WoW trial downloader = bittorrent? So lame.

P

peacetilence

2[H]4U
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Sep 23, 2004
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I thought I'd try this game out since I've been bored with most of the games I have. I tried to download and noticed everything was crawling and my dl speed was as slow as dial up. I dled netlimiter, and I see that I'm uploading more than I'm downloading. For someone who has to be conscientious of my daily download (comcast complains if I go over 10 gigs a day..) this really sucks. You'd think with all the money they must be pulling in they could at least provide a way to DL it in a non-ghetto way.

I have to ask, do the official game download patches work in the same way? If so, I can't believe people tolerate cheap crap like this when they're paying for a service.


With the way it is now I'll have uploaded 10gb's and only have downloaded 2gbs in 10 hours. :rolleyes: My upload rate is totally flooded and I'm only getting 130kb/s download over my 8mbit connection I can't even use my connection properly while it's downloading since it's flooding my upload.
 
That's why many people get patches etc from outside sources, like Fileplanet etc. You can get the client there too I believe.
 
Yea it is ghetto, Guild Wars has done a better job. However, I do get quite a good speed. It does flood my comcast connection but i can generally get done downloading the game in 2-3 hours. I guess they have done that due to such high demand.
 
They do this because so they don't have thousands of people downloading a huge file taking alot of bandwidth. Yes, it is slow. And yes, Blizzard does have the money to have the capability of doing a direct download.
 
you can limit your upload you know.


and bittorrent is very fast when a couple million people are seeding.
 
Teh_ZioN said:
They do this because so they don't have millions of people downloading a huge file taking alot of bandwidth. Yes, it is slow. And yes, Blizzard does have the money to have the capability of doing a direct download.
Click to expand...

Fixed that for you

Bittorrent excels in this situation you have the initial seeds who have good high speed connections and then you have even more bandwidth coming down from other downloaders

in addition to this you have all the check summing for the data so that the downloaders will know they get the same file as what the initial seeder put up
 
They also do the official patches through the same torrent client as well.

If you're getting really slow download speeds, then there are always things you can do to improve it. However if you absolutely abhor torrents, or for some reason you can't use them with your connection properly, then you can always turn the filesharing part of the downloader off.

Then you get a direct download from Blizzard, because Blizzard would then be the only seeds available and you wouldn't be uploading to them. Your download speed may suffer because of it though (not compared to the speeds you're getting now, compared instead to the speeds you theoretically could get if your computer was set up to handle torrents properly.)
 
meh I prefer usenet and pars. I hate bittorrent and can't stand having my upload speed flooded. Call me selfish but I'm not a server or a communal provider for others. I use an 8mb/1.5mb connection so the problem isn't my net connection. It's just that when my upload is totally flooded it slows the download to a crawl and in my case the downloader was uploading faster than it was downloading. I don't know why anyone would want this or would try and defend Blizzard using other people's bandwidth as a means to deliver paid content. You're just freely bending over with your pants down if you're actually defending this.
 
I think the way Blizzard implemented their download system was a smart move. Remember that WoW has 8+million "users". But of course we know not all of them are active and not all of them will connect right away on Server Down Tuesdays. But lets assume that 25% of that 8 million connects on Tuesday to download a patch. And lets give it a worst case scenario.

Blizzard releases one of it's bigger patches that includes a new instance and/or gear. So it's around 75mb.

That's 2 million people trying to get a 75mb file.

How many businesses would be willing to pay for that type of bandwidth when it's only needed occasionally. And do you honestly think it'd be faster with 2million people spamming the servers for the patch?

People like to compare WoW with Guildwars for this. Guildwars has 2.5 million+ users. If 25% of those download a patch, that's significantly less than what Blizzard has to handle. And because Guildwars is an instanced based game, the servers resources are probably a lot less than WoW.

Blizzard IS raking in the money so the could afford to have direct downloads, but as a business, it would not be smart to have a bunch of servers and bandwidth just for patch releases when it will be sitting idle most of the time. That's a lot of wasted resources. You may say that they could use it for other things during the down times, but they you would have people complaining on patch days if they have issues becuase of not using dedicated servers. It's a lose/lose situtation both financially and customer service wise. If you owned Blizzard, you would do the same thing.

By using torrents you allow those millions of people to connect to each other and speed up the process. It may be slow at first, but after a few minutes it speeds up as you connect to more and more people.

If you are experiencing slow speeds, then make sure you are forwarding your ports correctly. Block ports will significantly slow down torrent speeds.

/Sorry for the long winded response
 
maverick777 said:
I think the way Blizzard implemented their download system was a smart move. Remember that WoW has 8+million "users". But of course we know not all of them are active and not all of them will connect right away on Server Down Tuesdays. But lets assume that 25% of that 8 million connects on Tuesday to download a patch. And lets give it a worst case scenario.

Blizzard releases one of it's bigger patches that includes a new instance and/or gear. So it's around 75mb.

That's 2 million people trying to get a 75mb file.

How many businesses would be willing to pay for that type of bandwidth when it's only needed occasionally. And do you honestly think it'd be faster with 2million people spamming the servers for the patch?

People like to compare WoW with Guildwars for this. Guildwars has 2.5 million+ users. If 25% of those download a patch, that's significantly less than what Blizzard has to handle. And because Guildwars is an instanced based game, the servers resources are probably a lot less than WoW.

Blizzard IS raking in the money so the could afford to have direct downloads, but as a business, it would not be smart to have a bunch of servers and bandwidth just for patch releases when it will be sitting idle most of the time. That's a lot of wasted resources. You may say that they could use it for other things during the down times, but they you would have people complaining on patch days if they have issues becuase of not using dedicated servers. It's a lose/lose situtation both financially and customer service wise. If you owned Blizzard, you would do the same thing.

By using torrents you allow those millions of people to connect to each other and speed up the process. It may be slow at first, but after a few minutes it speeds up as you connect to more and more people.

If you are experiencing slow speeds, then make sure you are forwarding your ports correctly. Block ports will significantly slow down torrent speeds.

/Sorry for the long winded response
Click to expand...

I think your 25% is exceedingly low. Our guild has a 100+ active players...and quite often we saw at least 80% of them log on during a tuesday. Nearly everyone fires up WoW on tuesday if only to get the patch.
 
I like it, personally. I've gotten 800k/second+ download speeds with it during patch days. If you're just downloading the client to a computer, it's not very fast, but if a lot of people are downloading a certain file, it's really, really quick.
 
Usenet is fine and all that, of course it costs money, fast usenet servers are expensive and ISP based ones are usualy either crap OR the cost is built into the package they provide, and so other services are often slower/worse.

Bit torrent is free, practically no ISP limit upload bandwidth because people rarely use it, it's a great way for a bunch of people to share a common file(s) quickly. It might cost some upload but for me thats OK, if you have a decent router and know how what speeds to limit torrent speeds to then you should be fine, I can even game when torrenting when it's set up correctly.

Most of the people who complain do tend to be also the people who boast about capping their upload and how clever they are for not sharing. In reality most trackers are set up so that seeders prioritise good sharers, if you have a high upload then all the seeds target you for faster file transfer and your download speeds shoot through the roof.

Being a member of a private bit torrent community which enforces upload/download ratio's is also a good idea, I have about 850Gb uploaded in a community and about 500Gb down, because I'm a good seeder I'm allowed onto the new torrents before others and get faster download speeds.

As for Blizzard, yes they have loads of money but not enough to arrange the kind of bandwidth they'd need to serve however many millions of customers they serve, the problem is that demand is all in 2-3 nights as patches are released, rather than over the period of weeks, no one has enough bandwidth to throw at that problem and give everyone good download speeds, and this is why bit torrent is such an ellogant way of distributing patches.

It still costs them money, they still need high speed seeds to start of the transfer and no doubt the seeds keep on seeding all the patches the whole time it's released rather than just for the first few hours/days as with other torrents, where the original seeder may dissapear quite quickly.

Given a set budget for patch distribution, torrents get the file to everyone quicker but borrows some upload bandwidth, during which you can't play the game anyhow, I'm all for getting the patch quicker, tbh.
 
There's also a way to rip the tracker link out of the downloader's .exe file and use a standalone BT client (I use bitcomet) and limit your upload speeds to around 80% of it's max. That way your not limited you downlink because the uplink is too congested.

I've gotten 350k/sec downloads this way when Blizzard's downloader was only getting me about 80k/sec.
 
Martyr said:
you can limit your upload you know.


and bittorrent is very fast when a couple million people are seeding.
Click to expand...
Ya you can Limit but you also limit your down speed aswell.


And Ya Blizzard makes alot of money but Them using bittorrent doesn't mean there cheap.
Bittorrent is simply the best way to distribute patches to 8 million people.

I don't think there is any service any were in the world that could support 8 million people hammering on there servers for 30mb+ patches, Well at least cost effective ways.



BTW: If your behind a router you might want to open the ports they recommend to open to help with your speeds.
 
Amazing that the TS complains about 10gigs a day when others like me have to do fine with 10gigs/month :D
 
Blu_Haze said:
If you're getting really slow download speeds, then there are always things you can do to improve it. However if you absolutely abhor torrents, or for some reason you can't use them with your connection properly, then you can always turn the filesharing part of the downloader off.
Click to expand...

Bear in mind that some ISP's (like mine) automatically throw you to the bottom of the foodchain priority wise when they detect bittorrent on your connection. Any heavy file transferring of that nature, and you get used to 10KB/s or go crazy.

When I run into a patch day on WoW, a direct download for the patch goes at about 60KB/s. Letting the downloader do the bittorrent thing causes the speed to drop back to about 5KB/s or less.
 
Run the torrent extractor app and get the actual .torrent file. Use your own program. Will be MUCH faster than using blizzards client.

http://capnbry.net/wow/

Oh and make sure to use a clinet that has encryptable connections...
 
Trepidati0n said:
I think your 25% is exceedingly low. Our guild has a 100+ active players...and quite often we saw at least 80% of them log on during a tuesday. Nearly everyone fires up WoW on tuesday if only to get the patch.
Click to expand...

Yes, I was lowballing the percentage on purpose, since even with "just" 25% the amount of users downloading on patch day is tremendous.
 
When using torrents, if your uplink is saturated it can impact your download speed terribly.
Are other people in your house also using the internet?
If so, they could be helping to saturate the uplink.

Try turning your maximum upload speed down a bit in Bittorrent.
Set it to say 80 or 90% of your max upload speed, this should free any bottleneck if you are the only person saturating your internet connection.
 
Just go out and buy the "trial" dvd. Its the EXACT same client as the "full version". It sells at most gameshops for $2.

/thread.
 
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