Originally Posted by
Crevox
This is really wrong, but... good try?
I already explained the reason for this, and the files for the game aren't encrypted into a single .dat (even for similar things). They're spread across MANY dats, which is why patching FFXI took so long (you'd download tons of tiny files, and you'd end up patching 30000+ files). FFXIV downloads patches compressed, and then just extracts them over all the files that need to be updated, which saves a lot of time (and you're downloading one file versus 10,000).
You can just go look at the game folder to see this. My data folder has over 110,000 files (this is not "semi-encrypted into a single .dat file").
I have no idea where you got this idea.