Downloading....

Blizzard seems to have done a lot of right things with its games (startling revelation, I know!). The fact that they've got me wanting to play it again after just not having played it for a while, and some reasonable looking patch notes is kinda a testament to that. Unfortunately, they have their own set of failings.

Yes, I know I said I wouldn't precisely one post ago, but I set up the client downloading, and, lo, a day later, vanilla WoW was installed on my machine.

Problem being, my account is activated for The Burning Crusade. This means (apparently) I can't play unless I have all the TBC data downloaded. 'Not a problem!' thought I, naively, 'I got the vanilla client from the "Download The Burning Crusade" page, I'll just head over there again'

Only then I hit a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error, and have done since then.

Blizzard, I'm not wanting to, but am compelled to give you more money to play your damn game! And here you are not letting me sell my soul to you. Noble, sure, but not great marketting. I'm reminded of every time there's a PTR when the character copy page goes down, or every patch day when the entire website goes the way of the dodo.

Seriously, new infrastructure pls.

Also, interestingly, you can view other clients on the torrenting patcher thingy. I got maybe 3% of my data from other clients. Perhaps there is something slightly wrong with this distribution method.

Anyway, In the absence of Blizzard to the throw money at, I decided to purchase Portal instead. Its now downloading smoothly, and once its down, I'll be able to play it straight away. Differences indeed.