SE reps: Will we need to use the torrent-like system to download patches in ARR?

[GinTama]

Yeah it worked great and I got to play within 30mins to an hour. Not 19 hours later.

not on patch day, speed was horrible at least for me and most ppl i knew.

Then they should get better servers. Other MMO companies don't have issues with direct downloads from their servers. SE has no excuse.

give me an example, what other MMO use direct download from their servers and dont have problems on patch day?

I am not against direct download i just dont think its better than P2P, so i am just voicing my opinion. If there is a better solution for everyone i would like to hear it

[Delsus]

lol what do you suggest then? direct donwload from their server? anyone that played FFXI knows how THAT goes.
P2P is by far the best method right now.

That was because the PoL servers (where we got patches from) had a very low throughput, therefore they didn't have enough for everyone on broadband connections, and people were always getting kicked (I downloaded a patch overnight on an old phone's GPRS connection and didn't get kicked once)

All they need is servers with decent throughput and we will not have the problems, a lot of mmos, even web servers have enough throughput to support a lot of downloaders at once.

[ninesunz]

That was because the PoL servers (where we got patches from) had a very low throughput, therefore they didn't have enough for everyone on broadband connections, and people were always getting kicked (I downloaded a patch overnight on an old phone's GPRS connection and didn't get kicked once)

All they need is servers with decent throughput and we will not have the problems, a lot of mmos, even web servers have enough throughput to support a lot of downloaders at once.

I think the problem wasn't simply server bandwidth, because many people could not connect or once connected they would get booted. If it was purely bandwidth the download speed would just crawl.

I think SE had a session capacity issue along with a bandwidth problem. What SE probably needs is multiple servers with load balancing - which i'm guessing they already had, just wasn't enough to support the masses downloading at the same time.

Compared to FFXI's updating, i'd take FFXIV P2P any day.

[Delsus]

I think the problem wasn't simply server bandwidth, because many people could not connect or once connected they would get booted. If it was purely bandwidth the download speed would just crawl.

I think SE had a session capacity issue along with a bandwidth problem. What SE probably needs is multiple servers with load balancing - which i'm guessing they already had, just wasn't enough to support the masses downloading at the same time.

Compared to FFXI's updating, i'd take FFXIV P2P any day.

FFXI was designed to be run on a dial up 512Mb dial up connection, and that's what the patcher was designed around, do the PoL servers were getting a lot of packets of data too fast from the clients, this cause a lot of packets to get dropped, which is why people were kicked a lot, if it was a session limit it wouldn't kick people patching, just stop people beginning another session.

It wouldn't be as bad for FFXIV because it's designed around a broadband connection, which will prevent the packet loss for a direct download.

[Wynn]

not on patch day, speed was horrible at least for me and most ppl i knew.



give me an example, what other MMO use direct download from their servers and dont have problems on patch day?

I am not against direct download i just dont think its better than P2P, so i am just voicing my opinion. If there is a better solution for everyone i would like to hear it

Ok first of all, I didn't say anything about problems on patch days so do not put words in my mouth.

Secondly, any pay2play game or even former AAA games gone f2p out there that has direct patching from their servers (read almost all of them) work 100% fine and are fast and efficient.. Take your pick.

People that play MMOs other than XI know this.

[Alhanelem]

There's nothing really wrong with a torrent system- it was just utilized really badly in 1.x FFXIV, in such a way that drastically hindered potential performance and didn't completely comply with the torrent standard.

A direct download option needs to exist for those who can't use or have problems with torrents, but under normal circumstances, torrents are an effective way to reduce day-of-update congestion.

[Soukyuu]

There were threads (including one by me) explaining why our current patcher design is flawed, I do hope they did improve it in the new one.

[Zumi]

Then they should get better servers. Other MMO companies don't have issues with direct downloads from their servers. SE has no excuse.

Most MMO companies do use torrent protocol for their downloaders. Look at Blizzard and WoW they also use torrents for their patches. Yet their updater downloads patches as fast as your connection will allow for me I usually get 3 mbps out of them. You can choose to throttle it if you don't want all your bandwidth being used but they leave that choice up to you.

Torrent updates are much better then direct download, FFXI which had direct download was very slow with so many people using their servers bandwidth it slows everyone downloading to a crawl.

The problem with FFXIV is their updater. Its poorly written code. The biggest issue with it is SE limits the amount of peers you can connect to and throttles how much bandwidth you can use from them. You may only get a few kb per sec using the official SE FFXIV updater but open the same torrent file in a stand alone torrent client which doesn't have all the restrictions on number of peers or bandwidth restrictions and watch your patch file download skyrocket to a few MBPS. SE officially doesn't approve of people using like utorrent or any other torrent program to get the updates faster and mods usually delete posts which provide details on how to do it, even though its not really hard.

[Focant]

I certainly hope a direct download option is available. Due to restrictions put in place by my ISP (which I can't change atm), I couldn't download patches officially without some severe workarounds, most of which don't work anymore. I had to use third party hosting to get nearly every single one. :|

[Taika]

Yeah it worked great and I got to play within 30mins to an hour. Not 19 hours later.

Just reactivated my XI account. Installed the game and updated...for 3 days (computer was closed during nights so somewhere around 25 hours total).

That being said, SE really should give us a better XIV patcher this time.