For the Love of Hydaelyn

[MoldyOne]

please make it so we can start downloading the heavensward patch early on the 18th, do not give into the Lure of Zodiark and delay it until just before the servers are alight with the wisdom of Midgardsormr.

this will allow for three things,
1. to allow those with slightly slower speeds to download the patch and be able to play with their early access instead of spending a day (or in some cases 2) downloading

2. allow you to find out if there is any issues with the servers that may cause the patch to be delayed

3. allow time for the server congestion from all your players to die down some (on most major patch days at first i am barely able to get 0.01mps for download speeds)

[MilesSaintboroguh]

How is this technical support in any way? And Square can't cater to everyone with wildly varying download speeds. There's going to be bottlenecks no matter what due to the sheer volume of players trying to get the client.

[Ahielia]

There's going to be bottlenecks no matter what due to the sheer volume of players trying to get the client.

This is exactly the point.

If 1 million people all try to download something on 1 day, the servers will bow under the pressure and crash.
If 1 million people try downloading the same thing on 3 different days, it might be slower than ideal, but the servers will still handle it fine.

Or is the 1 day option preferable?

This isn't about "catering to all people with varying download speeds", because whether a person has 100Mbit or 1 Mbit, if the server can't upload more than 10Kbit to each, neither is going to get more.

[MoldyOne]

How is this technical support in any way? And Square can't cater to everyone with wildly varying download speeds. There's going to be bottlenecks no matter what due to the sheer volume of players trying to get the client.

ok, First of all, this is a forum for technical support questions which this pertains to bottlenecking due to poor planning.

secondly, i am not asking to be catered to, i am asking for some common sense in what is going to be a huge patch that will take 5-6 hours to download for MOST people which means if SE does their normal patch release it will be just shortly before they bring the servers back up at 2am PDT, which means most people will not be able to access the game until 8am PDT to 12pm PDT since it is supposed to be a patch 2x the size of the original ARR launch.

finally Bottlenecking will be huge and if the servers crash due to it, then this launch will be a major failure, by opening the servers for the patch the day before while the servers are offline, you allow time for people to get the patch downloaded, installed and any problems due to a possible crash have time to get resolved.

[Raist]

The downloads are mirrored. So a large chunk of(if not all) the download traffic is on someone else's severs and not coming from Montreal.

We all check in with a server in Japan for version check and such and then get directed to a server for downloading. In my case it has typically been akamai servers out of Cambridge. Even though that is still the north east and prone to congestion, I still pull down at better than 1.5 megabyte/sec regardless of when I patched---morning, noon, early or late evening. Note that is bytes and not bits BTW. (1MB is a little over 8.3mb).