Bought subscription and ready to play but they got me again.

[Xateric]

Left a long time ago because of issues and decided to come back installed launcher and 14 hours later still cannot download, just keeps saying unable to download patch!

Tried support but they are dumb as stumps....They even had me reinstall windows still will not download.

Thought I would try one last time and ask you guys if you have a fix.

[EveK]

So ... here's the deal:

Firstly, it's a randomly occurring issue. So if you keep trying and trying, eventually it will work. You can also make note of exactly which file you're on and once you do get a clean copy of that one file, at least you have that much progress made and will pick up on the NEXT file. So you shouldn't have to start completely over every time.

That said, if you notice it fail right away, then you probably need to manually delete the corrupted patch file for it to try again.

Also, a physical disc copy of the edition that bundles both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward together has all the problematic patch data, so you could bypass the issue that way.

As for specifically what is happening and why, in a sense, it's not their fault. The issue is that good data is leaving their servers and getting corrupted before it gets to your computer. (I downloaded the whole thing without incident over a fiber connection, but I imagine this issue is still somewhat likely to occur over a galvanic connection).

Of course, in a sense, it's also their fault since they mistakenly designed the thing to have ginormous blocks of data to check at once. So instead of a teensy bit getting corrupted and your computer just saying "hey, send that last little bit again" and you not even noticing, instead, you download over a gigabyte of data and then find some portion of it is bad and repeat the entire gigabyte file. They seem to have learned from this mistake and corrected things onward. Patches after 2.0 were broken down into way smaller chunks. They, sadly, have not gone back and re-engineered these original files yet, though. Maybe with 4.0.

[Xateric]

Also, a physical disc copy of the edition that bundles both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward together has all the problematic patch data, so you could bypass the issue that way.

I have the bundle but it is still happening....have tried over 75 times already. I loaded the game with the discs, so do you mean it is on the disc and there is more I can load from it or are you saying it should have already been loaded when I installed from discs?

My next idea is we have a server farm at work and we can instance it a few hundred times so every ten minutes it will try to pull the patch hundreds of times, this way if I get one good download I could copy it to usb and transfer it to my computer correct?

Update- Setting it up on the servers at work now hope this works, going to let it run all day and see if I catch the whole ex1 or not. If I cannot does anyone know of someone that might have it for download....because some are saying it is SE's fault and it can be downloaded easily as long as it is not SE's servers.

Update 2 - We got 85 instances of FFXIV running on our server farm and attempting to update every 12 minutes, we could not do 10 minutes. so far it has been running for 3 hours and all have crashed on ex 1 at about 520 mb.

[EveK]

The larger the file, the more likely it is for some portion of it to get corrupted. The hope was that the issue was just with the very large 2.0 launch files. If you've already installed from that bundle disc, though, then you're having the issue with one of the smaller and newer files. So the discs won't help.

If you're having the same issue at work, that at least helps to rule out your home networking as the culprit. With it also happening at work, though, that suggests the data is being corrupted somewhere farther down the route (before it gets to either your work or your home).

The result you're reporting about trying it simultaneously on 85 machines is ... interesting. Last I tried to update even two machines at once, it would not let me use my login credentials simultaneously on both. Perhaps this restriction has been lifted since.

The rest of the info you provide about these server farm efforts seems confusing. You say it "crashed." That's very different from an error message of "unable to download patch." Which is it?

Also, after either result, I would expect some manual intervention on your part would be necessary to get it to start trying again.

Plus, I'm no networking expert, but if some network node somewhere along the way is potentially corrupting the data, it's possible that corrupt data is cached to some extent. I don't know when such a cache would be purged, but the effect may mean that simultaneously attempting the download multiple times does not actually yield any benefit but that trying it multiple times (that actually occur at different times) would.

My understanding of the patch process is that it downloads the patch file first. Then, after the file is verified as not corrupt, it applies it to the game files. After that step, it then deletes the patch file. So ... if an unattended machine did successfully download it, there wouldn't really be a patch file left to copy over anyway. I've read of a variety of tricks people have used to work around this such as copying the file in the seconds in betwen when the download completes and when it's deleted after its application. After that, the file could theoretically be distributed via other means.

The game's launcher and patcher can certainly use improvements to prevent these issues such as giving users the option to augment their patching with peer-to-peer sharing of the patch files and a better form of error-checking that allows corrupted data to be resent without having to also resend hundreds of MB of other data.

It's also worth mentioning the VPN option. It's probable a virtual private network would allow you to effectively sidestep whatever part of the internet is corrupting the data. I don't know where you are or where things are going awry, but, for example, someone in New York could use a VPN to route data from Canada through Atlanta rather than Chicago if Chicago were where it was getting corrupted. You'd obviously want a VPN that has access to servers in another geographic area, though. There are some commercial services that do this, often advertising improvements in latency rather than being used as workarounds for corrupted downloads.

I also read here of people reconfiguring how their routers select which servers are used to fix the issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...d_patch_files/

It's of course hard to really tell for sure whether their shenanigans actually made the difference or if it was just the fact that they tried it again at a different time. I know when I had these same sorts of problems in the past, it seemed to me like any technical changes I tried made no difference and what ultimately did fix it was just trying again and again enough times.