Installing patch from a torrent download?

[Spitfire]

Say you download the patch at an off site location; how do you go about installing it?

Wanna have all my bases covered just in case.

Thanks

[Elkwood]

SE blocked most torrent clients from downloading the patches

[MattyWS]

SE need to make their own system faster before stopping the faster ways.

[Soukyuu]

If you have the file, you put it into your FFXIV directory in the my documents folder (Documents\My Games\... afaik) Just start the official patcher and then find where it has put the file. Close the patcher, replace the file, relaunch the patcher.

[Eekiki]

SE blocked most torrent clients from downloading the patches

They blocked most torrent clients from connecting to their official tracker.

Enough people download patches this way that it still works, though.

But really...why does SE care whether or not we use the official patcher? It's the same protocol.

[Catapult]

I suspect legal reasons. Torrent programs are generally licensed for personal and private use. They are also perceived as... dubious among certain circles.

No doubt SE wants to send those lawyer-type people an indication that they are doing "everything in their power" to discourage piracy blah blah blah...

[Eekiki]

I suspect legal reasons. Torrent programs are generally licensed for personal and private use. They are also perceived as... dubious among certain circles.

No doubt SE wants to send those lawyer-type people an indication that they are doing "everything in their power" to discourage piracy blah blah blah...

I see your logic, but that would be a dumb reason. Regardless of what client is being used, to our ISPs it's still a torrent.

If they wanted to stay smoochy with the lawyers, they'd be offering us some http or ftp alternatives.

[Catapult]

Regardless of what client is being used, to our ISPs it's still a torrent.

To my knowledge, and this is what I've picked up from working in residential tech support for an ISP, the ISP doesn't track that it's a torrent file so much as it's negotiating with a server known to host mainly copyright-infringing files. Destination and IP addresses are what matter.

I consider the matter not to be one of SE actually caring about the client or torrents in general, but more about corporate perception. They wouldn't want a legal firm or competitor to pull a long bow and equate their allowing the use of torrenting clients to an expectation that their customers would use such programs or an open endorsement of general file-sharing that may violate copyright legislation.

Yes, a pretty long-bow argument, but weirder stuff has gone down in the legal world. Better safe than sorry IMO. And hey, I can live with it.

As for an ftp or http option, that would probably involve a patch client needing extra bandwidth than a p2p setup. I have no idea if SE are capable of running something like that in a high-demand scenario, such as straight after a patch is released.

EDIT: Trying to play devils advocate here, for the sake of a balanced argument. At the very least the updater's performance could be improved.

[Soukyuu]

As for an ftp or http option, that would probably involve a patch client needing extra bandwidth than a p2p setup. I have no idea if SE are capable of running something like that in a high-demand scenario, such as straight after a patch is released.

That's not really true. SE is actually shooting themselves in their own feet right now, because the way the patcher works, they always have a load on their servers, since once a player finishes downloading, s/he drops out of the swarm.

If they had an http seed instead and made it possible to seed after finishing without clogging the bandwidth, they would solve 2 problems: people who cannot use torrents will leech from http and people who can, will contribute to the swarm saving SE bandwidth costs. Just give the torrent traffic a higher priority and/or limit the http speed.

It works quite fine for Blizzard, why not for SE?

[Dubont]

utorrent works fine.