The install went fine. Then I had to create an account and register
for the free 10-day version. (I had the install disc but the 14-day
trial code was already taken.) Then I spent the rest of the evening
downloading patches. I left the last three to download overnight (one
was 2.3GB - yes, GB) and thought, "Yay, tomorrow morning I'll get to
play the game, FINALLY!!"
Ha.
I got up a few minutes ago and rushed downstairs only to find that I
had run out of hard drive space and the last patch won't download. I
have 5GB!! I have a slight problem with this.
1. The original system requirements state that you need 10GB of hard
drive space. Since WoW is currently taking up 8GB with the gazillion
patches it already downloaded, it stands to reason that 5GB more
should be plenty.
2. One should NOT have to spend inordinate amounts of time downloading
patches just to play a goddamned game. Get it right the first time,
people, and put it on the DVD.
3. Blizzard doesn't even host their own stupid patches. They rely on
peer-to-peer to do it for them.
4. The game itself costs $20 retail, and then to keep playing after
the trial period, you spend between $13 and $15 a month.
5. The game is online only, hence the cost in #4.
6. You need nine of the ten days just to download all the stupid
patches, so in reality, you only get one free trial day, because you
can't download anything until you have your trial account created AND
sign into the game.
7. As beautiful as the game seemed when I saw someone at work playing
it, I WILL NOT STAND FOR ANY OF THIS.
You know, this is the one weekend I had time to finally get into it
and now most of my weekend is gone, wasted, obliterated, by Blizzard
which as has turned into a worse company than Microsoft with all its
upgrades and patches because they just couldn't wait until things were
RIGHT before releasing the MAJORITY of the code WITH the game. Note:
THERE IS NO WARNING on the game itself stating that you'll need to
spend hours on a 5MB down DSL line getting stuff just to play the game
for the first time. The farthest I got was the trailer. From there,
it would not go further until I downloaded to the latest patch. The
line on the box that read "system requirements will change with time"
does not cut it with me. Yeah, they've covered their butts legally,
but that's all. They MUST have foreseen a gazillion downloads in the
future and to be truly legitimate, they should state on the box:
"Note that once you install this game, you will not be able to play
until you download all patches, which can be larger than the game
itself. We suggest you start this installation process well before
you actually want to play the game."
And, they should sell the patches on discs, too.
In this day and age of "everything is fast" - there is NO excuse for
this BS. Especially when expecting such amounts of money to slip
through their greedy little fingers. Thank goodness I never bought
this thing. I'm going to attempt to install it on my Mac which has
more hard disk space (windows was a partition on it and I never
expected to install anything THAT big) and if it fails again, I'm
going to boycott this elusive game like I did Radio Shack for years
when they cheated me on a keyboard.
~nv
"Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS." –
Alan Kay
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