Guild Wars 2

Personally, it doesn’t seem to change much for me – so far all the patches after the beta client release were so small they finished downloading in seconds. I don’t know how much feedback can be made until some big update hits and we’d have data to compare.
On the other hand, i haven’t noticed anything negative either.

I tried idle setting it wasnt downloading so I had to change to max. Would be nice to be able to see the downloading bar with speed and amount left while in game.

I did like the concept and tested that. My experiencie was this:

I downloaded a 20% of the last patch and started playing thinking I could just play the content in the meantime, then I went to check the new shadow weapons and none of them had textures, they were invisible. I though that was ok and I wandered a bit around LA.

Something that I was wondering was how much files would I still need to download or when it’s finished, but then I dc’ed (it happens often to me, like 20 times per day. It’s a problem in my router) and the launcher was never able to download anything back again. It was giving me errors (maybe because I dc’ed while it was downloading something in the background) and I had to reboot the entire computer to make the launcher works again.

You might want to check that. Everything else was ok.

Suggestion: Add a percentage progression bar in-game to know how much of the game you still need to download. I would love to know if I downloaded a 70% or a 90% while playing without the need to exit the game and start the launcher.

Had some nice experience waiting on CoF to open,:

your content is being downloaded…

Problem was why would the loader do so? I hope I DL-ed CoF a long time ago. after 3 or 4 tries I gained access, I think it was due to the instance opener being quite slow to load in, and the instance therefore still not being confirmed or something.
But it’s your thing, you find out.

I like the fact i can start while still DL-ing parts of the patch, but it slows the opening of maps a bit. (writing and reading simultaneously cuases more stress on the rig.)

My observations till now. hope you can do something with it…

I haven’t tested playing while loading yet, as the builds load so quickly that I really don’t want to stress things unnecessarily.

This next may be my lack of tech expertise, but I vaguely understand that SSD’s have a limited read/write lifetime. A large one, but limited. Does that mean it’s harder on my SSD’s lifespan to conduct more simultaneous operations?

I haven’t tried it yet, and i don’t think I will use it in the future. I’d rather have everything downloaded and loaded in my PC before playing a game , even if it means to leave it downloading a whole night.

I don’t want to run the game, and find that there are some missing assets because they haven’t been downloaded yet, or play with crappy low quality textures until I get the good ones from the server, or discover glitches caused to resources not yet downloaded.

I am rather liking it . I really don’t have to worry bout updating or waiting . But my worry is just the increased lag or fps drops with bosses and stuffs , i don’t think its caused by that.

Setting the streaming client to disabled seems to increase lag exponentially. I’ll test it more when I get home.

Didn’t That_shaman do a youtube review on it?
Have you seen that yet?

I am not sure I understand the purpose of choosing to download the files while in-game. I tried doing so while in the PvP Lobby wanting to exit to Lion’s Arch. I waited in the Lobby, while periodically checking the download bar by mousing over the hourglass. It never really moved (showed any progress) until it finished.

I thought, ‘Great. You can play in a map while downloading the next one!’. I proceeded to enter the portal to LA, and what happens? Loading screen comes up and I must wait while it downloads the files. I used the command line argument, -maploadinfo, so I can see files being downloaded and am quite familiar with certain areas and their usual download. I saw no difference after having downloaded the files in the background (which takes a goodly amount of time).

Thus….my feedback is that it is great to be able to join the game faster from the launcher, but other than the map first entered, it may be more desirable to forego -streamingclient.

I have a question, in the settings for content streaming there’s off, idle, and max settings. Off and max make sense to me, but how does idle work? It says when your connection is idle but I’m not sure what qualifies as an idle connection since it seems the game would always be doing something even if you were sitting afk somewhere.

I enabled the feature today, since I wanted to wait until most of the major bugs from this past release were cleared away (sorry Gaile, but its a safety measure to prevent reporting many false positives to y’all). Will certainly update here after the next couple of releases.

From a feedback POV though, the game really does need some form of indicator to tell if the download finished. If there’s nothing to tell the player that there is a background download occuring, they may think the connection to your server is bad that evening. That usually means one or more attempts to re-login, and I’ve not heard much about how well the downloader recovers from that.

i havent tried it because adding -StreamingClient (?) to my taskbar icon is more of a pain than browsing the forums (that i leave a tab open for anyways) while downloading micropatches. maybe id need it if your patching systems sucked! but … they dont. but dont get me wrong the feature looks nice, and useful, and a million other positive adjectives. maybe ill go figure it out and add -mapsomethingorother too so i can see map assets im loading.

Donari.5237:

I haven’t tested playing while loading yet, as the builds load so quickly that I really don’t want to stress things unnecessarily.

This next may be my lack of tech expertise, but I vaguely understand that SSD’s have a limited read/write lifetime. A large one, but limited. Does that mean it’s harder on my SSD’s lifespan to conduct more simultaneous operations?

They have limited writes. If you need to download the patch it is going to have to do those writes regardless.

The feature seems to be working perfectly for me so there isn’t much to say. I have yet to encounter the case where it needs to download things for a map I am trying to enter so I can’t really comment on that part.

While downloading the last update (on the 16th) I had the streaming client enabled and started playing as soon as the game allowed it. I tried to move to a different map (silverwastes) a popup indicated the map was not yet a available and the transfer would be queued. A minute later the map was ready and I could move.
So far it all worked as to be expected. After a bit I noticed the performance of the game was quite sluggish. I checked the performance monitor and the gw2 process was writing heavily to the gw2.dat file (100% disk activity) without any mayor download. this lasted for at least 10 minutes before I restarted the game after that the loader still had some files to download. After that I had no real performance issues.
It was the only update big enough to play while downloading so I am not sure if this was actually caused by the streaming client.