This certainly needs to be filed under the rumors section, and if we can get more specific than that, the seemingly stupid rumors section. According to reports, running Windows Media Player will cause load times in World of Warcraft to decrease. It sounds stupid, but by all accounts, this bizarre idea appears to be true. Various WoW forums have been reporting this for over a month in Europe, and more recently in the US.
To try to prove things one way or the other, one of the writers for WoW Insider decided to test this out for himself and he did notice significantly faster loads in the menus, although in-game performance remained the same.
I really don’t know what to make of this; it just sounds so blatantly made up and silly, but Blizzard has given word to Game|Life that they are aware of this and are looking into it.
7 Comments to Seemingly Stupid Rumor: Windows Media Player Speeds up WoW Load Times
by: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
On December 20, 2007 at 8:48 pm
So the only way M$ helps gamers is by accident?
Maybe now the will “accidentally” stop charing people for wanting to play multiplayer
by: Asian Marketing
On December 20, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Maybe not…
by: EDoggM
On December 20, 2007 at 10:29 pm
What’s interesting is that I used to have Windows Media Player playing music on all the time while playing WoW, never noticed faster load speeds, but also never noticed any slower speeds either, although I was expecting it to bet, but whoknows. I just assumed my comp was badass, LOL.
by: Annom
On December 21, 2007 at 1:41 am
The explanation seems to be that windows media player uses Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS), which is a thread scheduling service. Normally, Windows would allocate some CPU resources to background stuff, even if it wasnt needed. MMCSS allows full use of the CPU in multimedia applications.
Only seems to work if windows media player is idle.
by: William
On December 21, 2007 at 2:22 am
Windows Media Player sucks.. period. Get iTunes
by: somewhat
On December 21, 2007 at 10:35 am
ooooh, you partisan you ! You’re not on a Mac, are you Will?
by: Shawn
On December 21, 2007 at 1:25 pm
This has happened in other titles. If you are running a Counter-strike 1.6 server on a windows environment, this allowed servers to have better registration and updates. Yes, it is weird.