Guild Wars 2

My friend lives out in the country and does not even get 1mb download speed. For the past 3 days we get home from work and log onto Guild Wars to play. Within 15 minutes of playing we are met with “New build available in 10 minutes”. For me its no problem I get 30mb. For her it means not playing for the whole night and having to run the download over night.

We have both been looking forward to the 2nd beta event, she just purchased the expansion so she could play in this beta, and playing WvW on reset night like we always do. Within 30 minutes of testing the new specializations we see the “New build available in 10 minutes” again. She has been downloading since the patch was put up and is only at 30%, That’s going on 3 hours of not being able to play and at the rate its going she will probably not be able to play tonight at all.

I know the majority of the player base probably has decent internet, so ArenaNet does not think about the people that play their game who have crappy internet. I am writing this because if she tried to it would just slow her internet down further and delay the download even more.

So 99.99% of the playerbase should suffer because 1 person has internet connection
from 1990 ?

The patches were around 30 mb in size. If she has 1 MBit that means normally 1 MB in
8 seconds .. so 30 MB should be downloaded in 4 minutes and not in 3 hours.

And the patch will always go up at the wrong time for someone. So they release most patches every other week. They release critical fixes in between.

Tonight’s issues were posted 3 hours ago. And were related to the beta as was yesterday’s updates. Where any issues can affect player feedback and the ability to test what they’re wanting players to test. Tonight’s also fixed a server crash issue. Which are typically high priority as server crashes are game breaking when they happen.

I sympathize with her problem but to be blunt, what do you expect Anet to do about it? Schedule it for midnight? What about the other person thats inconvenienced at that time? Should Anet ignore them in favor of your friend?

No time is good for everyone and someone is always going to feel hurt over it. So they do the only thing they can do, release patches when it’s easiest for them to do so. Usually this means during Anets business hours. Does it suck for your friend? Absolutely. Is there anything Anet can reasonably do to fix it? Not likely.

If its taking the entire night to download the weekly updates it sounds like she has some network issue that is throttling her connection to the server. Like Beldin.5498 said it would only take around 5 mins to download the patch at that speed.

Have her run a speedtest to see what her actual download speed is to start and then work from there.

How is she even able to play the game if downloading 30mb takes 3 hours?

I only have 1MB speed also and it didn’t take me anywhere near that amount of time. A few minutes max. There is something else going on with her computer. That 4 hours download is typical for what I had when I only had 3G and about 50KB/s download speed.

My only issue with the patch was I just did my weekly backup of Steam and MMOs an hour before. The dat file takes a good while to copy via USB 2.0.

My internet is only 2MB download, so double what you claim she has, and it only took me a couple of minutes to download the patch (and for something interesting, 30mb only takes slightly more than an hour to download with a 56kb connection, that’s dail-up speeds).
So either her speed is much lower than even 56kb, or she has other apps taking up bandwith (could be a virus, spyware, or simply a phone or pc downloading updates or syncing some cloud stuff), or there’s an issue with her connection for which she might need to contact her service provider.

Here at home I often have the 2nd problem, for example somebody left their pc on and is still logged into steam when it suddenly decides to update a game, bam gone is most of the internet. Somebody decides to torrent something but doesn’t cap the speeds, gone is the internet for everybody else. We had one phone here which also did a lot of cloud syncing whenever it got on the wireless, always taking the internet down for everybody else. I ended up investing in a better router with Bandwith Control, so I can guarantee myself I certain minimum speed no matter what everybody else is doing in the house. That did wonders for me.