Thursday, September 18, 2008

When the world hates you

It seems like these past couple of days, the world in general and of Warcraft specifically don't like me very much. Ignoring all the non-WoW related stuff, here's a recap of the last week or so:
  • Somewhere around last week, the WoW Launcher announced that data for the next patch is ready. Since then, it hasn't been doing a very good job downloading it - I usually get really good speeds for patch downloads, but this one is at around 20% and changes between not downloading and downloading at a whopping 3K/s.
  • WoW has recently decided that it would be appropriate to randomly freeze at the character selection screen, be it right after login or when logging off a character. Though it seems highly unlikely and I can't find the connection, it started at about the same time I started downloading the patch... I think I'll just stop downloading it on my PC and get it on my laptop instead, and hopefully the problem will work itself out after the patch. For now, the whole thing is very annoying.
  • Monday night the Internet in my apartment just stopped working. Very surprising, considering that in the 2 years I've lived there, not only have I not had a problem, but the connection was so good that to this day I'm still not sure exactly how fast it is. Now, the connection itself is not "private" (it comes with the apartment), so there's no tech support to turn to or anything. Then, yesterday, it seemed to work but with fits and starts. I guess it's a good thing I'm supposed to be moving soon-ish.
  • When I did finally manage to log in to WoW, and get past the character selection screen to play around with Alierah a little more, nothing seemed to go right. I intended to get to Ashenvale to quest a little, and kept forgetting to do things like going to the bank, or actually putting everything I'd intended in it, or buying food, or repairing or a million of the other kinds of things you do when you're in a capital city.
  • Even questing didn't go as smooth as usual, starting with Sharptalon. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Sharptalon is a level 31 Hippogryph. Kill it, loot its claw and start a quest. Together with 2 other named mobs in Ashenvale, they make up the local "Tauren hunting quests". Now, 31 is pretty high, but usually you just have to take him on close to the Undead, uhmm... Reasearch post? I don't know what it is. But anyway, with the NPCs' help it's a piece of cake to kill it. So that's what I did, except that apparently I didn't do enough damage and so couldn't loot it when I was done.
  • Next I went tried to do Torek's Assault - you have to escort a group of Orc warriors and help them take Silverwing Outpost, while making sure Torek doesn't die. Quite easy, if you know what you're doing. Except that, for some unknown reason, Blizz decided to make Torek PvP flagged, and just as I was in the last fight inside the outpost, and almost done with the quest, a stupid NElf hunter runs in and kills all the raiders. Quest failed. I suppose I could've metled his face to pay him back for his kindness, but really didn't feel like it, so I just moved on.
  • Finally, another quest called Vorsha the Lasher. You escort an NPC called Muglash to a little rock out in sea, extinguish a brazier, fight 2 waves of 3 Naga, and then a Hydra, all the while having to keep the NPC alive (of course). Again, not too hard if you know what you're doing (eat/drink between the waves, get the healer first, etc.), and if the quest isn't bugged. But last night WoW decided it would be fun to send the second wave out again together with Vorsha. While I happily killed them all, leaving them in a smoldering heap of melted faces, Muglash died and I failed the quest.
At that point I pretty much decided it just wasn't my day, and called it a night. Didn't even hearth - just logged off right there on that rock. And, of course, WoW froze again at the character selection screen. /sigh

So, yeah, the world hates me. I'm just hoping it finds somone else to hate that's more ammusing soon.

One last thing - due to recent changes at work (nothing bad - not that it got busier or anything) I'm thinking of switching to a 2-3 posts per week schedule, instead of my post per weekday. I'll give it a shot and see how it feels.


UPDATE: So I'm downloading the patch on my laptop from work using a "normal" Torrent client (uTorrent), and it's downloading at an average of 500KB/s. Hooray for fast Internet. Hopefully, that should solve my first 2 problems. In case you want the .torrent (and not some mirror that who knows what file you'll actually be getting), go into your WoW dir, open "Cache" and you should find a .torrent there. Have your way with it. ;-)

4 comments:

KC said...

I have been having the same exact problem as your first two. Occasionally I will also get a note that data for the next patch is not available. I think that there is an issue with the patch downloader at the moment — and I think the two things must be connected, because I never had a problem logging on until I started trying to download that thing.

Tal said...

Yeah, the downloader seems to be buggy this time. I think the problem is that it doesn't always stop downloading when WoW is running, and if it's messing around with open files that could freeze WoW. Who knows?
What I'm doing for now, is I looked in the WoW installation folder, under "Cache" - it contains the actual .torrent file for the patch. Open it with your favorite Torrent client and ignore Blizz's downloader. While I wouldn't download patches from mirrors or from torrent aggregation web-sited (I'm paranoid that way), this torrent is actually the one used by the downloader so there's no chance of patching a keylogger into your executable come patch day. :)

Anonymous said...

Lots of people are having problems with the downloader this time around, but I wonder if that has a lot to do with its size. I think it's over 800 megs. The downloader has always been a bit quirky for me, so I usually download the patch from other sites and then do that final percent from Blizzard on the day it's released.

And the world doesn't hate you! I'm here and feeling the love! I'll be sending more good vibey thoughts your way. Again, I think!

Tal said...

Thanks for the good thoughts. =)
For now I've finished downloading the patch and now it seems like the character selection screen is back to its old self. Need to give it some more time to make sure, though.

Anyway, welcome back. Hope everything works out with the new place.