Guild Wars 2

Recently after the release of the expansion I’ve been having alot of trouble patching the game on my 1.5Mbit DSL connection. Upon further inspection, I discovered that the game was downloading far more data than it actually required:

1) The prepatch folder is 35.6MB, but I download about 100MB each time
2) The HoT release was about 3.5GB, but I downloaded over 10GB

After looking at the network connection closely using network monitoring tools, i was able to determine that when the connection is even slightly unstable (packet loss), the patcher would request the same data from the server repeatedly.

In other words, in non-technical terms: When a file fails to download due to connection problems, the patcher redownloads the entire file again.

This works fine for smaller files, but as of the HoT release, some of the files are a few dozen to several hundred megabytes in size. When these files fail to download, it can use up excessive amounts of bandwidth for no reason.

Please don’t assume everyone is on cable or fiber at the last mile.
(Many people are still on ADSL, wireless or mobile broadband)

Please don’t assume that data caps do not exist.

The technology to resume downloads was invented in the mid-90s and it seems incredibly unprofessional to not support it. Not to mention that your launcher is still not P2P and thus gets low throughput under high server load.

I noticed the exact same thing on my DSL connection (same speed). The amt of data was huge for the expac, much larger than 3.5g, and took nearly a day when released. I’m glad I don’t have to pay per gig/dl <smile>. I don’t know much about how it all works, anymore, but resume download I do recall (I’m an old lady). Can’t log in now anyways at least for tonite. time to sleep…..