Please make a better download system

[TheFibrewire.6845]

Anet your download system is ultimate garbage, it is so slow and it download so many tiny files, please at this age allow us to download in one go or give us option to, this system is causing so much issues for people who live outside USA and Europe. You client needs connection with US servers and in order to download the game fully additional VPN is required. This is a very discouraging for new player. So many players I have know in other discord community who wanted play GW 2 comes back saying they can't download. Majority of people are stuck at 34% and the download goes down to 1MB - 2MB and then 0KB. They start downloading game at 30-40MBs and reach 34%, only to dip later and then stuck for eternity.

 

You recently announced living world story was given for free, so many people in discord communities failed to download the game and claim them in correct. time, if you can't provide a proper service then why even announce such events?

 

If we contact support, they reply with a standard copy pasta message on packet loss. Please for Balthazar's sake get your kitten together and provide better online service. From the start itself Anet hates people playing their game and they are on a crusade to ward off players, right from the UX of downloading and installing the game.

[LucianDK.8615]

Never had any issues downloading the game or updates.

[kharmin.7683]

GW2 is hosted on AWS throughout the world.  Maybe check with your local ISP?  What country are you in?

[Astralporing.1957]

Never had any problem with it (in fact, it's probably the best download/update system i have seen so far in any MMORPG i have tried). And no, i do not live in US, or anywhere close to it.

[sevenDEADLY.5281]

This is the only MMO I've ever played that doesn't have hours long downtime with server updates.  Every few weeks its like a 30 second update and boom back in the game.  Of all the misinformed ridiculous posts I've ever seen on these forums, this one is by far the most laughable.

[Healix.5819]

4 hours ago, TheFibrewire.6845 said:

Majority of people are stuck at 34% and the download goes down to 1MB - 2MB and then 0KB. They start downloading game at 30-40MBs and reach 34%, only to dip later and then stuck for eternity.

That's usually caused by a bug on server's side. The servers apparently don't check for errors, so when they fail to download a file, they'll simply host whatever it was able to get. This causes GW2 to get stuck, since the file is corrupted.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Healix.5819

[costepj.5120]

4 hours ago, TheFibrewire.6845 said:

 it download so many tiny files, please at this age allow us to download in one go

Doesn't really matter how many files constitute a download; the transfer will always be broken down into packets for transmission. The anet approach to patches divides the transfer into essential files and files you only need when loading specific maps etc. That way you can play the game as soon as the essential portion completes and let the remainder load if/when you need it.

 

For the record, I haven't had any issues with GW2 downloads, even when I had a much slower internet connection back in 2012.

[vinterberg.2783]

It doesn't download alot of tiny files, the file counter you see are "virtual files" within the one big data file called gw2.dat, so don't take that counter litterally. It downloads that one big data file, which contains all the files for the game, which they most likely have their own internal file structure for.

[misterman.1530]

4 hours ago, TheFibrewire.6845 said:

If we contact support, they reply with a standard copy pasta message on packet loss. Please for Balthazar's sake get your kitten together and provide better online service. From the start itself Anet hates people playing their game and they are on a crusade to ward off players, right from the UX of downloading and installing the game.

Anet and the AWS servers won't have anything to do with packet loss. That's on your end. Specifically, either your ISP's end OR you have a misconfigured router/modem - perhaps your MTU is the problem. To check that, go to a command prompt and type:

ping www.google.com -f -l 1492

Note: you can use any website

If you see the message:

Packet needs to be fragment but DF set

Keep lowering the number (I use increments of 10 at first) until you get to one that doesn't show that message. Then go up until you get to the highest number that doesn't show that message. Your MTU should be set to 28 more than that number.. For example, my best ping test was 1464 so I add 28 and made my MTU 1492.

More complete explanation here:

https://kb.netgear.com/19863/Ping-Test-to-determine-Optimal-MTU-Size-on-Router

 

[Mungrul.9358]

I don't have a problem with download speeds at all.

But after an update, I know I'll have to launch the game twice, as the game runs really badly on the first launch.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has this problem, or if it's unique to me.

[Sobx.1758]

No problem with the download here.

[Astralporing.1957]

6 hours ago, TheFibrewire.6845 said:

Anet your download system is ultimate garbage, it is so slow and it download so many tiny files, please at this age allow us to download in one go or give us option to, this system is causing so much issues for people who live outside USA and Europe.

Actually, if you have problems downloading it now, it would be worse if you were downloading one big file. The "one big patch" approach, usually ends with you getting your connection cut at 98%, and having to start from zero once again.

Not to mention this way Anet can give you a real differential download (where you download only the files you actually need), while in the one big patch version you'd be downloading one full update package (including probably files you happen to already have), or even worse, a set of consecutive update packages with half of the files they contain being mostly the same...

[costepj.5120]

2 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

I don't have a problem with download speeds at all.

But after an update, I know I'll have to launch the game twice, as the game runs really badly on the first launch.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has this problem, or if it's unique to me.

Do you let it autostart as soon as the essential files have downloaded? Because it might still be downloading the remainder in the background and impacting game performance? I make a point of waiting the extra seconds until everything has downloaded each time before logging in.

[Khisanth.2948]

5 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Never had any problem with it (in fact, it's probably the best download/update system i have seen so far in any MMORPG i have tried). And no, i do not live in US, or anywhere close to it.

The only possible gripe might be the lack of any indicator for the total download size. Relevant for people downloading over a metered connection.

 

30 minutes ago, costepj.5120 said:

Do you let it autostart as soon as the essential files have downloaded? Because it might still be downloading the remainder in the background and impacting game performance? I make a point of waiting the extra seconds until everything has downloaded each time before logging in.

That is why I always fully patch using the -image option although it shouldn't be necessary anymore. Back before I upgraded to an SSD I could actually hear the drive speed changing each time a file finished downloading in the background which then needed to be saved to disk which coincided with a stutter in game.

 

Based on some of the "fixes" people have posted. Frequently the issue seems to be people suffering from bad DNS servers. Bad because they are providing outdated information. If you ever had to mess with -assetsrv or you host file this would be you.

 

[Mungrul.9358]

1 hour ago, costepj.5120 said:

Do you let it autostart as soon as the essential files have downloaded?

 

Nah, have always let downloads complete before playing.

Odd one, and interesting to see nobody else reporting the same behaviour.

[Gibson.4036]

1 hour ago, costepj.5120 said:

Do you let it autostart as soon as the essential files have downloaded? Because it might still be downloading the remainder in the background and impacting game performance? I make a point of waiting the extra seconds until everything has downloaded each time before logging in.

Agreed.

"Playable" is a lie. 😄

 

[LSD.4673]

13 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

Doesn't really matter how many files constitute a download; the transfer will always be broken down into packets for transmission

Well...yeah, but that's like saying "it doesn't matter how many GB the game is, your OS will always process individual bits".

 

As far as i'm aware, each individual file has to be compressed and archived with the enormous .dat file. I can imagine it's quite slow on a HDD. On an SSD, of course, it's no bother. It's also pretty RAM intensive, which is an issue i had with my old machine.

Pros and cons.

[Zavijah.2695]

I am personally thankful for how the client downloads, manages and allows for the server to be up nearly all the time.

 

maybe OP should have a look at FFXIV launcher when downloading, or the ESO one instead on the forced patch nights for some perspective.

[Ben K.6238]

I have plenty of concerns with latency, but ANet's server bandwidth and patching system have nearly always been high quality from my experience, all the way back to 2005. Something might be broken in the route, but there's nothing wrong with their systems.

[Astralporing.1957]

3 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

Well...yeah, but that's like saying "it doesn't matter how many GB the game is, your OS will always process individual bits".

 

As far as i'm aware, each individual file has to be compressed and archived with the enormous .dat file. I can imagine it's quite slow on a HDD. On an SSD, of course, it's no bother. It's also pretty RAM intensive, which is an issue i had with my old machine.

Pros and cons.

What you seem to be unaware of is that is also the case when you download one big single patch. That one also consists of a lot of compressed files, that need to be unpacked at some point. The primary difference is at which point the loader does the unpacking/repacking. The single-file-download ones simply do it as the last point of the download process.

Notice, btw, that if something does go wrong at this last point, you will still usually have to redownload that big patch, even though you've already done it completely and it was the unpacking part that went wrong. And if you ever get some of the files corrupted, you have to reinstall whole game from scratch, because there's no way to fix individual files at all.

In GW2, you never have to worry about it, it always downloads only the files you're missing/are broken, without having to reinstall everything from scratch.

Like you said, pros and cons. In my humble opinion, in case of GW2 system, pros heavily outweight the cons.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Astralporing.1957

[Khisanth.2948]

12 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

Well...yeah, but that's like saying "it doesn't matter how many GB the game is, your OS will always process individual bits".

 

As far as i'm aware, each individual file has to be compressed and archived with the enormous .dat file. I can imagine it's quite slow on a HDD. On an SSD, of course, it's no bother. It's also pretty RAM intensive, which is an issue i had with my old machine.

Pros and cons.

That doesn't make any sense. The data should already be compressed on the server. Downloading uncompressed data to then compress it on the client side would be a very stupid design that waste everyone's time and money.

 

The size of the file also doesn't matter either except for the most simplistic compression algorithms but in that case smaller files are better because those simplistic algorithms will want to read in the whole file to do their compression.

 

Since the files seem to be downloaded over HTTP there are actual potential negatives of having many small files versus one large file since that can require additional connections but that has already be fixed by HTTP/1.1 piplining and HTTP/2 multiplexing.

 

What exactly are the cons you are implying?

[LSD.4673]

4 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

That doesn't make any sense. The data should already be compressed on the server. Downloading uncompressed data to then compress it on the client side would be a very stupid design that waste everyone's time and money.

 

The size of the file also doesn't matter either except for the most simplistic compression algorithms but in that case smaller files are better because those simplistic algorithms will want to read in the whole file to do their compression.

 

Since the files seem to be downloaded over HTTP there are actual potential negatives of having many small files versus one large file since that can require additional connections but that has already be fixed by HTTP/1.1 piplining and HTTP/2 multiplexing.

 

What exactly are the cons you are implying?

The way i understand it, the individual files are downloaded as gw2.tmp, but i'm not certain they're in the same compression method used for gw2.dat -- it'd explain why small hotfixes are often tens to even hundreds of megabytes.

The huge .dat archive is then accessed, and each changed file is looked up, swapped and compressed. As the file is some 50-odd GB in size, and made up of 512B blocks with a single MFT referencing each file by number...it's not the most efficient method. Not just in terms of resource usage, either, from the looks of things.

 

Still, it works.

[Obtena.7952]

Wait ... your internet sucks ... so it's Anet's problem?

[Naneel.2348]

I had the same problem after installing  anew. Started with 30mbit/s and on 34% just died. Support couldn't/wouldn't help me. VPN then managed to fix it. That's no problem of internet connection, as literally everything else worked. It seems to be one data having terrible issued being downloaded 🤔.  This problem occured once again for an update, but mostly download is fine and fast.

[kharmin.7683]

What country are you in?