Patch day is a mixed bag, often a triumph for some while a disaster for others.
And it can be all the more extreme with World of Warcraft and the requisite AddOn apocalypse that comes with every patch and their legendary slow patch download system that seemed at one point to be designed to get you to subscribe to places like FilePlanet.
Thus I generally approach patch day with low expectations, no matter how nice the changes look in the patch.
So I was a bit surprised how well the WoW 3.2 patch went for me.
When I got home Tuesday night Blizzard’s updater downloaded the patch in record time. (I hadn’t let it pre-download as I was just going to grab it from FilePlanet, then FilePlanet was having problems.)
With my Dalaran problems I had pared down my AddOns to the bare minimum, so the pain of their absence was minimal.
And so I was in Azeroth and looking around before I knew it.
Of course, some there were a pile of additions and changes to engineering, so I knew I was going to have to get into Dalaran and train that up. I decided to bite the bullet and get it done, soonest started, soonest done and all that.
The question was just how many reboots would it take me to accomplish this task and get back out of the city.
My hearthstone was still set to Hero’s Welcome. Silly me. I’ve been crashing in Dalaran since March, but I haven’t changed my recall point in all that time. Well, it is a key point in the game, even if the game craps out when I get there.
I hit the stone and watched Dalaran load slowly around me.
Then, when I could actually move, I started trotting to the engineering trainer. I made it.
I trained the new items, checked out the “engineers only” steam powered auctioneer, then went next door to the forge to smelt down some ore I had on me. The game was still running.
I went out, mounted up, and headed towards Krauses Landing to make my escape. Not that it would matter. History had shown me that once in Dalaran I was doomed to lock up, no matter how far away I flew nor how quickly I did it.
On the way to the landing, I decided to turn and pick up the extra Children’s Week quest that got tossed in with the patch, picking the Wolvar orphan to guide around Northrend.
Dalaran was packed, and usually the more crowded it is the quicker the crash comes, but I was still going. I had crossed the city twice, with is one and a half times more than I can usually manage at peak times.
I decided to push my luck.
I picked up the daily cooking quest back at Hero’s Welcome. I ran around to the bank to pick up supplies for it, cooked up the right items, and turned them in. I was still there.
I picked up the daily fishing quest, which required a flight to Wintergrasp and then a return. I did that, came back, and was still online.
I did a bit of fishing in the fountain.
After about an hour, I started to quietly think in the back of my mind that perhaps Blizzard had fixed my issue. I tried not to think that too loud, lest I frighten whatever fixed the problem. But I have set myself to cautiously optimistic on the situation.
The problem might be gone.
Which both made me happy and pissed me off.
It pissed me off because for the last few months I have been been convinced the problem has been at my end. It stared when I had to get a new video card and I could never find another problem decription in the support forums that sounded like the same one I was having.
If I see other people are experiencing the same problem I am, I feel better. I can relax. Misery loves company. But if I am the only one who seems to be, say, crashing in Dalaran, then I get obsessed about fixing the problem at my end.
But it made me happy because all I really want to do is play the game without having to worry about restarting every time I got within a certain radius of the main city in Northrend.
So all the other stuff in the patch is nice. I like the cheaper, earlier mounts. I like that the base flying mount has been sped up. I like that there is a mailbox by the auctioneer in Darnassus.
But I really like the whole not crashing thing a lot. I hope it lasts. Quality of life rocks. And I need not avert my eyes from Dalaran for fear of a crash!
Let us fly to Dalaran!
Meanwhile my daughter, who got special dispensation to play some during the week after doing some of her summer homework, declared this the best patch ever.
She is happy that some of her characters in their 20s get mounts now, but she is especially happy about the fact that battlegrounds now grant experience. She has been a bit of the PvP girl of late, sitting with her hunter at level 39. But in just an evening she got herself to level 40 and got to buy her epic mount.
So, all-in-all, we would have to give WoW Patch 3.2 a positive review so far.
How is it treating you?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
To be honest, I have not really gotten a chance to “play” with 3.2. This weekend I will be hitting heroics and raids, but in my limited time during the week I have been doing the AH thing and pulling in about 5k per day.
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Gah so it was a game side crashing issue?! You know it could be both. Say your GPU crashes when taxing memory. Maybe the new patch has better memory management. Weird that you haven’t found any similar problems on the forums.
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Some of my first thoughts:
A) http://smakendahed.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/my-thoughts-on-patch-3-2/
B) http://smakendahed.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/emblems-of-conquest-and-exorcism-changes/
Have you tried binding at the inn down in the sewers? It might be less lag intensive to start.
Overall, I feel more positive about the changes now that I’ve had some time to play. I definitely like the new emblem changes but wish they’d revisit the cost of some of the lower emblem items (i.e. a bracer for 60 emblems of Valor when 58 emblems of Conquest gets you a chest or helm item? Seems off…)
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@Rakanishu – I never found anybody who was similar enough for me to assume that it was just the game. I did find one or two that sounded close, but I had done all the things the Blizzard rep suggested and the threads just ended without any sort of “it works” or “it’s still broke” sort of resolution.
@Smak – I did try the bind in the Underbelly approach with Tistann. I was okay down there, but once I had to load the graphics for Dalaran proper, I was done for. Even flying out the side entrance from the Underbelly I would crash. I didn’t even have to look back to turn into a pillar of salt.
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I don’t remember, but did you ever do a full re-install to fix the issue? It’s possible a file used in Dalaran got corrupt enough to cause error, but not enough to trip off Warden when loading the game. My guess is the patch overwrote the file, and so fixed your error.
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@Syncaine – I uninstalled and deleted all files associated with WoW then downloaded the current WotLK installer and did a fresh install in a new location. I logged in, went to Dalaran, crashed as usual. It was quite a let down.
Frankly, short of reinstalling Windows, I did most everything I could imagine, and I have a vivid imagination. The virus protection software and the firewall were suspects at one point, but they proved to have no effect on the crash either.
Then patch day came and the problem went away.
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Very odd. I can’t imagine they put anything in the patch to address this issue specifically, which is why I thought it must have been some kind of file overwrite that fixed your issue.
My odd issues atm are that xfire does not pick up DarkFall when I play on NA-1, and that my old comp loads WAR faster than my Alienware, although the Alienware gets much better FPS even at higher settings/resolution.
Computers, still not working as intended.
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Well, my hope would be that all those “send error report” messages I managed to send (38 since June when I reinstalled fresh, and the game only crashed gently enough to generate those about a third of the time) pointed to some problem that they could address.
Most of the time it was related to loading a texture file, never the same one though, but maybe 1 in 5 times I got the “send error report” option, it pointed at the dbghelp.dll.
Who knows.
When you mix in everything installed on end user machines the whole thing begins to seem more like art than science. I’ll have to go back and see if there was a patch in Feb/March about the time that I installed the new video card.
I think xFire needs a manual add button for games. But so do a lot of people in their forums. I had that problem with EVE, xFire would never see it.
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My Xfire is not showing Darkfall NA-1 either. I think it’s something with the EU-1 client being on there first- who knows.
I actually like it since none of my friends play DF and they would always moan and groan when they saw me playing it instead of game X with them.
I could turn it to private, but I don’t want to turn it back when I’m done; that’s just a hassle. I wish you could pick which games to show you were playhing and which games you want to hide.
3.2 was a nice patch. I hit 60 the day of the patch and the epic flyer did refresh my urge to level, but I still can’t play the game AT ALL if no one I know is online.
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