Downloading the huge updates after not playing for a while ?!

Hi,

I've been away from Guild Wars for about a year. Today, I decided to load the game.. it took the thing 30 mins to update, and then the main screen loaded. As I opened an old Factions character, I noticed there were 12,500 files to download.. it was going at 100 kb / sec, but after an hour, it got through only about 100 of those. Not even 1% of the download was done.

I'm not willing to leave my computer on for 125 hours. Is there a way to manually download these files somewhere ? Moreover, should I expect similar download screens for every new territory in the game ???

Sweet mother of god... His download speed is too low to download the incremental updates, and you're telling him to download the entire game? That's a 3.6 gigabyte download.

Anyway, to crispycrepe14: No, there is no way of downloading the updates separately, they are streamed on-demand. However, it sounds like you had very low download speed, as the updates for any given area shouldn't be very big, and should easily download in an hour at 100KB/s. At the log-in screen, do you have a little lightning symbol in one of the corners of the screen? If so, the game is still downloading general updates, and that may be why it was so slow to download the area-specific updates.

(And yeah, the game really has changed a lot in the last year.)

This is kind of related... but I'm uploading the .dat file (as of just a few days ago) to my FTP server.

I was gonna make a thread about it, giving people the alternative of using an FTP download as opposed to the in-game download scheme. Also some people use download managers or whatever, which I believe makes things go faster sometimes?

Cyberduck is alerting me that there is still about 11 hours left till its done... but I will make a post when its done if anybody is interested.

Did you minimize GW while you were updating? I did while I was updating my game the other day to browse the net and it got stuck at 1%. Let it do its own thing quietly after that with no problems.

If you run -image, do it while you're at work/school or sleeping or when you know you'll be out of the house. Especially if you're on a slow connection.

my dl speed is under 20kb/s took me about a month to get the whole .dat file downloaded.. Just leave it going over night or when your out

actually, i did have that lightning symbol. i left it loading for a few minutes, and it finished updating on the main login screen. still, when i actually load a character, it takes a while -- it's not a very slow download; it's at 100-150 kb/sec, sometimes 200/kb, which, from what i've read, is average. i was just watching those files -- 4,336.. 4,335.. 4,334. no luck. even leaving this overnight, or a whole day, won't do much. there are just too many files after not touching the game for over a year. with old characters, it's even more -- 12,300 files. simply unbelievable.

hmmm, don't know if that -image command will be any faster. doubt it.

If you're getting an average of 150 kilobyte per second in download, then a complete download of the entire game (the -image switch) should take a little less than 7 hours.

That equals a 1.2 mbit broadband connection, so presumably you've got a 2mbit and not quite perfect connection (e.g. wireless router)?

Actually, that reminds me: try restarting your router. Just unplug its power cord for a few seconds. Many, perhaps all, consumer-level routers have memory leaks and tend to drop drastically in throughput after being continuously running for a week or so.

FWIW, the download speed from Anet appear to be capped at about 650KB/s, so up to a connection speed of roughly 5MBit you should see improvement, but after that it levels out - e.g. I get no faster than that with my 100MBit.