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I've been needing to vent about this. I have two kids and we play Minecraft, Starcraft, and other Blizzard games and Steam games, on the LAN; we have several c

I've been needing to vent about this. I have two kids and we play Minecraft, Starcraft, and other Blizzard games and Steam games, on the LAN; we have several computers, both Macs and PCs, in the household. The amount of "updating" that happens is absolutely insane. Blizzard games update themselves multiple times per day (I read somewhere that if it is updating this much, it is a bug and you should do a clean install or something, but it has always happened on all computers no matter what). All of these games have launchers, and the launchers also require updates, and even if you are playing single-player or on the LAN, you have to take the update. You have to sign in with your username and password. You have to use a different account, with a different email address, on every computer. I made the mistake of buying two iMacs with SSD/HD fusion drives for the household, which use very slow HDs, and then for a while I was booting one of them into Windows (until I bought a couple Windows machines for gaming), and Windows only used the slow HD. A forced Steam game update could take half an hour. Also the various launchers sometimes have bugs and get stuck in a bad state, like at one point the Blizzard updater got stuck in "updating" mode and refused to start Warcraft III. Which should not need daily updates in 2022!

jiggawatts 4y ago
Don't get me started on the Blizzard installer/updater! Must... not... rant... argh... okay fine: It is the worst-written thing I have ever witnessed from a large software development company. The. Worst. I once "took it apart" using reverse engineering tools, because one of the World of Warcraft expansions I was keen to play simply wouldn't install. Why? Because my CPUs were too fast. It is an unbelievably complicated Rube Goldberg contraption of software that downloaded more software, which would it would run out of temp directories, which in turn downloaded more software that it would also then run as "services". At some point it had 4 processes communicating with each other using TCP[1], and this could very easily deadlock if you had a) 4 or more CPU cores, or b) if the CPU cores were too fast. Some of the processes could run in parallel across the additional cores, race ahead, try to communicate with something else that wasn't ready, time out, and crash. If it failed for any reason, it would leave the executables and the config behind in an invalid state, from which it could never be recovered short of a low-level disk format. At the time there were something like 10,000 complaints on the Blizzard forums, all being dutifully dismissed with "have you tried turning your computer on and off?" I resorted to using a 1-CPU virtual machine on another, slower computer to install WoW, and then I would copy out the files to my gaming PC. The hilarity was the the actual install process was just that: "copy". No other steps were required. The entire installer was superfluous garbage written by a Too Smart developer. [1] Among other things, this meant that you could never successfully use the installer if your Ethernet adapter wasn't the first in the list of IPv4 devices. You couldn't use the installer if you had VMware Workstation installed, a VPN, or a PPP dialup modem. (Or a firewall[2]) This was because... of course... the installer had pages and pages of code to "detect" your local IP address so that the processes could communicate with each other, instead of simply using 127.0.0.1 like a normal person. [2] Of course a local firewall of most types would block the process-to-process traffic because it wasn't "localhost", it was going out to the adapter and back, which many products would process using different rules.
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  That is amazing. Have you written a blog post somewhere for this? Would love to share that around.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I had a much longer and detailed rant on Slashdot, but for the life of me I can't find the comment any more. I'm really not painting a complete picture here. However bad you think it is from my description, I assure you that it was worse.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Don't get me started on the Blizzard installer/updater! Must... not... rant... argh... okay fine: It is the worst-written thing I have ever witnessed from a large software development company. The. Worst. I once "took it apart" using reverse engineering tools, because one of the World of Warcraft expansions I was keen to play simply wouldn't install. Why? Because my CPUs were too fast. It is an unbelievably complicated Rube Goldberg contraption of software that downloaded more software, which would it would run out of temp directories, which in turn downloaded more software that it would also then run as "services". At some point it had 4 processes communicating with each other using TCP[1], and this could very easily deadlock if you had a) 4 or more CPU cores, or b) if the CPU cores were too fast. Some of the processes could run in parallel across the additional cores, race ahead, try to communicate with something else that wasn't ready, time out, and crash. If it failed for any reason, it would leave the executables and the config behind in an invalid state, from which it could never be recovered short of a low-level disk format. At the time there were something like 10,000 complaints on the Blizzard forums, all being dutifully dismissed with "have you tried turning your computer on and off?" I resorted to using a 1-CPU virtual machine on another, slower computer to install WoW, and then I would copy out the files to my gaming PC. The hilarity was the the actual install process was just that: "copy". No other steps were required. The entire installer was superfluous garbage written by a Too Smart developer. [1] Among other things, this meant that you could never successfully use the installer if your Ethernet adapter wasn't the first in the list of IPv4 devices. You couldn't use the installer if you had VMware Workstation installed, a VPN, or a PPP dialup modem. (Or a firewall[2]) This was because... of course... the installer had pages and pages of code to "detect" your local IP address so that the processes could communicate with each other, instead of simply using 127.0.0.1 like a normal person. [2] Of course a local firewall of most types would block the process-to-process traffic because it wasn't "localhost", it was going out to the adapter and back, which many products would process using different rules.

creakingstairs 4y ago
That is amazing. Have you written a blog post somewhere for this? Would love to share that around.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I had a much longer and detailed rant on Slashdot, but for the life of me I can't find the comment any more. I'm really not painting a complete picture here. However bad you think it is from my description, I assure you that it was worse.