Anyone who loaded up
WoW this morning and patched their game up to 3.0.8 was greeted with a pleasant surprise--a slick new Blizzard Launcher. It looks to have been redone slightly, with a cold-steel
Wrath-y theme and a more organized interface. Immediate additions I can see from my end are helpful community/forum links at the bottom, a well-lit link to the Blizzard Store right up top, and (of course) our boy the Lich King, stage right.
Tipsters have noted that it looks similar to
Battle.net launchers, and this may very well be an intended change given
Blizzard's past statements that Battle.net is up for a major overhaul for
Diablo 3 and
Starcraft 2. Leave it to Blizzard to package such an anticipated patch in such nice foil wrapping.
Tags: blizzard, blizzard-launcher, launcher, new, patch, patch-3.0.8, wrath, wrath-of-the-lich-king
Filed under: Patches, Odds and ends, News items
Jan 20th 2009 at 1:30PM 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Iain Jan 20th 2009 1:34PM
Unfortunatly the launcher is as far as we're gonna get for the next few hours as maintanence has just been extended until 1pm PST.
deplicitus Jan 20th 2009 1:34PM
I have my launcher disabled, not really a big deal.
Daisil Jan 20th 2009 1:35PM
"and (of course) our boy the Lich King, stage right" If you ask me; he's stage left.....
Kit Jan 20th 2009 1:38PM
Actually it is stage right. Stage directions are based on the performer's right & left as they face the audience, not on the audience's right or left.
Snuggles Jan 20th 2009 1:39PM
actually stage directions are taken from the perspective of the performer, thus stage right would be the audience's left
FlameFlash Jan 20th 2009 1:41PM
That was my knee-jerk reaction too. Had to dredge up my theatre background.
Jason Jan 20th 2009 1:45PM
Ummm...Stage Right is the audience's left. It's the right hand side of the stage as the actor faces the audience. Since The Lich King is facing towards the viewer and is on the left hand side of the launcher from our perspective he is in fact stage right.
Graham Jan 20th 2009 3:41PM
lol. Someone needs to L2Theater.
He's definitely stage right.
FifthDream Jan 20th 2009 1:38PM
My launcher has a couple of blank, black areas where the Lich King and WoW logos should be... Maybe i need to reboot.
Cr0wley Jan 24th 2009 9:05AM
From http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html;jsessionid=D597A7FCE14788180A3C85E8CB51957A.app06_06?topicId=7700561520&sid=1
This is because of a conflict with IE8, or parental settings on your router. Mine's an IE8 issue, but I'm not uninstalling it atm
Ilem Jan 20th 2009 1:40PM
Nope, it's stage right; blocking terms starting with "stage" are as seen by actors facing the audience. :)
The new launcher is nice, but my firewall keeps asking me if the launcher should be allowed to access the web each and every time it starts up. Don't know what's changed that this should happen... Hrm.
FifthDream Jan 20th 2009 1:45PM
Mine's doing that, too.
LouCypher Jan 20th 2009 3:41PM
The new launcher makes a copy of itself in a randomly named subdirectory in your Temp directory. It does this everytime you launch WoW using the default shortcut. Your firewall (and mine) see this copy as a new application resulting in a prompt for confirmation to allow access.
Not sure why they did it, but you can "fix" the issue by changing your shortcuts to point directly to WoW.exe instead of Launcher.exe anywhere it occurs.
Ilem Jan 20th 2009 3:50PM
LouCypher, thanks for that piece of intel! I haven't even tried to look at the problem yet, but you seem to have found it.
What a nice way to mess with firewalls AND increase fragmentation; thank you Blizzard! :(
Hoggersbud Jan 20th 2009 6:06PM
Blizzard's launcher is creating the separate application due to malware which would take advantage of the launcher's opening.
yoshimitsu Jan 20th 2009 1:49PM
The new launcher gets a big thumbs down from me. Its new design creates new temporary directories on each load and just provides endless amounts of firewall approvals.
Gala Net Rappelz Epic3 is an Epic Fail!
Karzon Jan 20th 2009 1:58PM
I typically launch the Launcher from inside Steam so others can see when I'm playing WoW. Doing that in the post-3.0.8 causes Launcher to launch copies of itself indefinitely without ever loading. Sounds like it's probably related to the creation of temp directories. Any ideas on how to get around it?
MechaKingGhidra Jan 20th 2009 3:34PM
I'm rather annoyed with the constant approval notices, as well, but mine are from Norton Anti-Virus and even though I put on the option of *Always Allow*, it still doesn't change anything.
Avan Jan 20th 2009 3:12PM
@Karzon: A Blue post suggests that you skip the new launcher and just have a shortcut to WoW.exe instead.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14498230357&pageNo=1&sid=1#1
Navk Jan 20th 2009 1:52PM
REJECT FALSE ICONS
THE LAUNCHER DELAYS US!!!!!