Quick downloader

So, I installed City of Heroes last night, and completed the tutorial only to be told that I couldn't proceed with the game until the quick downloader finished stage 3. So, I started a 2nd character a played through the tutorial again while I waited. Finally, stage 3 finished, and I could enter the game... but by that point it was very late, and I was tired, so I exited the game and went to sleep.

Today, I woke up, excited to play the game proper, only to log in and find that the quick downloader is starting over at 0% completed on stage 2. There is no way that I'm going to sit and wait 2-3 hours every time I log in for the quick downloader to download the same content again, so is there a way to avoid it? I know Guild Wars has a -image flag on the executable that allows you to download all of the game content without launching the game client. Does City of Heroes have a similar option, and if so, how do I use it? Thanks.

The new-ish launcher upon initial install loads the game in four stages so that you can atleast create a character and test it out a bit in the tutorial while it finishes the download in the background. Unfortunately the tutorial has been rewritten to the point that you can easily finish it (even at walking pace slow) before the other stages have completed. My suggestion is to always tell the launcher to fully download/install the game before even getting into it so that you avoid this.

Note: the game only needs to download/install fully Once unless you delete/uninstall the game. Once that's done (save a reasonable sized issue update or patch) then you'll never go through it again and can happily play the game. I have a link in my sig if you care to read it. ;-)

Thanks for the guide; I took your advice about the max inactive frames flag. With a bit of poking around, I also figured out that by right-clicking on "City of Heroes" in the PlayNC launcher and picking "check for updates", it will install the rest of the game.

Looking at the updater, I can't help but notice that the download speed is limited to around 150 KBps with an estimated completion time of about four hours. I just checked www.speedtest.net, and measured a download rate of 12.32 Mbps, so I know the bottleneck is not my ISP. It would be nice to have a faster content distribution system, maybe something like a torrent. Just sayin'.

I'm with Agge on this one. I can get 200+ KBps on four clients all downloading at once or 800-900 on a single client.

Is it possible that your ISP throttles traffic from certain sources?

In Paragon City since June 2005.

They said they wouldn't, but apparently they are. After looking around the internet, it seems many people have complained about this, and there's even legal action being taken. Sigh....

On a different note, I advise against using the "Check For Updates" option now that I've tried it. Right below it is a "Repair (Consistency Check)" option that's almost as fast and can save you the trouble of having to wait for the downloader twice. (After the first time, the game still said it needed to download Stage 2 and wouldn't let me past the character selection screen. Also, the progress stayed at 0%.)