Installing patch from a torrent download?

[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?