T w e n t y S i d e d

I probably shouldn’t have opened the can of worms yesterday when I complained about the new Blizzard World of Warcraft downloader. To be clear, I wasn’t complaining about a beta having bugs. I was complaining about what seemed to be a senseless and self-defeating design.

But now I’ve seen the system work (sort of) and I sort of feel obligated to set the record straight:

The new streaming downloader is a great concept. It’s not quite working as advertised yet (beta, naturally) but once it does it really could save us from those awful seven hour patching sessions. Now that I see it working, I can tell the problem yesterday wasn’t with the new system so much as the way it was rolled out. They asked you to uninstall the client. While annoying, this made sense. Then you had to download this 15GB monster. This download :

Once that thing was done it launched, ignored the 15BG it had just downloaded, and began streaming the game as intended. That first download step was the problem. It made no dang sense.

So, the new system could turn out to be great. I think the initial bulk download was erroneous. It also confused things because I naturally assumed this bulk download was the new “streaming” system, which made no sense. It wasn’t.

Again, it’s boring fussing over the details of an installer for a beta that isn’t even out yet, but after I heaped shame on them I felt like I needed to make clear what was going on.

(Note to self, this is why you shouldn’t write about technical problems in a beta. Even if it seems like horrible design, there may well be explanations other an idiocy.)

Ah. Lesson learned.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m on the Cataclysm beta. But I haven’t spent much time with it yet. Every time I find I have forty-five minutes to spend on it, I fire up the software and it spends thirty five minutes downloading and patching. The only time I get in is when I plan ahead and launch the program an hour before I actually want to play. Now, this is all part of the deal of being on a beta I’m not really complaining about that.

But this morning was one of those times when I had the foresight to start the program before I needed it. At 6am I fired it up, planning to to play around 7. That would give me a nice hour of playtime before I began work at 8.

But the launcher announced that Blizzard was rolling out a new update system. And get this: It promised that the new system would “stream” content as needed. I wish I’d grabbed a screenshot when it offered me the deal so that I could get the exact wording, but it gave me the impression that I wouldn’t need these annoying forty-five minute patches anymore. It sounded a bit too good to be true, but then it didn’t really give me a lot of choice, either. The game would no longer launch until I’d gotten the new downloader.

Step 1 of getting the new downloader: Uninstall Cataclysm.

WHAT?!?!?! Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New Blizzard Downloader”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.