Only 12 more sleeps until Launch Day, and it's bringing back memories of November, 2004 for me. Back then I was a naive young lad, blissfully playing away his days in the beta, thinking that hardly anyone knew about the game, and that it'd just be a matter of heading down to FutureShop (Canada's Best Buy before we also got Best Buy) to pick up a copy of the Collector's Edition.

Yes, yes, you may laugh now. I really had no clue. In fact, by the end of the day, I was just lucky to get my hands on a copy of the non-collector's release, and begin the installation. Fortunately, our guild had already chosen a server by the time I was finished installing, so it was just a matter of creating a character and then fighting the other thousand orcs for boar kills.

Cut to now, 2 years and 2 months later. Now I have a plan, even if it's not much better than what I had before. I've pre-ordered through EB Games and Amazon.ca, knowing that I'll hopefully get 1 on launch day, and another copy a few days later. Now I tried to pre-order the collector's edition, but my local EB didn't know if they were getting any, so I'm just on the list for the normal version. I've been on the list since September, and I've since lost my receipt, so I wonder if I'll just lose my $10 I put on the pre-order. No biggie, Amazon is there to back me up, and the extra copy will be a very late birthday present to my brother (Happy Birthday, Dave!).

So if all goes well, my day should go like this: Wake up, realize it's launch day and login to see how crashed everything is, go to work (yeah, the day job), head to EB Games at noon to see if there's a copy, bang head on counter for EB did not receive a large enough shipment, run to FutureShop and see if there's a copy left, find out they actually opened at 7am and I could've picked one up before work but now they're sold out, get back to the office just in time to hear my fellow WoW Insider bloggers cheer about picking up their copies of the game, cry a little on the inside, head home after work dejected and secretly hoping the servers are down due to Bliz's inability to be prepared for big launches even though they have bazillions of dollars in the bank and could just throw money at the problem, trudge into the house, trudge back out of the house realizing I'd forgotten to check the mail, see a package from Amazon, open the package, squeal in delight until the neighbor's dog barks, and then run inside to begin the 3-hour install and patch process.

Ahh.. good times. So, what do you think Tuesday, January 16th will be like for you?

Tags: burning crusade, BurningCrusade, january 16, January16, launch day, LaunchDay, plan of attack, PlanOfAttack, warcraft, world of warcraft, WorldOfWarcraft, wow

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Expansions, Humor, The Burning Crusade