extremely long download inbetween places

I haven't bought the game, my friend did so I just use his account, and we share. He bought it awhile, and for some reason lost the 2nd CD, so I couldn't install it. I went on the guildwars site and downloaded it instead, pretty fast download. I did his account and password, and it logged me in as if I bought the game; normally.

Now when I made a character it took forever to load the place. Forever as in I thought I had to download a patch. I figured it was the patch so I waited the 30 minutes. Then it was time for me to go into the next zone... the long download happened again, then I was convinced it wasn't a patch but really long loading screens. My friend can go through zones fast like any other game, as can I. But I need to go through the long download first.

Is this normal? Did everyone else go through the long download, then the game was normally loading?... Am I needing the disk or something? Cause I installed the game by the download. Thanks for any help.

You have 2 options:

1) start your guildwars with -image at the end.....this makes the game load all the current content...once its finished u have a fullv version of all current content
(just write "c:/Your_directory/GUILD WARS/gw.exe" -image)

will take a while but after that u can play without anything loading

2) let your friend copy his gw.dat and burn it to cd or something and give it to you...then u download and install gw....stop the download and replace the gw.dat with your friends gw.dat

Atm a full version of the gw.dat is around ~4GB

So make your choice ^^

Ahhh. Thanks, jenny2. Now I know why the download was so fast, I knew it couldn't have been the whole game. Haha, well yea, thanks again. I'll have him give me the files.