[WoW] Should a 5MB download be taking this long? (Rant)

[woodsmoke]

I've been downloading what looks to be about the most minor update Blizzard has ever released for at least 20 minutes now, and I can't figure out whether the problem is with their super-shitty tracker or my super-shitty connection. I'm afraid it's a combination of the two.

Seriously, it's a fucking 5MB download! It shouldn't take more than a few seconds, and here I'm coming up on half an hour!

Never thought I'd say it, but I absolutely can't wait to start work again. Soon as I've got that regular income I can finally be rid of this wireless bullshit and call Qwest or Comcast to hook me up. We're receiving a signal from a transmitter 15 miles away when there's another one sitting atop a hill a few hundred feet from the house. It may be true, due to some fucked-up technical reason, that we can't get a signal from that one, or from the other one just a few miles away here in town; however that doesn't in any way justify our having to put up with a constantly up-and-down signal when we're paying for the same high-speed internet every other customer is.

Why anyone would ever choose a flakey wireless ISP over a solid, grounded connection through a cable that jacks straight into your computer is absolutely unfathomable to me. :mad:

[eskatonic]

Obviously, so you can sit at Starbucks and sip your $5 latte and make sure everyone sees you on your laptop, doing oh-so-important stuff! Duh! ;)

Seriously, you might also look into using BitTorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html) or something to get patches from Blizzard. I started using it after the last big patch that everyone was having trouble downloading, and I had the patch in no time.

First time I'd ever heard of it. Now I'm a fan.

eskatonic

[uriany]

personally... i typically wait till wednesday to try downloading it on my home computer. the day after, it typically downloads at an appropriate pace

[Ikselam]

I generally downloaded patches from like Fileplanet or someplace like that. Even with the queues, it was still faster and more reliable than the Blizzard downloader.

The exception was the 1.11 patch; for that one I ninja-started the background downloader (which you should never actually have running in the background, btw) the day before the patch, and let it do its thing overnight.

[BlakeT]

I got my update, on my Mac, in seconds, but the wifes PC took over an hour. I think that it was just hammered early today. The site died at about 2 meg and an hour later it was finally finished.

It's not like there aren't 6.5 million other players out there wanting the same update. :P

[Ghostwise]

I got my update, on my Mac,.

We usually do.

Except for last Wednesday.

[freshie]

I don't think it was exclusively your connection. I know there were quite a few of my guildmates having issues with the download.

[IceShadow]

I got on my computer at about 1:15, right after the servers went up, and it took about 20 minutes to download.

I think it was just the strain of pushing it out to some 3-4 million people at once. That'd be 15 <i>terabytes</i> of information (at my rough guess of people, pulled out of my ass). :eek:

[Tenacious B]

Next time, give Filefront (www.filefront.com) a whirl. There are no queues, unlike FilePlanet. Hell, you don't even need to register.

[woodsmoke]

Thanks, I'll do that. It's the need for registration at most places that's kept me using the Blizzard downloader.

[Ikselam]

I think it was just the strain of pushing it out to some 3-4 million people at once. That'd be 15 <i>terabytes</i> of information (at my rough guess of people, pulled out of my ass). :eek:

But the Blizzard downloader appears to use some kind of bittorrent implementation; they shouldn't actually have to push out all that info more than a couple thousand times before the p2p maaaaaaagic takes over.