Guild Wars 2

It feels like every time I open up GW2 — it wants to download a non-trivial amount of data. Did it twice yesterday, twice today.

Is this….. normal?

Yep, on tuesdays in particular. Instead of going down for four hour maintenance every week, there are some patches to download.

Welcome to MMOs. Most other MMOs either do this just as much/more or don’t do it enough and have persisting bugs that stick around long after the initial patch that caused them.

Yep, normal for new patches, which sometimes have bugs that need fixing. This is true in all MMOs.

Coming from WoW — where I can expect it to be 4-8 hours on Tuesdays, that’s reasonable.

So I don’t know where you get the “all MMOs” do this. In fact, WoW doesn’t seem to do this except on serious patches. Nothing near the size GW2 does on a VERY often basis FAR more than I’ve ever seen in any game I’ve ever played.

But point taken, GW2 seem to require a considerable amount of work to keep up and will require regular updates. I may hold off on playing until it’s more stable. Thanks!

It’s plenty stable. They give us these patches that barely take more time than just restarting the game normally would, and they give us notice the new build is coming, then give us an hour’s window in which to relog at our leisure.

If you hold off on playing until they stop giving us new builds, well, that means you’ve quit the game.

If I have to download 20+MB every single time I want to play — I disagree with that development style. So perhaps GW2 isn’t for me, which is a shame.

I travel. I may have a low latency but not always high bandwidth — so it’s become readily apparent GW2 is not for me and I should explore my other options. Thank you for your time.

You shouldn’t have that many patches. We had one yesterday, which held the balance changes they’ve been working on, and then a bug-fix one today. Usually we go days or even weeks between these new builds. Please give it a bit more of a try, you may have just hit at exactly the wrong time.

Donari.5237:

You shouldn’t have that many patches. We had one yesterday, which held the balance changes they’ve been working on, and then a bug-fix one today. Usually we go days or even weeks between these new builds. Please give it a bit more of a try, you may have just hit at exactly the wrong time.

Exactly this. The patches are typically every other Tuesday, with a couple of additional updates within the next day or so. Take a look at the Game Release Notes to see the typical update pattern.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates

WoW: 4 to 8 (or longer) hours downtime for a new patch and 4-5 hours downtime weekly for maintenance even without a patch. Patch days sometimes involve the game going back up, a catastrophic issue being discovered, and the game going back down for more time.

GW2: The game is rarely if ever down. Patch days involve no downtime, just patch load time, which can be measured in minutes even with the main patch. There are usually a few patches supplementing the main patch which fix bugs. Again, no game time lost except a minute or two to download the patch. The January 13 update had three small patches after the initial one. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-January-13-2015/first#post4689931

If you cannot see which update method involves less inconvenience to the customer, you should reexamine the facts.

HardReign.7142:

If I have to download 20+MB every single time I want to play — I disagree with that development style. So perhaps GW2 isn’t for me, which is a shame.

I travel. I may have a low latency but not always high bandwidth — so it’s become readily apparent GW2 is not for me and I should explore my other options. Thank you for your time.

No MMO is for you then. It’s that simple. Back when I played Rift, I was interrupted several times an evening when new patches game out, sometimes for days at a time. The only MMOs exempt would be MMOs that don’t come out with new content.

Maybe those are more your speed.

HardReign.7142:

If I have to download 20+MB every single time I want to play — I disagree with that development style. So perhaps GW2 isn’t for me, which is a shame.

I travel. I may have a low latency but not always high bandwidth — so it’s become readily apparent GW2 is not for me and I should explore my other options. Thank you for your time.

If you’re downloading that much every time you want to play, you’re either a) not playing very often (like, only once or twice a fortnight), or b) might have a problem with your computer’s memory. Does the launcher ever tell you it needs to repair?

Usually after a major patch, there are a couple of cycles of “oops” patches. And the 20MB one today is small compared to the large one we had on Tuesday.

It’s not normal, it’s just the no-hassle Anet way of giving you quick patches without long, schedule maintenance downtimes. Remember all those other MMOs with their company’s frequently saying ‘The servers are coming offline for update so and so, or for maintenance work, etc.’ and then the game is unavailable for an hour or so…

Yea, that hardly ever happens in GW2, so enjoy!