Thread of Ryan's Misery

bruce · June 2011

Browsing through the Hate Thread, I noticed how Ryan's anecdotes of misery always made me feel good or laugh raucously.

Therefore, we must now compile all of Ryan's misery from all sources (IM, The Belt, Texts, Facebook, Wanted Posters) into one place for our own delectation.

I'll get us started, shall I?

Ryan wrote:

Back in the summer Blizzard changed server providers in China, meaning that everybody lost World of Warcraft access for two weeks (I was okay, but I know some people I work with who were not). When the server change was completed, I could not register a new account, because China Big Brother requires everyone to register with their ID numbers. I didn't have one, and my friends didn't seem interested in helping me either. So I didn't play wow for a few months.

Yesterday I got my girlfriend to use her ID number to set me up with a new account. I finally got my new account set up, and after a few hours of difficulty we finally got my old characters imported from the old account.

But my old version of the game no longer worked, since they accessed different servers and used different launchers. I now had to download a brand new version of the Chinese game. That took about a day. Then I had to patch the game up to the latest version. That took almost another day. Then I had to find an old copy of my US version stored on my external hard drive that wasn't yet modded to play on Chinese servers (since that server information is no longer valid). Though this was lucky, had I not found my backup unmodded copy I would have had to download a whole new version of the game again.

I copied that onto my regular hard drive. I spent about half a day patching and upgrading it, but oops, US Blizzard just released an update last week, and it hasn't made it to China yet. That means my US copy was a version higher than the Chinese one, so I couldn't mod it to play on Chinese servers. Damnit.

So I started all over again with my US copy and spent the entire night downloading individual patches since 3.0.1 and installing them all manually one at a time. I'm still working on it. Then I get to go through a modest 21 step process to mod my Chinese copy with US files from the installation, which includes removing certain files from the US copy, uninstalling it but backing it up on an external drive somewhere, renaming several files, manually changing the text in the realm files, and downloading and extracting a few other key files to run.

Had I known it was going to take this long, I would have just studied Chinese and played on the domestic version instead.

Ryan wrote:

Last night's trip to the bar by myself resulted in five middle aged Hong Kong men speaking to me in Japanese and trying to hook me up with a Hong Kong lover. The two young girls they talked to were so afraid of them (or me?) that they fled the bar without finishing their drinks, but the gay waiter one guy tried to hook me up was more than interested. My life is a cruel joke.

And I'm not quoting all of it, but it seems that the Chinese Government has a legal requirement for all builders to abstain from work until Ryan has a hangover. Oh, mercy me.