It all started when I got an email from Blizzard...

They were informing me of a successful character transfer. It was an interesting email to have received, because I haven't played WoW in over a year.

Concerned about whether or not this might reflect on my bank statement, I attempted to log on to worldofwarcraft.com. Indeed, I was unable to log in, so I reset my password by answering my security question, and changed my default email address. And then I looked at my payment summary: Somebody purchased a month, on May 28th. I looked, then, to the subscription plans, which were indeed set to a monthly basis. The good news is that the month was not purchased on my plastic.

Still, mildly concerned about this character transfer business, I called Blizzard support. They told me that my account was hacked. And that there's nothing they can do over the phone about the character transfer.

But...

They did say that I should check my computer for viruses and keyloggers and trojans.

So I did check my Mac for those things...

And found none of those things.

Then, curious to see what else my hacker might have done, I decided to download WoW back on to my computer. The initial download promised to be 6.5 GB. I come back to my computer a little while later, to find that the 11 GB of free space I had left it with... Were all gone. I cleared off my hard drive, and redownloaded. Then I successfully had version 3.0.1. Then the downloader came up. And then the updater came up. And the download/update dance repeated, nine times, until finally, I was able to click "Play" on the launcher.

So I did.

And I signed in.

And was prompted to update, three more times.

But when finally granted the go-ahead to log in and run the actual game, it appeared that it was all for naught.

You see, on the very first installer screen, some eight hours ago, I chose Wrath of the Lich King. Thinking that installing that would let me play my basic account, since they all contain the same data anyway. Apparently... I was wrong. I installed the wrong kind of 15 gigabytes. You know how it takes up that much space? They never optimize their code. Their patches are installed next to one another. Never overwriting the precious base code of the other patches.

You would think, that with all of Blizzard's money and vast nebulous brainsize hive mind knowledge of making the most incredibly immersive video game experiences known to all of mankind, nay, all of Creation, that they would know how to make a unified installer. I was told that my account information was wrong. Back to the website to enter in the same account information. Which was proven on the website to be right.

So now I sit, downloading the right kind of 15 gigabytes. With luck, I'll wake up tomorrow and update three more times before finding out what my hacker had done.

In the meantime, I find it necessary to ask: if WoW were a standalone OS, would Microsoft finally look efficient?