Joined A Cult
Tuesday night I joined a cult. Yes, the cult of World of Warcraft. I was picking up Christmas gifts for my wife, and I came across a display of WoW for $20. I’ve watched friends play before, and I liked the look of the game. I’ve also played similar games in the past (Everquest and Dark Ages of Camelot) and I really enjoyed those games quite a bit.
Installing WoW was a pain in the ass, though. It eats up 5.1 Gb of disk space, and I only had 2 Gb free. After removing quite a few files, and a few games that I don’t play anymore, I got myself up to 11 Gb free. That means that I’ll hover around 6 Gb free after WoW was installed.
Once the install process was actually started, the installer told me that my CPU wasn’t beefy enough for the game. I have a 1.85 Ghz Intel CPU in my laptop, and the game only needs 800 Mhz. I’ve got over twice what the game needs. Why it thought I was underpowered, I’m not sure. It let me install anyway, and that’s when the adventure really began.
The install was on disk 2 while I was composing an email in pine in another window. For no reason that I could decipher, the installer suddenly popped into focus as I was hitting “send” (actually, CTRL-X then y) in pine. The installer didn’t like CTRL-x, y, and it crashed hard. I had to go in and remove files by hand, then start the install process all over.
This time around I got to disk 5 before things went haywire. It asked for disk 5, and I put disk 5 into the drive. The dialog box usually goes away on its own, but this time it didn’t. I gave it a little time before clicking on OK. The dialog didn’t go away, and the installer (on the last disk!!!) seemed to hang. I ejected the disk, and it asked for it back. I put the disk back in, and waited. Nothing. I clicked OK, and it hung again. This time I ejected the disk, put it back in, and clicked OK right away. No dice. I tried various combinations of timing on the disk insert and clicking OK. I even clicked OK as I put the disk in. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. I tried putting disk 1 in, and clicking on OK. It immediately asked for disk 5. I gave it disk 5 and crossed my fingers. No luck this time either.
I decided to cancel out of the installer and give it another whirl. Well, it had already installed almost 5 GB of data on my hard drive. It went through the task of “cleaning up”, which I assumes that it meant that it was removing all of the files that it had already installed. This took quite a while to do. (Matter of fact, I wrote most of this blog while waiting for the installer to “clean up”.) I finally got tired of waiting for the installer, so I went poking around the file system. The WoW install directory was already missing, so I assumed it was done, but hung. I tried killing the process, but it just wouldn’t go away. I finally had to resort to rebooting to clear up the mess.
After rebooting, I tried to install a third time only to have it crap out with a fatal error on the 3rd CD. Dammit. I decided that it would be best to run a defragmentation of the hard drive in my laptop before continuing. I ended the night around Midnight with no game installed, and my computer running a defrag on the system.
Wednesday night found me back at it. I tried to do the install, but it failed on disk 3. The strange thing was that I could not hear the disk spinning. I’m not sure if that was the fault of the disk, or the drive. I hope it’s the disk since I like the drive that I have in my laptop.
I remembered that Spice had problems installing WoW as well, and technical support told her to copy the contents of the CDs to her hard drive before installing. I thought that it was worth a shot since it seems to me that the drive was crapping out (overheating, maybe??) during the install. I copied disks 1 and 2 just fine, then disk 3 wouldn’t spin up. That concerned me. I proceeded to copy disks 4 and 5 right away, and they worked fine. When I was done with 5, I went back to 3, and it copied to my system.
A fresh install from the files on my hard drive was under way! It took a while (30 minutes or so), but in the end, I had a working copy of WoW. Then came the account creation, and that went well. I was worried that because I was a late comer to the game that my usual account name would be taken. I lucked out. It was available.
I got the game started, and I watched the cool opening video (which I always do with new games.) Then I logged into the game, and that worked. Then what I expected happened; it was time to patch the software to the latest version. Oi. What a pain, but it’s one of the bad things about coming into a subscription game like this late.
The first download only took a few seconds, and I was starting to get excited. Then the game exited and launched the Blizzard Downloader. Then the real download started. It was 465 Mb of stuff that it had to download. They have a neat peer system, which means that I guess other players with the patch that are currently playing lend part of their bandwidth to the newcomers like myself, and allows me to download the file from multiple locations.
Part way through the download, I got a message that stated, “Your computer appears to be behind a firewall.” It was correct. There was a link that took me to a site that walked me through configuring my firewall to allow the Blizzard Downloader to work properly. It only took a few minutes, and the patch started to stream in! Very nice.
Once things got going, it was still going to take 90 minutes to download the patch, and it was already 10:45. I decided that now would be a good time to head to bed, and to check on things in the morning when I wake up.
I checked on the patch Thursday morning since I was working from home. It was done! Yay! Too bad I couldn’t play much since I was working from home. I was in the process of moving programs from an old server to a new server. When I would get one moved, I would run it to see if it would work. This process would take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. While waiting on the scripts to run, I played the game a bit to get used to the interface.
I can’t wait until Saturday morning where I’ll get a chance to play the game for several hours on end to see what it is like.
