Boredom is a powerful and deadly drug in this modern day world… It can cause us to view some rather awful things that our human eyes were never ever meant to see. Great example was the viral “2 girls 1 cup” video that many laid eyes to and lead to some great “reaction” videos on YouTube. However… It has lead me to a rather interesting cross-road. I have lost quite a number of friends from the ex wreaking her drama around town which is a terrible shame really. In turn, this has caused me to play with an odd thought my cousin Sol tuned me to…

Zero, I dare to say that that your laptop could run World of Warcraft… I know you are getting cabin fever when people call out and cancel to your hang-outs. I have had friends who couldn’t even run Guild Wars with low settings on their machines, but somehow World of Warcraft runs like a champ. Plus you may have some fun on top of everything. Just hit up Blizzard’s World of Warcraft site and get your free trial key.

I would give it a shot and see what could come out of it… but sadly… there was one thing limiting me from playing. The updates. World of Warcraft’s base install from a v1.0.0 DVD took 20 minutes and about 2GB of hard disk space. Then add that there are several patches that lead to v2.4.0 that are about 450+MB a piece and NOT a direct “update to 2.4.0 patch” upgrade… Over a base DSL connection, that’s a rather agonizing download… I am on v2.0.1 updating to 2.4.0 currently at 24%, the patch being about 1GB in size, and my speeds from P2P downloads reading at 26 kb/s to 76 kb/s. The estimated time of completion being close to 5-6 hours. I could deal with slow updating, but that’s a rather hefty lot to be downloading almost 3-4GB of compressed game data just to enter the game. At the same time… Guild Wars has it’s own share of things… If you install the client, it does have to sync up with the server to download client software updates which can be agonizing as well. I assume that having to download all of the data before playing is much better than entering a zone and being prohibited from playing until the zone data completes, which is a slight issue I have with Guild Wars.

Why?

I would try to go somewhere like a zone after entering a town and my in-game friends would message me to death but due to the zone loading, I couldn’t see squat. I digress…

I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a long while, save for the one time Cousin Sol let me have a taste early on just to see… I didn’t care for it much then, as I had liked how polished out Guild Wars was with regard to errata. It should be interesting to see how things are now in the game after so many “nerfs” that have balanced/unbalanced (depending on your take) the game play.

It’s a shame my family doesn’t want to step into Verizon FiOS but I don’t have much choice. I will say that if World of Warcraft does run on my laptop, albeit crudely… 1) I will probably be seeking a dedicated Windows laptop for gaming and proprietary program use. Even if it does mean I have to donate Suzaku to my family and means I may not be using Linux too much… I don’t mind charity for them. 2) I will probably ask family to consider FiOS for bandwidth reasons.

I will say that I don’t plan to have World of Warcraft take over my life, I have decent self control from working out and knowing I only have a few years left in my pharmacy studies anyhow.