I'm installing that phenominal time-sink World of Warcraft (I actually have legitmate reasons for doing this ... honest). So far I have watched it download patches and updates for TWO FRICKEN HOURS. And without telling me, WoW decided to download all these many megabytes of patches over a BitTorrent system. This got me a nice lil' nastygram from my ISP (my ISP prohibits torrent traffic for technical reasons).
And rather than just download one fricken giant patch and apply it (say, look at what versions were burned to DVD and distributed as media and make a mondo-patch to upgrade that version to the latest release), Blizzard has instead chosen to force me to download a half dozen (roughly, and so far) AND require that I hit the "OK" button in their installer after each one. This means I can't just tell it "download the patches and apply them," then go away for a while. I have to ficken sit here while it downloads so I can hit "OK" so it will go on to the next patch.
Seriously Blizzard - this is terrible. At a MINIMUM you should be placing me into a non-networked sandbox where I can start to get a feel for the game mechanics, don't have to watch a progress meter inch forward, and should not silently be using protocols that many ISPs are known to be hostile to. There is all KINDS of not cool about this out-of-box experience. What are you guys thinking?
Update 1: Four hours now. And now downloading a 2.6GB patch. In additional to the more than 300MB already downloaded. WTF?
Update 2: More updates. More. Fricken. Updates. And finally they all download and all install. My bandwidth over the last 12 hours as abused by the World of Warcraft install process:
So what do I see when I launch the WoW client? "The World of Warcraft servers will be down from 5:00am PDT until approximately 11:00am PDT." Bite me, Blizzard.
Update 3: Holy Crap! NOW we're downloading ANOTHER 555MB patch? Seriously? AND the game servers are still down? So I paid money for a media kit. Now, nearly 14 hours after putting the DVD into my drive for the first time, I STILL have not even had the opportunity to learn the basic mechanics of moving a character around, clicking on things, etc. But hey! At least when this download is complete I'll have downloaded nearly 4GB of data. You know. Roughly the amount of data that fits on a single-density DVD. So why did I spend moneys on a DVD disk if the contents are SO out of date that they are all entirely replaced by automated updaters? Die die DIE DIE.
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