Was there any protection against entering Outland early? Like, once you installed it and applied to your account, you could enter Outland, even if it was before official release day? Or it was impossible to apply the key to your account until midnight? Or you could apply the key but it would still not let you to Outland or Exodar until midnight? Was there a server maintenance/restart for launch?
And did it cause any problems with, let’s say, logging in, or patching, if you installed TBC on your computer before it came out?
The dark portal wasn’t open and the starter zones for BE and Dranei weren’t open yet either. You had the entire game installed but it wasn’t live yet. I was not awake for Launch so not sure if there was a restart or not.
So it would still say “You need to have The Burning Crusade installed” when trying to pass through the portal, despite of the fact that you had it installed and applied to your account?
It was blue, same as Vanilla, and had the same functionality as Vanilla i.e. no functionality.
That only changed then the Dark Portal pre-launch event kicked off. It became active, went green, demons came pouring out and Highlord Kruul started stomping around.
I can’t tell you what happens during the TBC launch but I can tell you what happened during the WOTLK launch.
That day I was not at home at 00:00 because I was waiting in a game store in my city where they had an event at 00:00 to start selling the game, I waited 10-12 hours to get a CE and when I arrived home it was after the launch hour. Regardless I have friends who were not waiting and just bought a normal version one or two days earlier and they told me they were able to start like one hour earlier or so when the servers restarted.
Regardless, that was 2007 and 2008, and now we are in 2021. In the last years, Blizzard has improved very much their servers, and even if TBCC is a Classic expansion still uses 2021 servers architecture. With the current architecture Blizzard is able to activate the expansion worldwide at a given hour without requiring server restart, not even client restart, in retail you are logged in with prepatch at 23:50 and when the clocks reach 00:00 suddenly the quest to start the expansion appears in the NPC and the option to travel to the new continent is available.
It actually happens up to 15 minutes earlier for some players and up to 15 minutes late for others. I think Blizzard runs a query that activates the expansion per-account.
but I’m wondering how will the prepatch be handled. Back then, there was a 2.0.1 that brought only the new systems but didn’t change the world - there was no boat to Exodar, the dark portal was blue and no portal to Ghostlands. The changes only happened at 2.0.3, which came like a week before TBC launch.
So I’m wondering if we’re getting blood elves and draenei from the very beginning of phase 0, or for the last 1-2 weeks of prepatch, which is when 2.0.3 aired back then.
Because most likely we’ll get all prepatch content in one update, that is the new talents and Exodar and Silvermoon coming at the same time. But then I’m wondering what it means for the new races and the event. Will we have enough time to level them to 60 at our own pace?
And if the event comes too late, then the servers are gonna blow. Because everyone will be trying to get that tag on that mob, and since it’ll be limited time, people will be sitting there all the time trying to get it.
Plus another fun fact - since draenei are coming earlier, there will be draenei players who will have the tabard, which was impossible back then.
but you could have the latest patch installed but not have the expansion installed.
And even if you had it installed, if you didn’t have a key on your account, it’d still tell you that you need to have it installed. It was just a misleading error message.
And, in fact, even if you applied the key to your account, you had to relog for it to work - otherwise it would still tell you that you need to have TBC installed.
How hard is it to answer with a simple “yes” or “no”?
That is true now, but that is not how I worked back in the original TBC. Back them you were able to download from Blizzard patch 2.0.0 data with contains every data except for the expansion except Outlands data, Outlands data was only available if you installed TBC from disks.
This usually happened to new players like me when I started in TBC because I had not yet purchase TBC and I have no Outlands MPQ in my game folder until I bought TBC and installed it from disk.
The same happened with WOTlK, the game DVD has an expansion installer different than 3.0 patch installer, it was not until Cataclysm when Blizzard started including all the data in the prepatch regardess of what expansion you have bought so everyone have everything installed.
in Cataclysm you still had to install it, though it had that download-while-playing client so it’d just install automatically when you log in and that’d take like 20 seconds. All you’d notice is that it takes a little bit longer to log in for the first time after reinstalling the client or buying an expansion.
I think they only changed it in WoD prepatch when moving to the new storage format.
When you use the disc or install a downloaded patch those files gets extracted to the game folder YES. But the data isn’t applied until the patcher has installed those files to be applied and working with the client.
What happens is that you “install” the data from the discs to the game folder, then once Blizzard is ready to apply the patch to the server it will use those files to install it.
If you think the servers could handle 2 different client versions you are terribly wrong.
The expansion was only extracted from the discs into your game folder, but it wasn’t applied to your client until the expansion got released. What you refer to is just an extraction from the discs to the game folder, doesn’t mean the update is applied to client. That happened once the expansion was released, and servers where ready for the latest client version. You can’t log onto server with different client versions, period.
So to anwser your question. NO, you could not do anything before anyone else even if you got the discs. Because that patch didn’t get applied until it was ready for patch day(for everyone). Those files where simply idling and waiting for the patcher.
It was extracted to the folder if you installed it from disc, and if you didn’t install it from disc, then it wasn’t there. Patches would still install normally, it would be the same version, it was just several files missing from the directory.
However, when installing an expansion on top of later patch, it would revert the installation to the initial patch because the patches wouldn’t patch expansion content if it was not installed, so they had to be applied again. The patches were still there in the game directory, so they wouldn’t have to download again, they just had to be reapplied.
I never said anything about 2 different client versions, I said you could had TBC client installed with up to date patches without Outlands data installed.
Back in Vanilla, TBC or WOTLK the individual files were not the ones installed, they installed files called MPQ that is a type of compression file created by Blizzard. When you installed the game disk it installed some base MPQ that the game use to play and when it installed patches it install additional files called Patch-1.MPQ, Patch-2.MPQ, etc. that contain patch data that contain the files changed for the game client to use instead of the files from the base MPQs. It was possible to play the game with just the base MPQ from the Vanilla disk that contains only Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms and up to date patches until the last TBC available up to date without installing Expansion.MPQ from TBC disk. There was just one client version, the client was able to determine that Expansion.MPQ was not installed and it allows you to play because people without purchasing TBC does not need that file.