f13.net

f13.net General Forums => World of Warcraft => Topic started by: apocrypha on March 19, 2009, 03:14:09 AM



Title: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: apocrypha on March 19, 2009, 03:14:09 AM
Really, I don't understand it.

It's just a bittorrent client as far as I can tell, but it's a terrible and crippled one, it's main fault being that you cannot throttle the upload at all. For me, and pretty much anyone else on ADSL this results in incredibly slow downloads since the upstream swamps the downstream.

I noticed this morning that it was currently trying to pre-load 3.1.0 and that it reckoned 8 hours for ~600Mb (this on a connection that gets me roughly 3Mbit/s). I killed it, found a torrent link on the Patch Mirrors wiki page]http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors]Patch Mirrors wiki page (http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors) and it's done in 45 mins. Plus I can leave it open as long as I like uploading at a rate my connection can handle without killing the pipe for everything else in the house and without having to fuck about with my router settings because the Blizz downloader is a fussy bitch.

Why do they insist on using that piece of crap? </rant?


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Trippy on March 19, 2009, 03:23:56 AM
It's been a Blizzard tradition to write crappy networking software since the dawn of Battle.net.



Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: raydeen on March 19, 2009, 03:33:56 AM
You'll need something to piss and moan about 6 years from now when WoW is 10 and everyone has moved on to DIKU 3.0.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: apocrypha on March 19, 2009, 04:52:07 AM
You'll need something to piss and moan about 6 years from now when WoW is 10 and everyone has moved on to DIKU 3.0.

Haha  :awesome_for_real:

To be fair, returning to WoW after 6 months away and just starting the 70-80 levelling, it's about the only thing I can find to piss and moan about. Everything else is so polished it's blinding.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Cyrrex on March 19, 2009, 05:46:52 AM
That reminds me.  I haven't played WoW for like 4 months, but I'm still subscribed.  I wonder if I should do something about that.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: K9 on March 19, 2009, 05:50:16 AM
I hate the blizzard downloader.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Nonentity on March 19, 2009, 08:22:44 AM
I always download patches from Fileplanet, but to be fair, I've used the Blizzard downloader a few times, and it's gotten way, WAY better than it used to be.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Nevermore on March 19, 2009, 08:28:02 AM
Why do they insist on using that piece of crap?

Because they can.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Ironwood on March 19, 2009, 08:30:50 AM
Actually, I was going to post the same thing as the nonentity.

This time around, it actually just went ahead and downloaded and didn't bother me at all.  Strange.

It used to be utter wank.  Now it's just a gentle tugging with wirewool.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Ingmar on March 19, 2009, 10:53:25 AM
I used to be basically unable to use it, then maybe 6 months ago it magically started working acceptably for me. I can't explain it.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Chimpy on March 19, 2009, 12:11:33 PM
I think the reason it works better is simply that blizzard stopped being as cheap and has posted several of their own seeds. Originally they didn't even host more than one seed file, they left that to mirror sites.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: apocrypha on March 19, 2009, 01:01:03 PM
It used to be utter wank.  Now it's just a gentle tugging with wirewool.


Nice image  :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Merusk on March 19, 2009, 02:33:40 PM
I think the reason it works better is simply that blizzard stopped being as cheap and has posted several of their own seeds. Originally they didn't even host more than one seed file, they left that to mirror sites.

This is probably the biggest change.  If they weren't so damned insistent on using their own client, there'd be more seeds.  As it is, once you're patched you close the patcher, removing your upload potential from the stream. Whoops.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Ingmar on March 19, 2009, 02:50:03 PM
I think the reason it works better is simply that blizzard stopped being as cheap and has posted several of their own seeds. Originally they didn't even host more than one seed file, they left that to mirror sites.

This is probably the biggest change.  If they weren't so damned insistent on using their own client, there'd be more seeds.  As it is, once you're patched you close the patcher, removing your upload potential from the stream. Whoops.

They also seem to have made some change to make it handle multiple machines NATted to the same IP address much better than it used to.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: apocrypha on March 19, 2009, 11:45:04 PM
Whatever they've done it still works like shit for me. If the patch is small (like <50Mb) then I don't care about it being slow and fucking my connection up the chocolate starfish, but if it's one of the monster 500+Mb ones then yeah, it can FOAD!


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Azaroth on March 20, 2009, 12:02:20 AM
Maybe they own Fileplanet.


Title: Re: Why does Blizzard persist with their crappy downloader?
Post by: Tale on March 20, 2009, 01:28:29 AM
Answers to your questions:

1. Bittorrent means no load on them from 11.5 million people downloading.
2. Its crappiness does not seem to stop people playing and paying, which is the only thing that matters.
3. Can't fix patcher sorry, busy making money hat.