[MUD-Dev2] [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience

[Vincent Archer]

According to Mike Rozak:
> - I'm more intellgent than the average bear though,
> so I spent ten minues copying the second DVD into a
> temporary folder and install from there. It works!
> (Most normal people would NOT think of that.)

Duplication quality woes. The first expansion of World of Warcraft
suffered from this big time, notably in europe. A lot of CD #2, mainly
in Germany, but not just there were borderline unuseable. With luck, and
two-three attempts,
you could copy them on the disk, and run the install from disk, but the
install program would fail trying to read the disk from the CD/DVD
reader, and abort with a big error message.

> - Apparently, 500 MB(?) of them were. (A mere month
> after the golden masters were made.)

Usual for the course. It happens with every single MMO: the first patch
is always huge.

> - After checking with the server, the login screen
> intially says that downloads will take 12 hours and
> 53 minutes to download all the patches! I almost
> have a heart attack. This quickly drops to 2 hours
> as the system properly calculates my download speed.

I think I still have a link to a screenshot saying that it will take 17
days to finish the install of Half-Life 2 :)