly 2PM until almost 7. I finally found a site that hosted the patch and downloaded it directly. In about 5 minutes. Fuck you, Blizzard.
Then I finally get the patch downloaded and installed, get into the game to log in, and I’m stuck on “Authenticating” for 10 minutes. At least. GAAAAAAH! It’s 7:15 PM! I want to play this game! Fuck you, Blizzard!
And of course, when I try to surf onto the official WoW forums to see what the problem might be, I get “Page not found”. So not only are their game servers down, but their corp website server is down as well. Idiots.
Fuck you, Blizzard! You make incredible games, but you suck more ass than has ever been sucked at server-side operations. Outsource your damn servers!
By the way, Alla’s when you subscribe for their premium service has a mirror site to download the whole patch in about 9 minutes [or at least that is how long it took me to download it] and costs $30US year / $2.99 month. Worth the lookup resource for game information, and being able to get the patches without the farting around.
Also, EVERY tuesday is maintenance day, starting at 0600 pacific time, so forget playing during the day…and today’s patch was a rather serious patch involving a lot of UI changes, bug repairs and the like…in general the normal downtime is 4 hours with an additional 30-1 hour of the servers being seriously busy with people trying to get into the game, so I never bother trying to get in until at least an hour after patch time.
And given that EQ would randomly patch for 8 to 20 hours at a time with 15 minutes notice, I welcome my new Blizzard overlords who can maintain a regular tuesday schedule so closely compared to the major alternative of Sony-HELL. I can remember several WEEKS when EQ was unavailable.
I did manage to get in eventually, but I’m so lagged I can’t get any server-side interactions to work, including logout, exit game or NPC quest hand-ins. sigh
I’m just going to go watch Amazing Race in 20 minutes and come back to the game when it’s over…
Agreed, their system sucks ass. My new player experience was waiting 5 hours twiddling my thumbs for some pissant 30 megabyte patch to download 70%. Gave up in disgust and typed said patch’s filename into Google, chose a ‘trustworthy’ site and grabbed it in 15 minutes. They have too many customers.
Wow, you guys sound like the official site, with less ‘stfu n00b’ and ‘can I have ur stuff’ and ‘blizz sux!’ … oh wait
It’s a game with more subscribers than any other outside of Korea, I suspect. They announced on their forums that today was patch day, and if you think patch day for any mmorpg is smooth and playable right away … well, then I guess I just have to tell you to ‘stfu, n00b’
Yeah, the patch is slow, the servers are going to be beaten to hell tonight, but shrug such is the life of MMORPGs, especially one as massive as Wow. I’m willing to put up with patch day to play the best online game currently out there.
goes back to the ‘authenticating’ screen for a 10+ minute wait to get into Shattered Hand
File Planet also hosts all Blizzard patches, ftr, and you don’t need to be a paying subscriber, you’ll just have to wait in the peon free-server queue if you aren’t. If you’re on dial-up or getting a really bad Blizz patch connection, this is still a pretty good alternate patch option.
Patch days always suck, in every MMO, for the last 6 years I been playing em. Doesn’t matter the game, the developer, or anything, it’s just the nature of the beast.
As far as their amount of subscribers go…far as I know they’re currently beating every single record including Lineage from Korea. They’re at 1.5 mil accounts over all the regions and counting…which for reference, is about 3 times what EQ had at it’s peak.
Actually, no…pay for a research tool for items, quests, maps, tradeskills, monsters…the ability to suck down a patch in a few minutes is frosting on the cake…and I already had a subscription for the EQ allas=) so I knew the value of the site. Thottbot.com is good, but seriously laggy many times.
My 4MB/sec connection was downloading the patch at 2kb/sec so I broke down and got it from Fileplanet - took 4 minutes. Then all the servers were down. I finally got on around 9:00 EST last night, played for about an hour and everything seemed fine. I have one of those ZBoard WoW keyboards though and it no longer works. Who needs hotkeys anyway, right? I logged back out to see if re-installing it would work and never could log back in. Oh, and they nerfed my hunter (while ignoring all the major hunter bugs), and now my priest gets rez sickness whenever she rezzes anyone. Nice! :smack:
Last night did suck. I was kind of looking forward to escaping from reality for a couple of hours, but the servers were seriously hosed. To the extent that something very weird happened – actions weren’t completing and interaction with the game stopped. I could wander around and explore but I couldn’t fight or touch anything (and I wasn’t dead, either). Finally I just quit and read for a while.
Having to load a 60 MB patch without any warning is, by the way, a pretty suboptimal way to spend an evening.
I started to download the patch normally, it was so slow that I decided to check on an alternate plan. Another board I’m a member of had several links to direct downloads and one person was hosting one himself. I dl’d the patch in about 4 minutes.
And Finagle, Blizzard announced several days to a week ago that the patch would be out yesterday.
I was bummed last night too. My 3-week-old actually crashed and slept hard for a while, so I thought I’d maybe have an opportunity to do a rare (for me) instance run. Nope! >_< I’m wonder if we’ll get a free day out of the deal though.
If it happens next week I’ll be prepared - I’m picking up my PSP tonight.
Every time there’s a big update, and I try to install the patch, I get the message “Patch failed checksum.” Then the only way I can get the game to run again is to reinstall the whole damn thing again.
I don’t know about you guys, but reinstalling that game is NOT a quick task. I seem to recall it taking a good thirty minutes, last time- and I had to swap the disks during it, so it kinda keeps me from doing anything else.
I’m pretty damn frustrated. I guess I’ll be fixing WoW AGAIN tonight.
The funny thing is, I’ve never had any problems like this with any other game. And let me just say, I hate Hate HATE their patch distribution system. I despise having to open my firewall up just to download the patch… and having to allow other players to connect to my machine to download it.
Don’t know how they announced it, but the news didn’t make it to my computer screen. And regardless, having to load a 60MB patch with no option to do it later is a pretty bad model.
Say what you will about STEAM: at least Valve pays out of pocket for the bandwidth they offer for patches and such. They may add P2P functionality later on (they did, after all, hire the dude who invented bitorrent), but after the system became relatively stable, they’ve been psuhing along with patches quite nicely for some time now.
