I recently bought Age of Conan after hearing some decent things about the PvP and blissfully ignoring the various gripes about the game mechanics.
As I usually do when it’s available, I grabbed the digital download. I’m a child of instant gratification so it’s usually the best option. Plus, it limits real-world time at an actual store.
This is a great idea in theory. You grab your disc images and you’re good to go — from the comfort of your own home. The problem is, Funcom uses torrent-style downloading (and uploading) to grab the files. This is brilliant if the game is at peak times and rocking tons of peers. However, it’s absolutely brutal during these slow times.
Not to mention, most people are leeching assholes and limit their upload speed to a crawl.
So, I install my cool kid Age of Conan downloader and start my download. I make sure my firewall is playing nice with it and ports are forwarded from my router. No worries.
After more than 72 hours, my download is blistering along at 15k/sec. Great. I could have gone to the store 500 times and picked up the DVD by this time.
Publishers: if you insist on using torrent downloaders, make sure you have an abundance of amazing peers constantly feeding the files!
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:29 am
So true.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:43 am
The other thing that’s going to slow you down, is the game is 22gigs after patches, it take a long time from the discs too, played an entire DnD campaign and came back and it was STILL installing
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am
What makes this eve worse is that they only do this to cut costs. Rather than having super speedy servers providing you with the files you want instantly they make other paying customers use their bandwidth to provide you with the files; theoretically this can improve speed and performance by having a wider range of seeders but enough speed should be provided by the developers and/or distributors to compensate for lack of seeder speed.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
This shit still hasn’t downloaded for me.
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Also take into account that depending on your internet provider… they might be messing with your torrents also
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Actual store 1, Torrent 0
July 25th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Yes this is quite upsetting. Most file distribution sites have their own servers that will kick in when no one is seeding.
Torrenting isn’t bad though, there has been many a time when I’ve downloaded another copy of Lord of the Rings:RoTK (too lazy to rip, honestly) and its zippy fast.
July 27th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Lol, well the p2p part in the downloader worked great for my part, funcom’s own http servers gave me around 8mbit down, and the p2p part gave me around 5mbit.. (maxing my download). the download took about 4-5hours and gave me 3 extra days of playing time (or was it two?).
Unlike WoW’s horrible solution which ended up giving me like 100-300kbps.
I also really like funcom’s way of update, without p2p.
August 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
15 kb/s? Sorry, when I downloaded this it maxed out my download speed at 700 kb/s and the reason for that is because I have torrents setup correctly. Chances are, you do not.