Quote Originally Posted by Cairdeas View Post
I still have not seen anyone prove 100% that the current patch system forces you to download all the current patch data at once every patch cycle.
It's not the patch system. It's just misuse of the patch system. Previously they were using it correctly but now they're providing redundant data. And yes, people have done diffs on the files produced in the patch to show that of the 300+ MB downloaded, only a small amount has changed, and only a few of the files have changed in the entire package.

It would be like they're torrenting a collection of music, and they later update one of the included albums to provide album art, but rather than include only those files in the new .torrent file, they're marking all the other songs, and the FFXIV client (for obvious reasons) doesn't let us do a partial download.

This really seems like just a casual mistake on their part, but once again, it is very difficult to communicate this fact to them.