The problem with World of Warcraft is that its too addictive. So to avoid that certain family members skip their homework and team up to burn unsavory characters to crisps in world I am very much reduced to playing in the middle of the night. Chances of that happening, well about once a week at most.

So I had mostly overlooked the Lich King upgrade until I tried to enter the game tonight. My English version of Word of Warcraft, playing on the Taiwan server cheerfully reported that my account had been upgraded for Lich King but that it couldn’t find the content.

The Chinese version on my wife’s computer automatically started downloading a paltry 1.9Gb of data (@ 1000Kb/sec, sweet), but I was referred to the US website.

It turns out that you can actually download the content from:www.worldofwarcraft.com/lichking/download

Of course it asks for a username & password, and my heart sank at this point — no US account, no download.

Miracles do happen, and (a fluke? design?) it accepted my Taiwanese username & password to download the upgrading installer.

Installation went smoothly, although at 50Kb/sec it took a long time. It also did reset realmlist.wtf again so that after the upgrade it tried to verify the account against the US server instead of the Taiwanese one.

The fix was simple enough — on your hard disk find the following file:

c:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data\enUS\realmlist.wtf

Then change the contents to:

set realmlist tw.logon.worldofwarcraft.com
set patchlist us.version.worldofwarcraft.com
set portal tw


Now I just need to find another quiet night…