monkey!

March 3, 2008

How to get your customer excited, Or: Why WoW is better then LOTRO

Before I begin this post: This is not about the gaming experience from either World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings online, this is about what happens before all the gaming. Getting the thing installed!

I had some free time in the mornings this weekend to just relax. I decided I would do so by installing Lord of the Rings online and play my free trial. I had the CD’s that I had purchased about 5 months ago in my desk and plopped those into my CD drive.

The installation got going, kind of a cheesy interface but whatever, it was working. While installing, I downloaded a full patch from 1.0 to the current Book 11 patch so I could be ready for that. The installer finished with no quirks and I opened up the patcher. After about 20 minutes of patching it was nearing the end when all of a sudden…

“Cannot purge data files!” at 99% of patching this showed up. What? Ok, shit happens, I look up the error and most suggest to re-install Lord of the Rings online and re-patch. I do that again, wasting another good hour or so.

Cannot purge data files! .. Yup, it happened again, at 99% again. Ok, now this is annoying. I do more research and find out that some people who bought the game early had issues and had to download the huge 5gb client from the web to be able to play. Great customer experience so far. The CD’s I bought don’t even fucking work.

So I download the client, surprisingly it’s going fast (550kb/sec average) .. wow! That made me slightly happy. The client downloads and once again, I run the patching tool.

Patching is taking awhile, you’d think they would offer a some-what patched client from their official site but I guess not. I’m nearing 100% in patching .. it’s getting close, when all of a sudden

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME. Yup, my patcher went PAST 100% and kept going. You know where it finished? 360% It also took very long, probably another hour to finish.

Finally .. LOTRO was installed. I loaded the game up, moved around for a bit, and fucking deleted this piece of shit game and threw my CD’s away.  I invested about 5 hours to get this shit running and I was too angry at it to even want to play after that.

A day passed, and I was hanging out with my brother helping my girlfriend move in. Off and on we got talking about WoW and I decided I’d give WoW a shot and play on his character to help him build up gear and ratings (I am not too informed on all the WoW terms yet)

I sat down at my computer at about 11pm and decided to install WoW before bed as I wasn’t too tired. I popped in the first CD and got going. The original WoW is 6 CD’s of data, but it went by fast and in about 20 minutes I was already installing the expansion (Burning Crusade)

The expansion took another 10 minutes. After that, I began downloading a large patch for the game. Estimated time said it would be about 2 hours as I had a lot of patch data to download. No biggie I though, I will go to sleep and finish it tomorrow morning.

I woke up today to find not only had my download finished fine, it had patched it all up once the download finished and after clicking Ok, I was ready to play WoW.

No hassle, fast, a nice friendly install UI made me excited to play. I logged on to make sure it all went through fine and it had.

So the lesson here? LOTRO and Turbine fucking blow. Blizzard does, and always has known how to please customers and this is no different. I see so many people complaining on the WoW forums about the game and such but after the experience I had with LOTRO I see how spoiled they all are.