In an interesting tack, Blizzard makes a virtue out of necessity, aikido-style. Sure, the actual retail launch of the World of Warcraft expansion was pushed back to January, what with many dungeons not being done even today, but that didn’t stop the live team from posting the expansion-related content that will be pushed to everyone earlier. Specifically, today.
There’s lots of, as expected, wailing and gnashing of teeth as befits a revamp of PvP, talents and UI code. But imagine dealing with all that AND getting new zones online. Yeah. Preloading as much expansion content as possible before ship – not that bad an idea.
#1 by Aufero on December 5th, 2006
Very good idea. Get the bugs out now, before the servers get crushed with the expansion release.
And they’ve finally figured out how to use that torrent thing by preloading patch content a week or two in advance. (Which is about how long it takes to download a patch with their crappy client anyway.)
#2 by Heartless_ on December 5th, 2006
Same ole story sung a million different ways. BTW Blizzard downloader is doing pretty well today.
#3 by D-0ne on December 5th, 2006
There was pre-whining and it was mine…
#4 by Mist on December 5th, 2006
I downloaded the patch from the downloader and pulled 492mb in 12 minutes. Thats…. pretty… impressive?
#5 by Apache on December 5th, 2006
the expansion is really good and im not even a huge wow player. there’s soooooo much new stuff in it.
#6 by Freakazoid on December 5th, 2006
What kind of crazy upside-down world do we live in, where warriors can’t tank and paladins can actually kill people in pvp?
#7 by Jessica Mulligan on December 6th, 2006
The same world in which the French get to accuse the US of being arrogant and the Germans don’t want to go to war.
#8 by Andrew Crystall on December 6th, 2006
Seems rather sensible patch management to me.
And yea, Aufero, it apparently does take that long if you’re not willing to share your bandwidth to patch a game you play. Which, er, I wouldn’t be either.
More likely to grab the patch off fileshack if I could, mind you.
#9 by xzzy on December 6th, 2006
The ramped up damage the new talents make available is comedy. Druids in my regular pvp group were running around spamming mangle, critting over 1k. At the end of a WSG, they’d be ahead of everyone in the battleground by at least 10k.
People drop so fast, I don’t think they ever got to the point of finding a way to prevent it. Apparently other classes are performing the same feats, but I haven’t witnessed it yet.
Going to make the next month of play interesting, until TBC releases and the upgraded gear starts appearing.
#10 by Ghiest on December 6th, 2006
Took me 10 mins to get the patch … 2 hours trying to sort my UI out
One hand they giveth … (nice ui scripting tools)
And then they taketh … (by then restricting what we can do with them)
I’m a rogue so there are still things in TBC that were not given to us in the 2.0 patch (infact quite major things) so the rogue community is bitching and whining about it.
Basically giving the patch for TBC before TBC = bad idea, as xzzy said the damage increase is just nuts giving pvp a almost comical feel for those of us who had the gear/damage edge before hand now absolutely crush casual pvp’ers.
#11 by Axecleaver on December 6th, 2006
The patch is pre-downloaded over the course of the previous week (at about 2k/s over my 15Mb fiber connection). The status bar you saw screaming up to 100% wasn’t downloading, it was verifying the checksums.
For me, I got all but 2Mb of the patch ahead of time, and that last 2Mb took about 10 minutes. Overall, a much nicer patch experience than they’ve been in the past.
Pvp is pretty silly now, and a lot less balanced, but at least we don’t have to deal with that ladder system anymore.
#12 by Heartless_ on December 6th, 2006
Axecleaver if I had a dollar for every WoW player that says they are on an uber connection and only get 1-2 Kbps from the Blizzard downloader I would be a millionaire. If you truly have a fiber connection my guess is you have no clue how to properly configure it.
As far as I can tell there was no pre-downloading of the patch at all on my side. I didn’t even start WoW since before Thanksgiving. I downloaded the patch in approx 15 minutes at 140+ average.
#13 by d on December 6th, 2006
The patcher by default I believes downloads in the background as you play, so you wouldn’t see it.
I set mine to download after I’m off the game because of the lag it induces, and it started downloading the things a couple weeks ago.
I don’t think it’s how fast his connection is, but how fast he’s getting fed data. If you browse your connection info you can see the download and upload rates, and inevitably my download rate is nowhere near what even my mainstream DSL line does for everything else.
#14 by Aufero on December 7th, 2006
The background downloader is designed to use as little bandwidth as possible (so as not to interfere with other applications) over a very long period of time.
The incredibly fast download times people are seeing this last patch day are due to most users already having all the data – all the regular download manager is doing is verifying checksums, (and grabbing that last 2mb) which takes about ten minutes. If you didn’t already have the data, well, there’s nothing like 50,000 seeds to choose from to maximize torrent speed.
They’ve finally figured out how to make torrents painless for patching.
#15 by Jason on December 7th, 2006
Well… except that while every other torrent client I have used for stuff works great, Blizzard continues to tell me that I’m behind a firewall and refuses to work.
#16 by Axecleaver on December 7th, 2006
What Aufero said. Other torrents, I can get up to 1.5Mb/s download speed if they’re large enough (enough seeds). My connection is tweaked correctly. Blizzard couldn’t figure out how to get their bittorrent clients written for rapid zero-day distribution, so they took a different approach and streamed it out over weeks.
I did hear from some folks that didn’t get it pre-delivered. I think those people had not played in a while, so the pre-downloader didn’t have a chance to fire up in the background.
PS PvP is really silly now.
#17 by Evangolis on December 7th, 2006
There is no software bug that cannot be made worse by segmenting the release it comes in. Just an illogical opinion based on a decade of releasing software.
#18 by Belski on December 16th, 2006
Haha, try working on dialup, took ALL night and quit at um 3am? 8% ok, got a long week ahead of me, filefront never works and the blizz. downloader sucks ass