I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. My WoW-loving buddy has somehow talked me into trying the full game.
He sent me another trial and I bought a 60-day playcard ($30 at Walmart). I tried to upgrade the trial with the playcard but, despite my friend’s assertions, it did in fact require the purchase of the retail box. So I shelled out another $35 for a product key and 1 more month. I’ve got until November to give it a go.
Luckily setup was a lot easier this time around. Blizzard had generosly updated the 2.5GB installer on Filefront with the next-to-latest 1.11.1 patch. My friend sent me a link to directly download all the patches so I didn’t bother reconfiguring my router for the bittorrent updater, and I blocked the behind-the-scenes P2P uploader that tried to sneak past me. I downloaded and installed the 5MB 1.11.2 patch very quickly and was up and running in record time!
So far no foul-ups in about 6 hours of play. I honestly do like this game so I hope technical difficulties don’t stand in my way this time. I’m now a paying customer (ugh) so I won’t be keeping my vocalizations to myself anymore!
~~UPDATE~~
I see in my logs that a surprisingly large number of people find my blog by searching Google for “WoW trial”. Surprisingly I’m currently the top listing on page 2 (#11) for this query. Mine is pretty much the only evaluative page for this query so I’m glad to have the opportunity to give people a little reality in their search for information on this game.
