How true, how true...

[Lissa]

You seem to be my sticking point is in believing anyone had difficulties. It's not. It's this "vast majority" your spouting and yet have completely and utterly failed to show. I saw about the same amount of people complain about the patch as mentioned how easy it was. Many, many more people said nothing at all. That's your "vast majority"?

Were you even paying attention to any of the boards at all on Tuesday or Yesterday Quark? There were tons of people mentioning issues with the downloader or outright just going to other sites to get the download. Look at the thread on this board, look at the thread in the General BS board at CA, then look at the crap that is all over the Blizzard boards. Sounds to me like a lot more people had trouble with the downloader than people that didn't. (So far, only you and Mio have spoken up about not having issues and you and three people that you talked to didn't have any, yet over half the Lurkers on SR had issues downloading the patch Quark, that's 50% atleast right there and I will bet that is low for the number of people with issues downloading this patch.) Just because you aren't looking for it, doesn't mean it wasn't a more of a mess than you think.

Qualifier missing: "for you". You're saying my experience that is was the best patch simply doesn't exist? I must be imagining it.

When a majority of people are having issue (atleast 50% of the SR Lurker population did), that tells me that it wasn't the best patch at all. A lot of people have experienced bad downloads before, but when the number of people having issues increases, you cannot say that this is the best patch experience by far.

Of course, significantly cheaper is not equal to "doesn't cost a dime". It's an exaggeration to say Blizzard uses no bandwidth of their own to push patches.

Quark, if the other method that other MMORPGs used is so bleeding expensive, why don't they do what Blizzard does when it comes to downloading patches? And fact is, the number of concurrent players on SR at Peak isn't that much different than the number of concurrent players on other MMORPGs out there during peak. So why is it that Blizzard goes with this when they have nearly $50 Million coming in each month (not everyone is pay month to month, some are paying for 6 months at a time) chooses to use this downloader when other MMORPGs out there choose not to and probably are paying similar bandwidth prices (in truth, I bet Blizzard is getting a deal because they are using so much bandwidth)? If it was such a bandwidth issue price, don't you think the other MMORPGs would have jumped on the Blizzard bandwagon? So why haven't they Quark, because if it was revenue saving, I would bet they would do it in a heart beat.

BitTorrent is notoriously awful without enough seeders, and people are pretty quick about making sure they don't become a seeder by closing their connection once their download is complete. The last 10% or so in particular is always a sticking point.

Quark, were your paying attention to what I said? Something changed in the downloader. Prior to 1.11, a number of people were not getting the message, "you are behind a firewall," from the downloader, but as soon as the background downloader went in, this started occuring. I don't know about what piece of hardware you use for your internet connection, but I use a Cisco 678 which has some built in features to help protect the Cisco from intrusion attacks from outside sources. I had the Cisco 678 setup to download without this firewall issue before 1.10, but now with 1.11, Blizzard changed something and the 678 isn't getting through like it use to (and there are a lot of people having this issue Quark, I'm not the only one). Blizzard changed around something in the downloader, probably the ports it uses, but refuses on their technical support pages to update those changes (I've had the ports openned that they say to have openned for months now and had little to no issue with the downloader, now I get "you're behind a firewall".) Something changed Quark. You may not have seen it, but other are.

Here's one area where I partially agree with you. But isn't Stormrage in bad enough shape without people leeching bandwidth to download a patch? Besides the fact that what works for many other MMORPGs may be complete failures for WoW. Having bandwidth available that you only utilize at most once a month is much easier for a company to stomach when it's 1/10th the bandwidth required.

If that were true Quark, why do other companies continue with the method I outlined while Blizzard refuses? Blizzard has upwards of $50 Million coming in a month on WoW, they probably have such a large amount of Bandwidth need that they get a break on the cost (the more Bandwidth you buy, the less per MBit you spend). These other companies have less bandwidth yet, they go with the method of a direct download while Blizzard that has more bandwidth and pays less per MBit than the competition refuses to take on that model. Blizzard is not hurting for cash by a long shot Quark (most other MMORPGs cannot feasibly put up a test realm each month for the general user populace to try, let alone 2 to 3 like Blizzard does). The reason Blizzard is king in regards to MMORPGs, as I said in my previous post, is game play, they have the best game play of anyone on the block, but they have by far the worst patching scheme of any MMORPG (and it's the one complaint you hear over and over about Blizzard from Game Reviewers when they look at MMORPGs).