06-22-2006, 09:29 PM
Quote:One more thing, then I'm out of this post:
When something goes wrong, some people will complain.
When something doesn't, most people won't generally speak up.
So even if the forums were deluged with tons of people complaining, you can hardly call that a majority because you don't know how many people are NOT complaining or have no complaint. There also exists no evidence that a majority of people had an easy time.
Just because our little subsection of people had issues (also not a majority of us) doesn't mean there was a problem at large either.
Generalizations piss me off.
Sure, generalizations irk me too.
However, I have no trouble believing that a large percentage of people have trouble with the downloader.
I am pretty computer-literate, writing software for a living. The downloader is very slow for me; I get about 30K/sec at most, intermittently (I can d/l 100K/sec steadily from other sites). It claims I am behind a firewall, despite the fact that I have cleared out all the mentioned ports a few times (and indeed the Blizzard torrent app is uploading to other people, somewhat faster than I am able to download.)
Does it slow itself down because it thinks I am being 'selfish' (behind a firewall) and keeping my bandwidth to myself??
It's true you mostly hear from the complainers. On the other hand, most people who have a bad experience don't complain about it; they just struggle with it.
My most recent download experience was the worst. It seemed slower than usual. I left it running all day while I was at work but my wife shut off my comp (didn't tell her I was dng). Finished the download, but something got damaged, because the patcher failed halfway through. The Blizzard repair utility reported nothing wrong. Downloading the patch again didn't help. I eventually got things working by downloading the full (1.3 -> 1.11) patch executable.
Anyhow, I don't think Blizzard's downloader really works, and I think they should provide something better.
If something basically fails for even 15% of your customers, and they depend on mirror sites to get YOUR patch, then I think your software has failed. If your software works by taking 8 hrs to download your patch, I still think you have failed. If your software needs Joe User to adjust obscure router settings, then you have failed.