I have two World of Warcraft accounts, and run the game on three different PCs: two desktops for my wife and me, and the laptop for when I'm traveling. Unnecessary to say that downloading and installing big patches can be somewhat of a headache. But not this time. Due to the Blizzard background downloader 694 MB of the 697 MB patch were already downloaded in advance. This morning, while the servers are still down for maintenance, I could simply log in, download the last tiny bit of patch, and apply the patch in less than 10 minutes. On all three machines. I'm quite happy with that background downloader.
Nevertheless I prefer the way in which for example Microsoft patches my computer. In spite of Microsoft having a lot more customers than Blizzard, I can download the Microsoft patches directly from their site, at very high speed. Blizzards website tends to be down during patch day, and the patch distribution is via peer-to-peer. As most people have asymmetric DSL, with low upload speeds, this automatically limits the possible download speed of peer-to-peer. Downloading a 697 MB patch from Blizzard takes a lot longer than downloading a file the same size from Microsoft, even if that Microsoft file is a recent update and many people download it at once. The Blizzard background downloader is nice, because it distributes the slow download over the two weeks before the patch. But if you missed that one, or have to reinstall WoW, the Blizzard downloads are a pain.
One warning to all Europeans who used the European Language Pack (EPL) additional download to change the language of their game. Apparently in this rare case the patch erases the screenshot folder. So backup your screenshots elsewhere before patching.
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