Stinking Patches

Ok, so you've purchased your copy of World of Warcraft. Then you installed it and you thought the next step was playing, right? Of course not.

You see, there have been patches. Lots and lots of patches. Big ones. Little ones. All kinds of in between ones. For someone coming into the game now, you'll have to download some or all of the ones we've been downloading all along.

So how's that going? Horribly horribly wrong you say? Doesn't surprise me. Just because I've had such a bad time with it.

You see, WoW uses peer to peer downloading. I'm not up on the tech there but somehow it's good for them and it's somehow supposed to be good for us too. Apparently us doesn't include the Philadelphia area. Just take a look at the experiences we've had among our friends. For example - these are from the early days.

Location	Success
Canada ("M")	About 1 Hour (for which we all curse him)
Florida ("R")	About 2 Hours
Philadelphia 1 (me)	Days. Literally.
Philadelphia 2 ("P")	Hours - Overnight

These are rough estimates of course based on my horrible memory but you get the idea. We all got accepted into the beta just a week before the game opened up to the general public (not really a beta frankly). I was literally downloading it for a week. I disabled every fire wall, every virus system, anything I could think of to speed up the transfer. Nothing worked. Luckily though, if you get disconnected mid download, it will remember where you were and pick up from there.

Recent User Experiences

I just got word from my friend in Hawaii. He just started playing a few weeks ago and he said it took him only 2 hours to download everything he had to.

I just found this blog post from someone who started and said it took "over an hour" to download everything.

Downloading from an Alternate Site

If everything is downloading fine for you, like it did for my friend in Hawaii then bravo.

If however, you experience problems which cannot be resolved through their help system, I suggest you download them from an alternate site.

Here's where I go: gamespot.com. Instead of hours or days, it takes me less than an hour, sometimes less than 10 minutes depending on the size of the patch. I just have to execute the patch once it's downloaded.

For now, ignore the "Mod" downloads. We'll discuss those later.