After 10 months of absence (and whilst I can’t log into LOTRO for the mil­lionth time) I decided to rein­stall WoW today and make use of Blizzard’s 10 day free trial for The Burning Crusade.

Of course, since I’m work­ing on an entirely new sys­tem, that meant dig­ging out the old CDs and rein­stalling from scratch.

I didn’t mind wait­ing half an hour whilst 2.5GB of data was copied from the anti­quated 4CD install set. I was pretty much expect­ing a major patch pro­cess after­wards, so I resigned myself to the 450MB auto­mated download.

Two hours later, ready for some old-time noob-zone smit­ing, I clicked on “Play”, and the game started.

Then it stopped.

Apparently the 450MB it had just down­loaded wasn’t the most recent patch, so it star­ted the patch­ing pro­cess again, upgrad­ing to the magic “ver­sion 2.0.3″.

Only… 750MB to go.

Another 4 hours passed, with not much more to do than watch a pro­gress bar. So, I left it run­ning and got some work done, had lunch, watched a movie, did some more work, and went shopping.

Finally, 6 hours and 40 minutes after first click­ing on “install”, the patch fin­ished, and I was ready to play.

Logged in. Agreed to stu­pid click-wrap license of dubi­ous leg­al­ity. Clicked “play”.

Loading… load­ing…

Patching?

Yes, after 6 hours of down­load­ing patches, WoW needed more elec­trons from the internet

At this point I left the com­puter entirely for the next 6 hours, because hav­ing down­loaded 1.2GB of patch data, WoW was now auto­mat­ic­ally down­load­ing another 1.25GB. That’s a total of 2.45GB on top of the four 700MB CDs ori­gin­ally installed.

It’s now about 12 hours after I star­ted installing, and I’ve just watched the intro­duc­tion movie for Burning Crusade. Logged-in, full of anti­cip­a­tion and des­per­ate to start rolling a new char­ac­ter. Maybe spend some time play­ing this game that in the course of the last two years I’ve spent some £230 on.

But no. It couldn’t be that simple. Because after down­load­ing and installing that whop­ping 1.25GB patch, show­ing me the intro­duc­tion movie, let­ting me log into the game for the fourth time, WoW needs another patch.

This time it’s 219MB. Almost noth­ing in com­par­ison to what’s gone before. Another 45 minutes and it should be here.

But after nearly 13 hours, I’m not par­tic­u­larly sure I want to play WoW any more.

Maybe I’ll just unin­stall it again.

Update: 15 hours in and — you’ve guessed it — another patch. That’s five sep­ar­ate patches to install this game.

This one’s only 19MB,  but once again there was no warn­ing what­so­ever until I’d actu­ally logged into the game. Seriously though, what would it take for Blizzard to imple­ment a simple ver­sion check on the game launcher that states what ver­sion you are cur­rently run­ning and com­pare it to the latest patch?

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