Why doesn't Guild wars use bittorrent?

Or does it? It just occurred to me that after installing GW on another machine that using bittorrent would greatly decrease their bandwidth usage.

I think the reason why ANET doesn't use BitTorrent is because BTorrent could easily be used to Pirate games and such, at least that is what I know it is used for, are there any other uses?

I don't see how you could pirate GW when all GW is is a free game client. You pay money to buy a key that lets you get past the logon and into the 3D world.

Anyways... They don't use bittorrent because the installer they supply on the website is simply a client download starter, you don't download the entire game from their site in one package. I know what you mean with bittorrent sort of, but the actual download takes place with the game client connecting to the internet for the first time.

Bittorrent might not be able to host their service too, for a company not only would they have to keep sending updated client full installers to bittorrent but because they are an organization bittorrent might charge them tons of money.

ahh yeah good point, I wasn't using my brain there

Do you mean use a bit torrent type client to host the .dat file?

If so, I agree that would be a good idea, but there are so many "Hit and run"ers (people who download the file then don't bother to share/upload it.) that it could end up being just as slow as the Arena-net servers.


You don't understand how bit torrent works, it's not a file hosting company, it's not even a company (except the actual bit torrent client called "bittorrent".)

Nobody can charge anybody for making a .torrent file (the file used to tell a p2p client where to download the files from) and bittorrent doesn't download the files from one big server that hosts them all, each client uploads the file it's downloaded once it's finished to all the other clients downloading it, maybe this diagram will help.

P2P Network:

Notice the lack of a master server giving the file out to all the clients.

Sorry to go off topic on that but when you said "bit torrent will charge them money" I started raging irl. It would be like the government trying to charge you money to breath, charging you for something they have no right to.

They don't use Bittorent or any P2P communication protocol for a very simple reason:

they don't trust clients (the computers of players) to distribute content of their game, only their server is trusted and allowed to distribute it to others.

This is to prevent corrupted versions of the .dat to circulate (although you can find it on bittorrent sites...).

hash checks ftw

And who's doing the check? The client software! No guarantee about this one unless you got it from the GW website.

This is how you hack heavy-weight crypto stuff, don't try to crack it, change the SW to bypass the check (Sun Zu rule #429).

EDIT: I think the GW client already has some hashchecks in place, see data corruption/correction, but its complex format doesn't make this easy.

They could have the client download a hashcheck program each time the game is loaded, do a hash, compare with ANet's version, and then if the hash checks out use that client's .dat file as a seed. I've installed GW using 'gw -image' to download everything on three computers thus far. That has to be hell on their bandwidth usage with multiple people at any given time doing that.

Stop here: just reverse engineer the program and shunt the hashcheck-downloading part (it can be a very simple thing to change, just one tiny bit sometimes...). Game over.

It's exactly the same inbound bandwidth usage overall for all players (it doesn't matter where the .dat comes from; on the other hand in P2P users would have to upload the file to others which they don't have to do atm), except for Anet who prefers to pay the price of server bandwidth for the benefit of architecture security.