Guild Wars 2

Hello I would like to advise you that both the lack of any mention of how much data is remaining to be downloaded and/or how long it will take (Approximately) is very detrimental to my experiences with it. Yes it says how many “Files” are remaining but it doesn’t mention the total size of the files.

Because of this I have no clue how long it will take and can’t create any sort of schedule around it. I have to sit and watch it for a few minutes and work out roughly how long it will take, myself. Something I don’t enjoy doing.

Another issue I have with the downloader/updater is that there is no confirmation dialog box when clicking the button to close the program and the program doesn’t appear to have a “resume download” function either. So as an example of why this annoys me: I had left it downloading the initial game (14GB download!) and it had made 2% progress, at this moment I had decided I wanted to watch some videos on Youtube so I looked for an option to pause/resume the download and could not find any. Thinking that it would at the very least support such a feature when closing the program (And resuming from where it left off when re-opening the program) I closed the program and went and watched some videos. To my horror, when I returned to download the rest of the game I noticed that it had resumed the download back at 0%! That’s like 500MB of downloaded data (And applicable time taken to download it) gone, wasted. I was pretty annoyed at it.

If you were to implement a confirmation dialog box for when closing the program then you could also utilize the dialog box for presenting the user with a caution/warning that closing the program will reset there download progress to 0%, giving the user an opportunity to re-think there decision.

A confirmation dialog box will also minimize the negatives of the possibility of a user going to minimize the program but accidentally moving the courser too far and mistakenly clicking the Close Program button.

The Minimize and Close Program buttons are also positioned in a relatively busy looking part of the program, nestled within some complex artwork making it unnecessarily hard to identify where the mouse courser is positioned when looking to take advantage of either of those features (Though this is mainly a problem with wanting to minimize, not close the program, as you can close the program after minimization but not recover download progress from closing the program.).

Anyways, yeah. Mainly I just want the following:

1) Some kind of confirmation screen when going to close the program.
2) A warning that closing the program will undo any progress towards downloading/updating the game.
3) The amount of data remaining to be downloaded, presented in a more appropriate and useful format.

It would be great to know the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. The amount of files really doesn’t give us any valid information 10 files could take the same time as 1000 so there is no way of knowing how long will it take or when would be a good time to left the launcher downloading.

Regarding stopping the launcher, every time that you restart it it will go back to 0% of the amount of files that it needs to download, but there are fewer files and you can check the gw2.dat and confirm that it is getting bigger, so it does resume the download correctly, the only thing that resets is the progress bar.

Caruk.9413:

It would be great to know the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. The amount of files really doesn’t give us any valid information 10 files could take the same time as 1000 so there is no way of knowing how long will it take or when would be a good time to left the launcher downloading.

Regarding stopping the launcher, every time that you restart it it will go back to 0% of the amount of files that it needs to download, but there are fewer files and you can check the gw2.dat and confirm that it is getting bigger, so it does resume the download correctly, the only thing that resets is the progress bar.

Neat, wasn’t aware of that quirk with the progress bar (Obviously).

Bumping thread.

Wanted to create one but seems there’s no need :
Indexing the percentage of completion on total data volume instead of file count would be really appreciated.
We (players) know that it’s not anything close to urgent as the bugs can be, but this would be a real life improvement. Simply because it honestly states what’s going on and this makes the wait more OK (espacially for small connections :P).

I also agree with Nicholas Steel about being more informative when closing the launcher that this action will not delete the downloaded work, though this part becomes somewhat optional.

I’m bumping this as I really don’t want my suggestions to be overlooked, if this is considered a frivolous post then please let me know.