Guild Wars 2

For those of us that work, it would be nice if we could download everything a day or two before HoT launches to get the most out of the weekend hours.

Any plans on making this happen?

I think we have been ‘pre-downloading’ for months.

I’m sure pre-downloading has been going on for some time over the last few months. We know Verdant Brink is already on our computers, after all, from the beta. A lot of other stuff should also already be downloaded, and there’s still two weeks to go for them to sneak more in.

A whole bunch of it is already in the game client, judging by how much has been data mined + beta weekends.

I suspect if we get any further patches before HoT they will contain some of the data the client needs.

TL;DR
It’s already been partially done like that.

I suspect some stuff is being left out due to bugs/conflicts/datamine leakage etc. Anet is probably doing as much as they can on that

No, and No more than what we already have since Anet doesn’t the want famous reddit data miner to leak too much info to ruin the players fun of discovery for themselves. So huge patch for release day

Will Heart of Thorns content be available to download prior to the unlock of the content? Or is it already into our client?
Also, is the Halloween Update coming at the exact time of the HoT content unlock?

Lascax.2163:

Will Heart of Thorns content be available to download prior to the unlock of the content? Or is it already into our client?

Part is already in our client but I suspect we also have to download some more files.

Also, is the Halloween Update coming at the exact time of the HoT content unlock?

We know it’s coming on the same day, we don’t know anything more than that. However, I suspect that both will go live at the same moment.

My internet speed is incredibly bad lately… if HoT is even 10 gb that’d take me two days to install… I was wondering if there’d be any chance of a preload for the expansion (or maybe the beta weekends lowered the required installation, and it may even be managable for lower connections? currently downloading at 220 kb/s)

We have been downloading HoT for the last 9 months more or less.

There will be a larger than normal patch when it’s released but as Krall stated, all those patches you’ve been doing over the last few months that are larger than the typical Friday reset patch are indeed content patches. So it won’t be a huge 4 hour patch … in theory.

Random.4691:

There will be a larger than normal patch when it’s released but as Krall stated, all those patches you’ve been doing over the last few months that are larger than the typical Friday reset patch are indeed content patches. So it won’t be a huge 4 hour patch … in theory.

that’s real good to hear.

Yar, Random, I agree it shouldn’t be horribly big. However, despite ANet’s track record at giving much faster load times than any other MMO I’ve played (heck, even my single player Dragon Age:Inquisition took 45 minutes to load thanks to it ignoring my disks, and it takes a long time to get into the game each time), on the bigger patches so many people have gone for them at once that things have come to a halt.

That’s without even factoring in the possibility of malicious interference.

So I hope they’ll actually make the bulk of what remains for HoT patching available on Tuesday, giving everyone a few days to get it, with only minor things left for October 23. After all, everyone’s going to have it, it will just not be accessible content for those who haven’t applied the code to their account. Thus it will be an activation thing rather than a new patch required.

I don’t want to mislead you, there is still the chance that it will take some time, there is also the inevitable hot fixes that will happen over the couple days post release. There is also the point that I don’t work for Anet and could be completely off the mark.

Yes, as Donari also pointed out you must take into account Malicious interference, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some DDOS’ing because that is apparently the thing to do now adays when u live in your parents basement.

lordkrall.7241:

We have been downloading HoT for the last 9 months more or less.

A lot of it is still missing or we would have seen more stuff datamined.

lordkrall.7241:

We have been downloading HoT for the last 9 months more or less.

^This. If you take a note of how big your GW2 dat file is, you’ll see it’s slowly getting bigger. This is because we are slowly downloading HoT with every patch. This means on launch day there will be less strain on the download servers as we will not need to download too much. My best guess it between now and launch we will have small patches every now and then.

Malediktus.9250:

A lot of it is still missing or we would have seen more stuff datamined.

Possibly, or people are simply decent enough to not spoil things.

I don’t doubt that there is going to be a rather large update coming at release to add in the last things, but fact remains that we have been downloading content for it for months.

I suspect we’ve been downloading bits and pieces of it already. Just look at your current, live game map. Their are icons in the new area already.

Also, some of the story will take place in the current map.

In addition to the continued small downloads over the past few months that we’ve already gotten, I rather expect them to release a sizable patch next week sometime (maybe on Tuesday like they usually do) to get a lot of the other stuff ready, so that the Friday patch is manageable.

But we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Malediktus.9250:

lordkrall.7241:

We have been downloading HoT for the last 9 months more or less.

A lot of it is still missing or we would have seen more stuff datamined.

That_Shaman hides a lot of stuff to not spoil anything important.

Hello.
I’ve got a question. More like for the GMs.

I think we can make it clear that on the release day the download servers are going to overloaded. Download speed will be pretty low. Conections will be lost etc.

Besides not all of us got super fast internet.

So my question is:

- Is there any chance for the game to be able to download like 1/2 days before relase day? Just download – non playable.

Yes, this needs to happen at least a day or so before the launch. I guarantee servers will shut down because of the influx of players trying to log in for the patch.

I think the download servers are different from the game servers, so if there was an earlier time to download, everyone might download at the ‘new’ time and disrupt the download, anyway.

Patches are delivered through a CDN. Although your default server may be slow, there are many more you could try by manually selecting them using the -assetsrv option. Rather than use gw2status.de, lookup the IP for assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com yourself using various DNS servers.

The current launcher doesn’t support pre-loading, so anything like that would be delivered through a standard patch. Releasing it a day early would just mean you’d lose that day rather than the next.

download has been happening for months now. They will flip it to live, prob no download or a minor one.

Yargesh.4965:

download has been happening for months now. They will flip it to live, prob no download or a minor one.

Correct! If you have been keeping up with all the latest patches then you have already downloaded most of Heart of Thorns. That said there will probably be a pretty decent chunk of patching to do when it goes live but probably not much more than the specialization patch. Also expect a million and one hotfixes after launch.