Update speed

[frydanny]

I was refreshing like a hawk but yet the 79mb supposed dl will take 1 hour on a 100mb connection. Why cant SE just create a torrent or something and let it rip??? We pay enough money to at least have this service no?

[Dallas]

It's because the playerbase has grown faster than technology.

[Kaisha]

The community kinda already does it themselves. Kinda sad really.


Nothing like spending a full hour to download something under 100mb.

[RAIST]

I was refreshing like a hawk but yet the 79mb supposed dl will take 1 hour on a 100mb connection. Why cant SE just create a torrent or something and let it rip??? We pay enough money to at least have this service no?

For starters, that 100Mbit is often only going to be achieved closer to home. You are running all the way to Japan, which is going to have considerably more latency due to various factors. I have a 10Mb, and I do well to grab 6Mb to some sites during off-peak times, typically is 3Mb or less. I got on early and I started at 1.6Mb, then it dipped down to 200k, up to 500k, down to 300k, up to 2Mb.... it bounces all over the place for various reason, a large part of it because of the different file sizes. As more people are hitting the connection for the download, it gets worse. SE is not a group like Microsoft that can provide large clusters of servers and bonded T1's (or fiber) for the express purpose of the updates--they basically are running on the same hardware that the game runs on.

Have to remember you also are not grabbing one large file, or even 20 medium sized files....but thousands of small files. The various handshakes that happen for the stop/start/verify of every file bogs the realized transfer speed down considerably. Take 2000 500KB files and transfer them all at once, then take those same 2000 files and pack them up as one file with no compression (so you wind up with the same amount of data to send) and transfer that to the same server--you'll be surprised at the difference in how long it takes to complete the transfer even though you will be sending the same amount of data.

[frydanny]

So why not pack it as 1 file to download and use peer to peer to distribute and verify once installed. SE gets allot of money for this game they charge for ff 11 14 now ff 3 has been released on android they can afford to be more upto-date with the updates. X-Box users will have more of a problem but for PC users the faster we get the update the more Bandwidth available for x-box users and ps users to. Japan is fibred upto the world with many many servers bouncing along the way even a dl speed of 1mb/s is a vast improvement. File verification can be done by pol later on my quad core sata pc can make mince meat of that.

Also i understand that SE invest allot of money in the DEV team but the cost of this is minimal in 2012 where servers and connections are much cheaper than they used to be. Updates must be the biggest pain of players and i hate it when im took off for 2 hours + x hours for the update afterwards.

Just a thought.

[RAIST]

One of life's big mysteries.

Some players at the BG forums fortunately have taken up the task of packing the new files up into a RAR file though, and often have an updated file up within several hours of release. I forget the exact link, but you can search for it, sometimes the link even gets posted at Alla when an update is packed up and ready to go.