Friday, November 13, 2009

Warhammer Retrial Day 0 - Return of the EUALA



I expected to have less-than-kind things to write about the process of reactivating a Warhammer account for the re-trial, but the experience actually went pretty smoothly. My account has been dormant since the included month with the box from the game's launch ran out, and the "activate" button on the account page immediately recognized that I was entitled to the 10-day retrial. I was also offered the option to transfer any or all of my characters, since their servers no longer exist.

On the downside, the retrial does still require billing information, but I don't think that Blizzard will physically intervene if you try to resubscribe an account that is eligible for a free retrial. (EDIT TO CLARIFY: Last I checked, Blizzard doesn't require billing info for the WoW free retrial but does allow you to accidentally skip it and go directly to paid time. Mythic does require billing info, but does NOT allow you to miss the retrial you're entitled to.) Anyway, as with the first time around, the first thing I did after activating my account was to re-cancel.

My computer's DVD drive has been acting up, so I was somewhat dreading the installation process, but it turned out to be pretty straight-forward. You download the installer, which weighs in at 50 MB or so, and it downloads the 10 GB worth of game. This took pretty much all evening, but I'd actually planned for that by deliberately re-activating on a night when I wasn't going to have time to play anyway.

Where has the EUALA gone?
The one thing I did check when the download finished, 4-5 hours later, was the dreaded EUALA. This may seem like a little thing, but Warhammer took a fair amount of flak at its launch for making players sit through three "look at our logo" movies and then click through both a license agreement and a terms of service, repeating all of this EVERY time you logged in.

Mythic stubbornly maintained that having people click a box that said they had read the agreement that everyone knows that no one actually reads somehow gave them a stronger case of breach of contract in going after gold sellers etc. Legally, they might have been correct, but all of the logos and click-throughs managed to be tedious and irritating to players, without doing much to deter the actual gold spammers.

Anyway, in the modern client, the three logos displayed in one rapid-fire display the first time I launched the client and then went away for good. I agreed to the EUALA and the TOS once each and they went away too. A small change, perhaps, but a welcome one; at least the first re-impression wasn't a bad one.

4 comments:

  1. Blizzard? Warhanmmer? Whaaat?

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  2. I've dl'd this game now that their trial is "endless" up thru T1, but I already have a game-breaking bug.

    I did a complete reinstall last night. Hopefully that will have fixed the bug. If not.... deleted.

    The game's decent, but not so fun that I'm gonna spend much time trying to fix it.

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  3. EUALA? -> I think you meant EULA. And Blizzard does not run Warhammer.

    Ha, seems you had a bad day today on Friday 13th. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Blizzard reference was a comparison to WoW's free retrials - they will not stop you from paying when you're entitled to free trial time. Mythic apparently WILL stop you from paying for Warhammer if you're entitled to a retrial first. I'll concede that it could have been clearer, and will edit accordingly.

    And Long, you apparently have never played Warhammer Online. Mythic decided that their EULA needed an added "A" for "Access and Licencing Agreement", and launch players had plenty of time to acquaint themselves with that fact since you had to not only view but actually scroll through the entire thing every time you logged in. Here's the EUALA direct from the source if you don't believe me.

    ReplyDelete

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