Just a little heads up to those just joining WoW, or people wanting to do what I did:
One of the reasons why I wasn't too distraught over not being able to cancel my pre-ordered hard copies from Gamestop was because I wanted a full, fresh re-install of the game to get rid of all of those old, extra files and save some HDD space and to clean out the pref folders (I keep getting pref bugs like Buffs consolidating when I tell them not to, Auto-Loot turning itself off randomly, etc).
A figured that a good clean-out and re-install would fix some of these issues, or at the very least, 'blow the cobwebs out' so to speak.
After popping the DVD in the computer, and sitting through ~45 minutes of installing, it finally gets done.
I boot the game up and it has to download the launcher. Meh, that's to be expected, I thought.
Then it....
Wants to download SEVEN GIGS of stuff.
Seriously, Blizz? You couldn't have given us two DVDs so that we got a full install with no downloading? That's not exactly the best way to entice new players to join the game; have them install half of the game and download the other half (all 7 GB of it) before they can even log in?
That's a heck of a lot of bandwidth being used up and nowadays more ISPs are putting limits and caps on bandwidth usage. Anyone who has a limit isn't going to want to spend 7GB of that on downloading something that should have already come pre-packaged with the game.
Granted, if you have a 1MB+ connection you might be able to start playing the game early, but eh. Not everyone lives in a city. Broadband is getting more common, but if you live away from urban areas, you probably only have, say 300k/sec or so and trying to download while playing creates all sorts of lag that makes the experience plain undesirable. And then there are people with multiple computers in the household, etc, etc.
So anyone planning on doing what I did, or planning on joining WoW, might want to ask a friend to hook a flashdrive up to their computer or something and just copy the whole stinkin' folder. That only takes 20 minutes or so to copy, instead of 45min install + 7GB download.
Edit: Luckily for me, I was smart enough to merely rename the old World of Warcraft folder to create a backup and was easily able to restore that backup and install just Cata. I preserved the "new" copy by renaming it, I might work on that 7GB here and there on my own time.
Edited, Dec 8th 2010 9:52am by Lyrailis