Naxx

[Itzena]

In the end, I just found the torrent address and fired up ABC. Much simpler.

[Cybsled]

I just turn it off. It doesnt download anything, it messes up my web browsing , and occassionally spikes up my ping ingame.

[Cad]

Just wait until patchday and get it off one of the 1200 mirrors that pops up within 2 hours. md5 the thing and off you go. Background downloader = off.

[Cybsled]

Pretty much, that's what I usually do anyways.

Lets see...torrent at 5k/s, or direct download from a mirror at 400k/s...hmm, hard choice!

[Grayson Carlyle]

Originally Posted by Itzena

The thread I linked had people who had all the right ports open, plenty of bandwidth and the downloader was still not working.

Okay, so it works for me. I guess that's all I can say about that though.

[Plaeroma]

My background downloader did nothing bug hog bandwidth for 3 days, then it got all 127mb in about 2 hours. Changed zero settings. /shrug

[Furism]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

Lets see...torrent at 5k/s, or direct download from a mirror at 400k/s...hmm, hard choice!

If Blizzard knew how to code a Bittorent client, it would be at least as fast as a direct download. They should hire a couple of guys from the open source Bittorent community or something.

[Itzena]

Or just put up a link to the patch, and let people use their own torrent clients.

[Fendryl]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Or just put up a link to the patch, and let people use their own torrent clients.

This is the one that amazes me; I totally understand providing the blizzard client if a person doesn't have a bittorrent client; even though there's still something fundementally wrong with it, it is better than nothing. None the less, I can't think of a reason to not provide the torrent link directly for those that do have their own bittorrent client.

[Soygen]

I have never understood why they don't just host the torrent file. Fine, run it with your shitty client, but for the (albeit small) part of your community who knows wtf they are doing, give us a direct link to a torrent file.

[Cad]

Because most people would disable sharing on their bittorrent client and it'd break the system. Blizzard uses their own client so you can't do that. Stupid, yes.

[Itzena]

Except you can disable (or cap, or whatever) sharing on their client as well, and the majority of people would just keep using the Blizzard downloader anyway.

Plus it might give Blizzard a slight incentive to make their downloader not suck.

[Furism]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Except you can disable (or cap, or whatever) sharing on their client as well, and the majority of people would just keep using the Blizzard downloader anyway.

QFT.

But I think the big concern is that with third party programs, it's possible to feed fake data on the network. The clients will disregard it, but if enought people are doing this, it can slow the traffic quite a lot. And you don't want to have your whole patching system to be sort of DoS'd, now do you?

Why would somebody do that? Well you might remember that a couple of time the FFXI servers were under DDoS attack after the developper banned a fuckton of bots and farmers.

Now of course they could implement a login system. You log onto the site, you get a link to the torrent, you start downloading. If you're not authentified, the tracker will deny you the list of the peers. If you're feeding too much disregarded data, you're kicked out and a report is sent to the tech geeks for investigation of malicious intent.

Illegal Bittorrent sites use this, or so I'm told, so I fail to see why Blizzard couldn't do it. Oh, yes, absence of willingness.

[Cad]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Except you can disable (or cap, or whatever) sharing on their client as well, and the majority of people would just keep using the Blizzard downloader anyway.

Plus it might give Blizzard a slight incentive to make their downloader not suck.

CAN, but thats way beyond opening preferences and setting upload speed to 1KB/sec like you can do in ABC or any of the popular clients.

As long as you make it hard enough to do that most people don't bother, you win. If you make it easy enough that Timmy can do it so his CS doesn't lag while he downloads, you just broke the system.

[Dynalisia]

It's actually not that difficult to extract the torrent from the blizzard downloader.

Also, I thought that the BitTorrent protocol itself forced you to enable uploading to the swarm, unless you don't mind being stuck at 5kb/s download speeds?