Just visited a neighborhood Game Stop and now have a shinny little copy of WotLK. About 50-100 people were there for the midnight opening and they had copies for everyone. Had the game in my hands at 12:25 am. Good job Blizzard and Game Stop!

Started the install at 12:40. It took about 10 minutes to finish the main install from DVD. The launcher then updated itself for a minute. When you click Play, they show a video. ESC does not cancel it. The video is nice high quality stuff. Lasts a few minutes. Accept 2 license agreements and you get to download a patch. Game exits and the downloader starts downloading 3.0.1 to 3.0.2. 389 MB. I guess I went back in time.

Download was saying 1 hour, so I was looking at mirror sites, but they have so many different versions of 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 update files that it is rather confusing. The download then sped up and completed in about 25 minutes total time. Patching took the usual 5 minutes. Launcher updated itself again and the downloader reused the 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 patch data already on the computer. Patching starts again for about 2 minutes. Play the game already! Click play, 2 more license agreements. Login and it works!

Grab my 70 mage who is in Shattrath. Fly through portal to Org. Ride out to Borean Tundra blimp tower and see an incoming blimp. Sweet! Must be 20 guys on the blimp. The blimp moves and the loading screen appears. Next thing I see is my poor mage falling through empty space and a few other unfortunates falling around me. I look up and see the ground high above me. After a while we all die and appear at the GY in Stonetalon Mountains! O K.... So I see no corpse to run back to. Have to spirit rezz? Ugh....

Oh wait! There is my corpse in TB. Only take an hour to walk there. Time to spirit rezz and port to UC. Maybe the use higher quality Blimps for the route to Hownling Fjord.... and yes they do, since I arrived without random death occuring. This place is crowded. Time to dump a bunch of old quests.