When you downloaded WoW for the first time

Community General Discussion
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This question is mainly for people who started WoW using dialup but all are welcome.

How long did it take? It took at least 2-3 days to download the game. Glad I got internet speed that goes way faster now. :laughing:

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Installed it from CDs. I think it was 4 in the box.

3 Likes
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If I remember correctly, almost a week. That was back in 2009

When I had to re-install… 2-3 days, over a year ago. I have bad internet over here, it just got, uh, less bad.

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play dial up with UO in 2000, but in 2004 played warcraft on cable

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Holy crap.

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Idk a few hours? This was back in bc man, can barely remember a week ago.

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I didn’t download. We had a fat stack of CDs to insert, and change out when prompted for the next. Even that took some number of hours.

Still have my original CDs for Vanilla, and for every expansion up to Mists of Pandaria. WoD was the first I skipped. Legion was my first by direct DL.

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…I installed Linux one day and needed a small game to play in a window, so I picked Wow. Then after playing an Undead Warrior, WINE ended up bugging out so I had to decide weither to move to Windows or stick with Debian Linux and its shaky WOW support. So, I installed Windows and downloaded it WOW 10mbps on my cable connection. I had pings of 20ms pretty steady on Proudmoore, I was making decent money so I had decent computer parts, there was really a fun crowd of people playing then. Made a ton of friends, in those days Epic really meant epic, and Legendary was Legendary

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Yea it took a few days to download when I first started, I think it was back in MoP. I remember being so anxious to play.

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How did you still have Dial Up back then? Were you in a Soviet Block country?

I’m in Omaha Nebraska, think we’ve had Cox Internet since the 90’s?

I was in beta phase 3, 4 and then the open beta. The open beta client was more patched up than the final CDs/whatever. So I bought Vanilla Wow on release, at 12:01 AM midnight (with 3 other nerds, who formed a line) at our local Walmart in Omaha, NE.

I got home, then was instantly playing in about 4 minutes after a 4000 byte patch or something (since the end of the open beta client was basically “release ready.”)

That is crazy, Oomster. I’ve only had OpenSuse Linux since the BC expansion, when I removed my windows partition. That is all I’ve played Wow in, all this time.

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I was a kid back then, I think my mom had it through at&t.

This was when TBC was current.

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Yep, took several hours and several disc changes.

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Download?? In 2004??

That baby came on multiple discs.

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This is also how I installed the first time.

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It took a long time for me to download, but im pretty sure i was past dial up at that time lol.

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I downloaded it from multiple discs onto my laptop. I spent most of that time reading the game guide that came with them trying to decide which race and class to choose.

I was enchanted by all the flags falling from the sky in the night elf starter zone. I didn’t learn until days later that it was players dueling. Good times.

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honestly i was so young at the time that by the time i had the chance to try it it was on my dads computer, so it was already installed. this was way back when it first released, i made a night elf druid named greenlady lol

but the first time i installed it myself i remember it took about 2 days or so, which to me felt like FOREVER because i was 10 or so

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Same, it’s all I had the option for on 11/23/2004.

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Yeah, this entire post confused me. WoW was not available for download in 2004, it came on discs. The Burning Crusade was not available for download until much later either. If you played wow before 2009, you installed from a disc, you didn’t download it.
:slight_smile:

To those asking, dial up is still around. There are areas without broadband connection, and satellite won’t work. You could play WoW on Dial up, but it was barely worth it. Oddly enough, having a slow computer was still worse than having dial up.

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Yeah I started in BC when DL was a thing. My fault.