link? edit: thanks :)

It's available in your WoW account management.

can U post me enUS downloader damian@gala.net

link doesn't seem to work.

Thanks, I fixed links.

"Blizzard has finally set foot into the digital age." - Very glad to hear this, playing WoW using a chisel and stone tablet was getting pretty annoying :P

I wonder though, how is the download offered? Is it only available to people who are also purchasing a key? Is it a direct file download, or is it downloaded via a special downloader/installer client? Also, is it a straight download or a bittorrent download, like how patches are distributed?

The wording of this post conveys a great deal of frustration, and no understanding of Blizzard's point of view.

On the first day that BC was released, Outland crashed on my server multiple times from overload. I didn't get to experience the frustration users felt, because my copy was still in the mail. Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor crashed at least once as well, from surges of players concentrating in small areas. Many people commented on quests being almost impossible to finish for lack of mobs, because of the sheer mass of players.

On the second day, Outland crashed on my server multiple times from overload. On the third day, Outland crashed on my server from overload at least once.

It took Blizzard over a week to stabilize the server properly.

You can fault Blizzard for not predicting the load - but I strongly suspect that they actually did a far better job of it than anyone on this forum would've done. Realize, too, that if they went overkill on beefing up the servers, they wouldn't have been able to get their return on investment - and that would reduce their ability to produce the games we want in the future. There's also the point I made many times during their free character/guild transfers - most software has a scalability limit, beyond which it becomes vastly more expensive to upgrade hardware to increase its performance.

Now, if they had made BC available for download the first day, imagine how much worse the overload would have been. Nearly everyone who has managed to level a character to 60 over the last two years would've been at the Dark Portal at midnight - except that they wouldn't have been, because there'd be 5000 people in queue to get onto the servers, and the servers would be very flaky because two thirds of the people who were on would have been hovering around the Dark Portal or otherwise in the Blasted Lands to be on hand for the update - despite the fact that we all *know* that we'd need to install the software update before we could actually go through.

Blizzard could have pre-emptively moved every player who hadn't logged on in several months. However, that would have generated a lot of anguish; people would demand to be moved back to the server where their friends were.

Personally, I think the only thing they could have done better would've been to announce a week or two before BC came out, that they would give free guild moves to other servers to help spread out the load, so decide which guilds you want to be with, and /ginvite everyone you want to pull along and that they'd move all of the toons of the players affected to the new server, unless specifically requested otherwise by the player, or those toons were in guilds which weren't moving.

However, without waiting until the BC release to do that, Blizzard wouldn't have known exactly how many players needed to move, and so there could have still been load issues on release. Many players would have not realized the moves were actually necessary, and there would've been significant anguish over that.

And, if they'd done something wrong in the buildup for the BC release, the whole thing could have been a flop. If that had been the case, any pre-release moves would have been an unnecessary expense.

I personally think that Blizzard did an outstanding job, and that y'all don't appreciate them or their perspective enough.