Guild Wars 2

Hi,

Unfortunately I’m on a limited data plan for month, and I get charged $1.50 for each GB over.

I’m wondering how much data is used in GW2, over a few hours of play?

Please help me,
Thanks!

The update on tuesday is going to be big probably several gig, regular usage I don’t know sorry.

Kain Francois.4328:

Hi,

Unfortunately I’m on a limited data plan for month, and I get charged $1.50 for each GB over.

I’m wondering how much data is used in GW2, over a few hours of play?

Please help me,
Thanks!

You can estimate how much network traffic the game uses by starting up Task Manager (if you are using Windows) and going to the Networking Tab, then click on the View pulldown menu and Select Columns… Then, put a checkmark next to “Bytes” and it will begin to keep a running tab of how much traffic that adapter is sending through (over the internet, etc).

Play for an hour of what you would normally do in an average gaming session and then go back to Task Manager and see how many GB an hour (or however long you played for) uses up. That should give you a rough estimate of the average traffic that the game produces (don’t do anything else on the system you are measuring with (streaming video, downloading, etc)).

Most MMO games don’t produce that much traffic, they usually only have to communicate location changes (you are here now, you are here now, they are over there, etc), but some can use more than others. Web Browser-based games use even less.

You can also use free utilities (or buy one) that can measure your network traffic, or your ISP may even have a page/form that you can get from them that lets you know your ‘real’ overall network usage.

A few hours a day isn’t going to bring you anywhere close to a GB even in zerg like areas like WvW at prime time. The only thing you will have to worry about is updates so the next few weeks are going to eat your bandwidth. On the 15th will be a large update, quick bug fixes for it can be expected throughout the next couple weeks. Living Story season 2 will be kicking off shortly as well and those will be several hundred MB in size every couple weeks.

I can do a byte count of a game session to give some rough estimates, but I would suspect that it does depend on the game mode you are in and the local player population near where you are.

Definately the updates are going to hurt you financially as they are often multiple GB of data and I suspect the one due out tomorrow is going to be pretty large (but then again, they are not adding a lot of content, just user interface and functionality changes, so it may not be that big).