Getting into the Trial
By
Arbegla,
Posted on: 2010-05-15 09:54 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
... part of me isn't sure where to start.
First: City of Heroes is a currently 3.1 gigabyte game. It's GOING to take a while to download, period.
Second: Trial Accounts can access most of the visual and story content in the game with the side-kicking system, so they have to download the entire game content. There's no you can only visit Atlas, Skyway, and Kings Row, and can only view the list of training origin and dual origin enhancements that can be slotted at level 14. So there's no way around needing the full 3.1gig install.
Third: Download speeds are largely on the head of the ISP's and their connections. We know for an Established Fact that some ISP's such as Time Warner and Comcast intentionally throttle (meaning they hold back and slow down the speed) the connection speed to several video games based on port numbers and IP addresses.
The fact is, the Trial is as easy to get to and get into as it's gonna get. There's really nothing else Paragon Studios can do.
And if I remember correctly, WoW's installer/updater is akin to Bittorrent, which along with 10 gazillion players tend to provide a ton of bandwidth for getting the games. NCSoft seems to rely on strict download servers and thus a bit more limited.
One advantage of having the entire game as a trial is if someone decides to subscribe, there is nothing more needed to download.
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My trial is still downloading... 11.4k/sec! Woohoo. Luckily I'm not relying on it tonight 
My connection is 20MB and I consistently exceed 1000k/sec downloads so its not on my side.
and finally... the WoW trial thing is worth checking just for how fast you get into the game. Its different than it used to be and as I said, pretty amazing! (I didn't actually play for more than 10 mins though... wasn't worth starting it again!)
I'll keep downloading and hopefully I can play by tomorrow. Again, though.. 24 hour download time isn't great!
My main point is that it would have been better for the company to offer more bandwidth to downloaders. Steam, for example, would have had the game downloaded and ready to play within 2-3 hours... but that requires a purchase and defeats the point of a trial
Ya know, i have the exact opposite problem.
Whenever i do a clean install of city, or rewipe my harddrive *atlest once a year..* I just pop in my install disc from my GvE pack, and run the install. Granted, that puts me at, i think I7? so i still have about 2 gigs left to download. While its going, i install my other games/drivers/windows updates, and by the time I'm completely set (usually 3 hours, give or take) city is done.
WoW on the other hand, is a overnight thing. Set that in the morning i gotta goto work, get home, see its only at 45%, head to bed, and I'm lucky if its done by the time i wake up the next morning, with everything up to the lich king, which is the current full game.
The Trail may be different, but I'd much rather be able to just upgrade my account, and not have to redownload anything, then have to wait another entire day, and waste my money waiting for a download (as you pay to upgrade, so any days your not playing, due to downtime, or downloading is wasted money)
every time i have had to download the game it takes all of under 3 hrs to get up and running. everyone has different experiences. if it is taking that long it is on your end. it can take longer to if you are on an open wireless network instead of a secured connection. i also do not recommend running any other programs while you download. this will make it take longer also.
It looks like its done now. I shall try it out tomorrow
I guess I'm mainly mostly impressed with the wow trial (5 mins to play - try it) and somewhat disappointed with the 10ish hours to get to this point on CoH.
Still... the game is the most important thing.
I'm an EU user, which should make me the worst candidate for this sort of thing, but I can pull CoH down at 1.6MB/s. Yeap, megabytes per second. On my old ISP, it never broke 50KB/s, but Be allow me to max the line out on getting CoH. It's all about the ISP, folks.
Naturally, if you try and download stuff during the launch of a new issue, you're asking for trouble.
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Not so much an issue this (I think), but I just wanted to comment about the "barriers" in getting into the trial.
Its pretty straight forward to start downloading the trial. Run the installer and the updates do it all for you. Since the game isn't particularly large, this should all be fine.
The problem is that the updater has very poor download speeds. I started at 140k/sec, which later dropped to about 45k/sec. This would take essentially 20+ hours to download. Not great if you just want to try the game out!
So, instead, I tried to find the client elsewhere and did so... then had to download an 800MB patch (at 200k/sec this time) and when that finished it gave an error about read access. I restarted the updated and had to download 900MB (200k/sec).
I've not got passed that point yet but I'm hoping there isn't more to download!
My point is... making the trial easier to get into is likely to increase the number of people that will actually play the game. Slow download speeds and errors are likely to put people off.
This is the opposite for trying WoW out... where I was amazed that I had gone just 5 or 6 mins from creating an account with none of the files on my computer to playing the game - unbelievable! I know you wouldn't have the resources to be able to have the game download as you're playing, but its a stark contrast to having to sit through a full days download to get into the game.