Help with downloading

Hi, I'm a new Guild wars Nightfall fan, and here's my issue.

I'm on a capped internet.
And you know when you have just started playing and go from city to city, when you have never been their before, it downloads the area.
(ranging from 20kb to 20MB)
But i have a unlimited internet at my business, so i want to know, is it possible to download all those updates or loading that it does at once, so that it wont download when i am going between areas?

Some players will save the downloaded files (located on your hard drive in GW folders) to a separate location, to place into a fresh install - stopping the constant downloading when zoning to new areas.

I'm not sure there is a way of obtaining these files without letting them download first time around, unless you could get them off a friend. I'm not sure, but Anet might have the files stored for download somewhere, but I can't seem to remember.

I'll let someone else answer, as I'm not 100%.

Edit: THIS MIGHT HELP!

is it a laptop? that you plan to take to your business?

run guild wars with a command line option of -image. this will download the fully up-to-date gw.dat file.
see http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_line for specific instructions and further details.


if it is a desktop pc, and you plan to download guild wars from your business pc then transfer the game over to your desktop pc via a usb drive or dvd, then what you want to do is simply copy over is the gw.dat file (after doing a full -image download of the gw.dat file of course).

Just to add to snaek's instructions, the full .dat file is just under 4GB in size. It can take hours to download from the ArenaNet site, even with a fast internet service. Your best bet is to begin early in the morning and let it work away all day until you leave.

You can use a 4GB flash drive to transfer it between computers.

cool, thank you all. I'm going to transfer the files on to my laptop as you said, and will run the download "-image" thing.

since its going to over-write my original .dat file will i loose any settings? (save games, ext?)

No, the settings like that are stored server-side. You won't lose interface settings, by example. Your templates are saved in a Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\ folder, iirc, and moving the .dat file around shouldn't interfere with that.

Fyi, you can close the client midway into the -image process. You'll lose some progress, but not all. The whole thing usually takes 3-6 hours to complete, depending on your connection speed.