f13.net

This weekend I had the gloriously fortunate oppurtunity to play guildwars on dialup. For all the previous beta tests and the E3 demo I was stuck with lousy broadband. Little did I know what I was missing!

In addition to the hair-pulling frustration of downloading the little patches (ok not so little), I was forced to uproot my fingernails utilizing my favorite pair of pliers each and everytime I zoned, whether I had previously been to that zone or not. This would have been bad enough had I not been subjected to this the first time I entered a multiplayer PVP arena..... and the second... and the fourtieth.

Not only did slow dialup loading make my gaming experience as fun as a homemade sex-change operation performed with tinker toys, but it also interfered with the rest of the teams game. This experience was perfected into a glossy sheen by the remarks of the afformentioned team players' helpful remarks concerning my slow loading.

Arenanet needs to treat this issue as a gamebreaker. If it were only affecting the dialup player themselves, I would say fine let them suffer, but when annoying AOLers ruin my gametime I am not quite as lenient. It isn't the players fault really, blame arenanet for their ingenious state of the art file streaming technology.






Downloading 333k (5KB/sec)                                                                           785,433 files remaining.......

OK, so you've got a point -- and a good one. Send it to Arena.net as a bug.

The first downloads back in November were horrible even for broadband users. Too many people trying to connect and get the code. The downloading via broadband hasn't been painful at all this time -- usually 20 seconds or less. Also helped that I have an  AMD 3200+ with 1GB of RAM. My previous P3 1.2 with 512 MB RAM took a while to download.

Guild Wars will never be playable on dial-up. It cannot be due to their streaming content crap.

I wouldn't be suprised if the final box says "Broadband Required".

Who really still uses narrowband on a normal basis anyway?

Uncle Grimwell?

They don't have a diskcache for map files? That seems a rather strange technical choice.

After you first download it, probably. You still have to download everything. That makes a sad dial-up puppy.

The OP reports long delays "even if I'd been to that zone before" which would seem to indicate not, though it's hard to believe. The amusing thing is it's quite possible nobody noticed because modem users rarely participate in beta's which tend to involve massive initial downloads. And naturally the developers are on a nice connection themselves.

Yeah it seems like it forces you to download files unrelated to the zone you are entering. After a while I guess I got all the files, and it became bearable. The play is still very rubberbandy with dialup though, I wouldn't recommend it at all, although the gameplay is ok otherwise.

Every gamer I know irl excepting myself. It is on the expensive side of things if you have a family + shit job + mortgage (most of my friends).

And they all intended to play this. They won't be. They aren't happy about it.

It's funny that the people this game would appeal to most, budget-minded gamers (lack of subscription fee and all), can't play it, because they are also the most likely to have dial-up.

After a while (a long, long, long, long while) you eventually get most of the files you need and it isnt so much of a problem anymore. I am back on broadband, and the last beta weekend was much better for it.