The WoW Beta Downloader

[DeeBye]

Bittorent is an interesting new technology, but Blizzard's implementation is not so great.  I'm guessing they are only using this for the beta, and didn't spend a whole lot of time tweaking it for that reason.

Well, it is only version 1.0. This is also the first time that bittorrent has ever been used on such a huge scale from a commercial company. There's always bound to be a few bugs to work out.

I bet that bittorrent as a means to mass-distribute large files will become more commonplace in the future. It already is pretty popular among the warez-traders, and it looks like commercial companies are just now starting to see how well it can work in completely legitimate instances such as this. Blizzard is saving a MASSIVE amount of money here, which will cause other companies to take notice.

On my computer, the downloader caused intermittent temporary freezing after a while, and the freezing continued even after closing the downloader.  Had to do a system reset several times before I used a different computer in the house, and had no problems there.

I haven't noticed any severe problems, just a few barely irritating ones.

One thing that I would have liked to have seen was a "pause" feature. The WoW downloader uses as much bandwidth as possible, and with my puny 128/64 connection it takes me a few minutes to just access my e-mail while it's running. That never happens when I download files the olde-fashioned way.

I can't even browse the internet while it's running. Doing so is like browsing with a 4800 baud modem. I always have to stop and restart the downloader when I need to use my computer for internet-related tasks, which takes way too much time IMO. Resuming the beta download takes upwards of 5 minutes right now for me (most of the time is spent checking what's already been downloaded, about 80%), and I have to sit there and wait to click on the license agreement, select the proper folder, and enter in the key.

I wish I could just leave the software running and have the option of pausing its usage of bandwidth. Otherwise I'd like to see a "one-click" method of resuming a download, but I can understand why this is hard to implement due to having to verify a key first.