COH/V Updater Too slow. Bandwidth issues?

I know I'm not the first to say it's too slow, however...

GunZ the Duel uses a HTTP Get and BitTorrent protocols to deliver its patches and updates to increase speed and bandwidth. perhaps if something like that was implemented into the CoH/V updater we wouldn't be waiting a hour or so on each patch because we would have our HTTP backup if pieces were missing and Bittorrent to speed up the process being able to download using the worlds bandwidth instead of just NCSoft's making the download speed virtually unlimited.

This would definately cause a increase in download speed on updates and get people back into the game alot faster too.

you must have a slow connection i wait like 5 minutes for the patch to download and another 5 for it to apply.

90 Kb/s
Thats not to slow, and thats about what it caps out on any connection, either wired or wireless on high-end broadband networks or my Phone-as-modem.

Yeah mine, done at the peak of today's prime time, only took about ... 15 minutes to download and apply.

Remember that *many* people are downloading it as well. It IS a little slow - but then, I don't have a clue what "gunz the duel" is, but I strongly suspect it doesn't take nearly as much information as this game does, to run.

Coming from NC, I can be positive that the downloads are secure, accurate, and not virus-ridden.

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Yeah mine, done at the peak of today's prime time, only took about ... 15 minutes to download and apply.

Remember that *many* people are downloading it as well. It IS a little slow - but then, I don't have a clue what "gunz the duel" is, but I strongly suspect it doesn't take nearly as much information as this game does, to run.

Coming from NC, I can be positive that the downloads are secure, accurate, and not virus-ridden.

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GunZ the duel, I wont get into, However Bittorrent files if the torrent came from NCSoft and the original data came from NCSoft there is no way you would end up with a file with a virus or corruption or anything like that because bittorrent itself works off file hashes and if even 1 byte of data is changed or moved about, the hash fails and that piece is thrown out and another one is located to take the place of the piece that failed the hash check.
Hash Function Info

It's far easier to be patient than to ask that they use a 3rd party distributor, really.

First off, BitTorrent uses the SHA1 hashing algorithm which is hardly secure. Although it's not completely useless, it's generally considered only useful now for data integrity, not security.

Secondly, I have to add myself to the list of people that were able to download it in very little time- patching actually took longer (being a laptop that's not surprising).

BitTorrent might be something interesting for the devs to look into if they've got some free time to kill, but I really don't see it as a huge priority or anything.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Patches have always taken longer to apply than to download for me.

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Patches have always taken longer to apply than to download for me.

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This.

Once the "downloading" process finishes, do pay attention to when it says "applying" because that's *entirely on your computer*. Nothing to do with the speed of the download, which is done.

Just to [censored] a little, living in Australia, I've been downloading that 90 megabyte patch since 11pm last night for me. It's 2 PM now... so... 15 hours?

60% done!

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Downloading at 2.0M/sec on my desktop right now, gonna take less than a minute total to download the full thing.

Yeah, I'm fairly sure they'd have no issue maxing out a 90 Kb/s pipe

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

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Just to [censored] a little, living in Australia, I've been downloading that 90 megabyte patch since 11pm last night for me. It's 2 PM now... so... 15 hours?

60% done!

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My point exactly, This would definately benifit the people that have a long distance to transfer this information, using a torrent system would end up with faster speeds because they would also be connected to local peers instead of a server half-way across the world.

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Just to [censored] a little, living in Australia, I've been downloading that 90 megabyte patch since 11pm last night for me. It's 2 PM now... so... 15 hours?

60% done!

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My point exactly, This would definately benifit the people that have a long distance to transfer this information, using a torrent system would end up with faster speeds because they would also be connected to local peers instead of a server half-way across the world.

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Problem is, with people on the opposite end of the world like that, there's not going to be all that many other people trying to download it (as by far the majority of the playerbase is US based). Then, when people finish, they're going to generally also stop the uploads, which means there's going to be a rather small window when you'll likely see a rather small benefit (especially since most ISPs have really low upload bandwidth).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

I eventually got the file by asking a friend to download it and send it to me over AOL. It arrived in about an hour and a half, even with AIM's crappy speed.

I'm just saying, something is a bit suspect.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Well after finally getting it downloaded (started this morning) I was finally able to make that costume that was requested in a PM eariler, now my battery is dead and its time to sleep so no play time for me. However figuring out a faster way to push the downloads (perhaps for high speed connections a background download process while you play? ahlah SWG)

Why not just *do something else* while it's downloading? And use a power cord if you're on a laptop? And are you in another country like Talen?

I took close to two hours to download for me, as I was getting speeds of 15KB/s in Eastern Europe. I usually get 100-150KB/s (out of a ~1.2MB/s connection), but I figured it was a busy time. I tried playing Mirror's Edge, but I suspect my video card overheated or something of the sort. "Hardware device or its driver."

That said, I'm not a fan of distributing this over bit torrent. Half the PCs I have access to block ports and refuse incoming connections, limiting my speed to a crawl, and most of those limitations I have no control over (not the sys admin), and some even connect to the 'net via proxy. WoW distributes its patches via proxy, so when a friend of mine was updating through my router, it took him literally all day.

Bit torrent, as well, depends on other people participating for speed. Outside of patch day, how many people do you think are going to be downloading at the same time? Who's going to stay looking at the updater and seed? Or do you expect the client will seed for you, stealing from your connection while you play? After all, my upload speed is a tenth of my download speed, and even limiting my upload to 80% of it, it STILL impacts my game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm in favor of allowing people to choose how they want to do it. Some will use it, some won't. But I would put money on the torrent users downloading a lot faster. At least for the first few days.

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I'm in favor of allowing people to choose how they want to do it. Some will use it, some won't. But I would put money on the torrent users downloading a lot faster. At least for the first few days.

[/ QUOTE ]Ugh, no BT patches in this game, please. I tried the "10 million subscribers" game, got a corrupted patch from it that completely hosed my Windows install. Not to mention that with the way the patching process works on CoH, we *can't* do BT patching without a complete overhaul. Currently, when you patch in CoH, the game files are modified directly. In that other one, the patches are actually downloaded piecemeal. If you update to 1.03 from a fresh 1.00, you have to download and patch to 1.01, then restart, do the same for 1.02, and restart, do the same for 1.03. And if CoH were to start using BT to push patch downloads, we'd have to do the same thing. And frankly, that sucks. When installing fresh on that other system, I was downloading for 2 days and still hadn't been updated enough to play when the bad patch from a seed system killed my OS.

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I'm in favor of allowing people to choose how they want to do it. Some will use it, some won't. But I would put money on the torrent users downloading a lot faster. At least for the first few days.

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As far as giving players a choice goes, I'm always up for it. However, you have to realise that people need to seed for a bit torrent download to have any meaning, otherwise you still have people downloading directly from the Paragon Studios servers anyway. But how many do you think are going to sit around and seed instead of playing the game?

I suppose if the updater somehow remained active AFTER you started the actual game (normally, it shuts down), then I could kind of see people seeding, but then that would interfere with actual gameplay as it eats up free upload capacity. I'm assuming there's a reason the Issue pre-download starts AFTER you exit, not as soon as you launch.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.