Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Is there any chance you could add a feature to show how many MB’s are left to download when doing updates? The number of files does not provide any useful information in the temporal sense.

I could also see how anyone having to manage a bandwidth cap would not be able to properly calculate the downloads implication.

Thank you,

Hello,

I’m here again, looking at the download client updating. As it shows the progress of the download, I’m left wondering if I should sit and wait, or continue growing my hair out. I don’t want to come across as too snarky, but has anyone one working there thought about showing some sort of concern to those of us with slower internet connections? How long and how large are these downloads?

Thank you,

Most software companies have trouble figuring out how to display file transfer progress in a way that’s helpful to end users. I don’t care about number of files and I don’t really care about total transfer size — what I want to know is how long I have to wait. Do I have time for coffee? For dinner? For a movie? For a trip to the Bahamas?

Barring that, the total remaining bytes to download is probably more useful than the number of files.

However, although I’d like to see ANet address this, it’s pretty low on my personal list of priorities. When ANet announces a major update, I assume I might not be able to play for an hour or three, especially if they release it at peak playing time. For unscheduled updates, I assume I need to allow for 20-30 minutes of waiting. I’m okay with that for now. (People with faster connections can reduce those estimates and a few out there might have to increase them. )

Many of the files you’re downloading are text based, those CAN get compressed as they leave the server so there could be up to a 90% discrepancy in the size of the file. They can tell you how big it is just sitting on the server but your bandwidth might be much less because of the compression which is just an automatic function and doesn’t report the size change. Various other files are more binary type and don’t get compressed anyway. I don’t know if they compress their files down the pipes or not – they should though.

There is a percentage, bandwidth, file count, and how much has already been downloaded that are listed on the updater. Unfortunately the percentage is based on file count and not update size. Initial client update size is around 10MB, then it downloads the updates to the game files. Small updates come in under 120MB, larger content updates can be over 500MB.

In the end, they have a list of files that is different than what is on your computer, those files get downloaded – including any that the client has marked as corrupted during your previous play session (hopefully). This list may include file sizes, it may not, but it most certainly has a crc/md5 or equivalent for each file – which is useless for this discussion The updater checks each time if there is a new version, downloads a list of files for the update, and then proceeds to download them, then checks the crc/md5/whatever to see if it is the right file. This list could include file sizes to calculate a total to appease the bandwidth restricted customers if they chose to do so.

The way I see it:
– The files remaining means ANET knows which files you need to download
– Since the files are sitting on ANET’s servers, ANET knows how big they are.
– If they are compressed, then ANET knows the size of the compressed copy as they won’t be compressing them on the fly when having them compressed saves space and CPU cycles.
– Since ANET knows the size of individual files, they should send the sizes to the client. Then let it calculate size remaining and maybe an ETA.