Wednesday, April 15, 2009

No Ulduar for Me

And I'd thought I'd prepared so well. In game I'd stocked myself with flasks and food. Outside of game I made sure that the background downloader had nothing left to download. I came home early from work to give the patch time to finish downloading and installing.

I'd thought the last scrap of patch that would need to be downloaded could be taken care of in a half hour. That was an underestimation on my part. But I didn't think it would take three hours. I was looking at my Blizzard downloader connection going 20kb/sec.

I ran over to a patch mirror to download a copy because I know my connection can do better than that… but the direct download appeared to have been missing a file or something and didn't work correctly… so a couple hours later I had a patch that wouldn't install and the Blizzard downloader was still crawling along.

Finally in the last half hour someone connected to the Blizzard torrent that gave me a good download speed of 150kb/sec and the last 40MB of the patch came to me much quicker.

Of course, I still had to install and by the time I finally logged on my guild's Ulduar raid was almost over for the night. I think I might have been online for the last five minutes of raid. Alas.

It turned out that we had Wintergrasp so a few guildies figured we could throw together a 10-man and try out the new Vault boss. I thought great, I'll at least get to see something new tonight.

So we got a group of mostly guildies together and I was on my moonkin. Problem was, all the guildie healers either went to bed or were currently the wrong spec (and apparently too poor to buy their dual spec) and there was only one pug healer in LFG. I'd wanted to do the boss first on my moonkin so I could get the achievement, or maybe a shiny new piece of T8, but we needed a healer and I wasn't sure if my second druid spec would be resto yet. I've actually been leaning towards feral of late.

That lead to me switching to my paladin, which was just as well because I PvP on my paladin and I don't on my druid so if any PvP gear dropped it would be wasted on my druid.

We cleared the old Archavon with ease, and then entered the corridor for the new boss. And then I crashed.

I got an error message and a prompt to send the report to Blizzard (or not). I did and logged back in.

I crashed again.

This was not good.

I came back on a third time and for a while things looked good. We engaged the new boss.

I crashed. That was bad.

I restarted my computer and did the graveyard run. After zoning in I waited around near the entrance for a while and things seemed good. So I ran back to the new wing of the vault and a few seconds later… I crashed.

…………

I had a sneaking suspicion it was something in that wing that was causing the problem. One of my guildies asked me to read him the error message I was getting and the consensus was that somehow my copy of WoW was broken and I should use the repair tool in the WoW folder to fix it. Oh… and it might take a few hours.

So I said good night, started the repair tool, and went to bed.

So much for patch 3.1 fun.

The one good thing with the arrival of patch 3.1?



Yes, that's an achievement for Love is in the Air. Look at the date it was accomplished. I was one of those people that only got a single bag of candy after some 40-50 odd tries. The final night of the event I even set my clock to wake up every hour for my last ditch efforts, and failed. I was rather cranky afterwards and decided I'd never do that for an in-game event again.

But patch 3.1 lowered the requirement for the number of candies needed to six, which is what I got, so my paladin is now Gillien the Love Fool. At least one thing went right.

3 comments:

Klepsacovic said...

It is no coincidence. Blizzard knew that the inevitable crashing would cause much hatred, so they compensated by allowing more people to complete a "Love is in the Air" achievement.

Grats to you, maybe it helps compensate for the crashy.

MarcusMaximi said...

You're lucky.

I have left my PC on for months with my background downloader running and when I got home from work I booted up and it started at 0% out of 880MB and started crawling along.

HELLO?

So I went to my other house (the one being renovated) and booted up my old PC (with better DSL speed) and that said 3hours!!

Except it seemed to stop at 47% and refused to carry on :(

Hopefully I'll be on by the weekend!!

Hana said...

Doh! Sorry to hear that, Holy. Best of luck getting on!