It’s noticeable when you’re grouped with someone on their first time into a zone, but it’s not game-breakingly slow. Most of GW’s zones’ loading times are just textures anyway; once you have all the textures on your hard drive, your zone changes are very fast.

None of this “Tuesday is Maintenance Day” or “Tomorrow the servers will be brought down from 7am to 1pm for a content update” we see everywhere else.

In parts. As you needed them.

You downloaded a small client. That client would patch itself very quickly, under 30 seconds, and start the intro, character selection, etc.

Every new area you went into, you downloaded a small patch. If you’d previously installed the map via CD, the update would only be ~500kb or less. The full map would be about 3-5 MB. Chump change really, with download speeds of 100-200kb/s. And it just looked like a loading screen. (Hell, it loads faster than AoC does.)

They also used to sneakily stream some content to you as you played the game. Don’t know if it still does, but there used to be a slow trickle so that future load screen times would take even less time.

I loved that Guild Wars never once inflicted upon me a horrible wait time as I downloaded every single last byte, some of which I might never ever see (raid areas, etc.)

The original idea was to dual-boot XP and Linux since I absolutely *loved* playing Guild Wars and WoW in Linux! The performance was better in WoW and let’s be honest, instant desktop switching is so much better than the craptastic resource swapping that occurs in Windows when we alt+tab in and out of games.

However, much as I loves me some Linux, I just don’t feel like putting up with the headaches, the configurations, and the whole “doesn’t *quite* work as intended” that Cedega and WINE give to the majority of modern games.

As I said, I’m into instant gratification, I can’t even be bothered rebooting just to game these days…

How was that for a general disagreement?

I’m not sure all MMO players have MMO ADD like you do. I try to limit myself to two MMOs at most, but I usually end up playing only one at a time. I tend to uninstall MMOs when I feel I’m “done” with them. For example: I own EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2 (hehe), DAoC, AO, PS, SWG, MXO, CoH/V, VG, WoW, probably another one or two I forgot to mention (I just remembered them; GW, DDO and TR) and I might have access to one or two I can’t mention, however, I only have WoW on my system at the moment.

I usually uninstall as a disincentive to play again because I know I will have to re-install and patch the games up again.

Unfortunately, it’s not all that discouraging because you can run most patchers overnight or get most of them caught up to date in a couple of hours (during which time I suck up to the wife before she learns I’ve subbed to another MMO).

Really, I don’t notice any difference because I will only patch what I’m playing and subbed to anyway.