Trying to keep a positive approach to my return, have to admit this has been a frustrating morning though.
First off, I downloaded the game on steam yesterday to return and see what has changed etc. Everything worked fine, for me!
The download took some time, but in the end I was able to launch the game and just look through my old characters. I chose my tabs to unlock and then just looked through my inventory on one of my characters and began refamiliarizing myself with the hotkeys etc.
I then logged out as my friend was downloading the game and was a bit behind me. Since he has never played the game I was going to wait for him to explain step by step how to get off noob island to meet up in Tortage.
This brings me to this morning. My friend tries to launch the game and the patcher is stuck in a loop for him. It constantly updates around 18mb worth of data and then closes itself. Then when he double clicks it again from the steam library it does the same thing. So he is stuck in this loop. Considering this hasn't happened for me I started running through the trouble shooting process. He is not very technically savvy so I basically have to guide him through the troubleshooting process.
For starters, I decided to have my friend go to his steam library and right click the game, from there I advised him to go to local files and then to click "verify integrity of game cache". Just to ensure that I was on the same page with him, I decided to do it alongside him just so that I could advise him of the following steps. I figured my game was working perfect so it would find no errors, at which stage I could just tell him the next steps.
Next thing you know, after about 30 minutes of running through this verification, his steam browser states that several files are corrupt and begins updating them. Then to my surprise, mine completes and tells me that I have over 300 corrupt files??? What??? I was just playing the game perfectly fine and nothing changed between a working client and me running this verification test. So anyways, it begins downloading these files for me BUT it is re-downloading the entire game again! It is going to take another 5-6 hours to redownload these files. It is going at a steady 1.3mb download speed for almost two hours and it is now only at 16% ??? Why? My game was perfectly fine. What is going on? Why is it re-downloading the entire game again?
Well, to make matters worse. My friend tried to launch the game after it updated his files, which was a significantly faster than my update to a client that was working perfectly, and it is doing the exact same thing as before for him! He is stuck in a loop where the patcher just updates these 18mb and then closes. I had him go into his steam directory and right click and go to properties to ensure that he is running it as administrator, but still the same patching loop. I have no clue what to tell him.
Honestly, this is a really bad starting to my return. My friend can't launch and is stuck in a loop and my game, even though working perfectly prior decided it would entirely re-download the game and I can't stop it, I can only pause updating. So I have to just wait another 5-6 hours until I can play a game that was perfectly fine.
Yikes!! I would have hoped that things like this were sorted out, so that a returning player (as well as a brand new player) would have a smooth and user-friendly experience.