All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

A couple of years ago my co-workers talked me into playing the World of Warcraft (WoW). I really wasn't excited about this because it seemed to me it'd be yet another EverCrack (nickname for EverQuest - due to it's addictive nature like a drug).

EverQuest was tons of fun... at least at the lower levels. Just like NWNo (wikipedia entry) and UO (wikipedia entry) before it, the major selling point on EverQuest was the social aspect. Unfortunately after a certain level the social aspect in EverQuest seemed to drop off unless you were doing a major guild event. Certain places were easier to find people to group with and others very difficult. In the early days pick up groups seemed to be pretty good, but as any game progresses the quality of the average player seems to decrease.

Back to WoW... So I figured since my co-workers were all playing I'd give it a go and see just how fun WoW was. It was kind of fun in the early levels, but got kind of boring and I got frustrated with certain things. My co-workers were already levels above me and I got some help, but not a whole lot. After a while of going around in circles I gave up and went back to my other games.

Here recently I've been wanting to find a fantasy MMO (in addition to the sci-fi space MMO I've been playing). The other day I got an email to try the new expansion for WoW - The Burning Crusade. I figured sure, it'll give me a couple of days to mess around with a fantasy MMO again for free.

Ten days free trial - count them... 10 days! Once you click this button it will start your 10 day free trial and then you can download the client. Ok, so I click the button and download the small installer (maybe 1-2 meg). I start the installer which now has to download about 2.1 Gig via a torrent-like rip-off of a downloader - 16 hours to download. Great, so the first day of my 10 day trial I spend downloading the installer.

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2nd day of my 10 day free trial - I start up the downloader again and it shuffles me off to the install process and then protests. I don't have WoW already installed and it won't let me install the expansion pack without Wow installed. Great, where do I find a WoW installer? I would go grab my DVD, but it's packed away somewhere and I'm not sure where after 3-4 or so moves and several years.

Surely there's a downloader like EVE-Online and GuildWars? I poke around some and finally find a downloader - 2 megs later I have it. I start it up and... 3.2 Gigs to download - 19 hours left. Geeze, yet another day wasted.

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Day 3 of my 10 day free trial - It takes a while for me to get WoW set up to run under wine. It works fine, but I'm having issues getting it to actually capture the mouse. I give up for now (I do only have 8 days left of this 10 day trial...) and install it under Cedega. Cedega actually captures the mouse so I log in and first thing it does is state that I need to download updates. Ok, after a couple minutes it's done and says I need to restart the WoW client so I click the button and WoW closes.

Up pops the Blizzard Downloader for the 3rd time... Downloading WoW-2.3.0-enUS-patch.exe - 692 meg to download - about 6 hours left. Great, there goes day 3.

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I'm currently still downloading this patch, but considering almost half of my free trial is already over - I'm not impressed.

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update: I think I've downloaded about 3 more patches, but they've been a quick 3-6mb download. All my old characters are still there, but I don't remember how to use them... Oh well, the point was to try out the expansion so I'll try out the new races.