BackgroundDownloader
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Is the background downloader a virus?
According to MVP Schwick on the EU forums, several different anti-virus scanners have started detecting the Blizzard background downloader and some patch files as malware. With as much trouble as you can get into with certain kinds of malware, this sort of alert would be bound to panic anyone. However, this one has been confirmed by Blizzard as a false alarm. For now, be sure to download the latest updates to your anti-virus scanner, and if it detects any of the following, it's likely a false positive: Trojan-PSW.Win32.WOW R/PSW.WOW.RG.3 Trojan horse PSW.Generic4.TUV However, if, after upgrading your anti-virus software, you're still getting virus messages? Report it on the tech support forums. As Blizzard EU rep Torzelyn says:Updating the Virus Scanners is removing the Trojan alert, but if your particular scanner is still flagging it as a trojan, please don't patch the game just yet. I'm sorry but I'm just wanting to be cautious. Although it appears to be a false positive, as with Kaspersky, AntiVir etc.. updating the definitions is solving the problem, I don't want to just say 'use the files' because there could still be a problem somewhere.[Via BlizzPlanet]
Children's Week coming in patch 2.1
Reader Baxmaniac (thanks!) sends along a little tip that Blizzard's event calendar page has been updated, and Children's Week has been officially scheduled for patch 2.1.Usually, the event has appeared in the first week of May, so lots of players were wondering what exactly had happened to it-- were the children going to be abandoned this year? But though Blizzard hasn't given an official reason for the holdup, most likely it was because they're adding new Outland versions of the event, including all new pets (I'll be running to get my Metroid pet ASAP).And finally, while Blizzard has not officially announced a date yet (do they do anything officially anymore?), the patch has been showing up on the background downloader, so it's a pretty good bet that 2.1 will be hitting tomorrow. By this time next week, you too could be carting little Dumbo the Elekk around Outlands.
The Background Downloader in Action
Today's release of patch 1.11 was the first chance we had to see how the new background downloader application would help us on patch day. The full patch file ended up being about 150MB, but for me, the background downloader had previously snagged 127MB of that, making the patch download fairly quick and painless. Of course patch day itself wasn't completely painless - the servers came up a few hours later than anticipated and the login server was sluggish when things first started coming online, but over-all the patching process seemed to go fairly smoothly. Did anyone have any negative experiences with the patch downloading process today?
All About the Background Downloader
If you happened to attempt to multi-task while playing Warcraft today, you may have noticed the Blizzard Background Downloader running, downloading a file with an unusually generic name of "wow-patch." So was some kind of patch released today? Well... no. However, there's an official post explaining exactly what is happening here. Before the background downloader was implemented, on patch day millions of people would be attempting to grab the patch at the same time - and my experience with this has been entirely negative. With the background downloader, whenever you log on to play, you'll be checking for updated files and start downloading them (very slowly - as to not interrupt your play-time). So as Blizzard finalizes parts of the next patch, the downloader is already grabbing them, which means that come patch day, you should already have most of the patch, making getting patched up quick and painless. I guess we'll wait and see how well it works in the end...!
