How much traffic does GW require?

Hi everyone,

I know that my question sounds pretty strange but I'm currently living in Australia and unfortunately the Internet is pretty expensive here. Things like flatrates etc. aren't really normal... pretty much everything is based on a fixed volume .

Therefore I'm wonderin how much traffic is required to play Guild Wars.
Of course I'm aware of the fact that this strongly depends on how much and for how long I'm gonna play. I'd just appreciate if you could tell me just more or less how much traffic is needed when playing... let's say... 15-20 hours a week.

I'd would very much appreciate every piece of help/advise you can share!
- thovader

You can limit yourself to any amount of hours. There is no required time investment. It is designed for casual play with no penalties for inactivity.

But it is very addictive.

Thanks a lot for your quick reply, but I didn't mean that I'm somehow forced to play the game !

What I meant is: if I'm playing 15-20 hours a week. How much traffic, i.e. how much MB or GB, would I have downloaded/used in this time?

I hope this makes more sense .

Old thread but might be helpful for you.

http://guildwars.incgamers.com/showthread.php?t=348907

Basically, not much.

Right click on the desktop link that starts GW. Select Properties. Look at Target, go to the end of that line past the parentheses and add -perf to the end of the line. You will now see how much download bandwidth you are using displayed in the upper middle right while you play the game. Upload is much less than that.

You should be able to check your total download on your ISP's website.

If not you can install Net Meter. It is free, fairly popular, and never caused me any problems. Google for Net Meter, think CNet has it among other sites. It is a 1.2 MB download.

@ SkekSister:
Cool, thanks a lot for this one. If those figures are accurate then I won't have any problems whatsoever with my 4 GB package .

@ wilebill:
Also thanks for this shortcut description but I don't even have the game yet . Before I actually buy it, I wanted to make sure that it doesn't use too much traffic because of my 4 GB cap.

My bf has a 5Gb a month limit, and doesn't have a problem having GW running for about 6 hours a day (not necessarily playing), using Vent, browsing etc. You should be fine unless you're downloading lots. Just bear in mind the initial upgrade to the current version may be large - the current client is around 4Gb in size and the images on any disks are quite old. If you have a friend who plays Guild Wars, it may be worth copying their files to stop you having bandwidth issues.

Unfortunately I haven't got anyone who could give me their files in order to save traffic, but thanks for the hint anyway.
So then I should definitely be fine with my 4 GB cap... thanks a lot, all of you!

Sorry but I just thought about something else regarding this issue and the streaming technology used in Guild Wars.

Let's say I successfully installed the game for the first time using the DVD. I didn't download any updates, patches etc. using the "-image" command yet. When I now start it, did I understand it correctly that GW will only download files that are absolutely necessary in order to play it?
So if I create a character and just stay in the starting zone without moving or doing anything else, would it continue to download information for all the other zones I haven't been in yet or would it just download the starting zone information and stop afterwards?

When I then go on and enter a new zone, it would now continue to download all information for that zone, is that correct?
I'm just asking because of my Internet traffic cap of 4 GB/month. If the starting zone for instance only "weighs" 2 GB in data while the next zone would "weigh" 3 GB (just an example), I wouldn't be able to leave the starting zone within this month... if you know what I mean.

Wow, this is complicated... I hope you guys understood anyway what I mean .

Thanks a again for your help,
thovader

if you don't have a complete and up to date GW.dat, the game will passively stream data while you play. so yes, your bandwidth consumption without a full GW.dat will be higher. how much higher... none of us really know. i can tell you, that GW will only start streaming passively when you are mostly idle. while you are out there doing quests and beating up monsters, it generally won't download anything to ensure good latency.

If you have a friend who plays GW you can simply copy their .dat file and use it on your own computer, saving you the download.

I live in Melbourne, and when I first started playing Guild Wars I was playing nearly every day, for an average of 6 hours. I never had a problem with bandwidth consumption, and I was on a 10GB plan.

If you really want I could probably mail you a burnt copy of the .dat file if you're really that worried about the download. It's about 4GB.

Thanks a lot for the offer but I don't want you to actually pay for sending me the file... but your offer is greatly appreciated !

I fist thought about something like asking somebody to upload the file to a server or an Internet hosting service like RapidShare or something similar.
I would then download the file from work and copy it to my local machine at home.
But to upload 4 GB of data would take for ever to upload so I guess I'm gonna try to update GW somewhere with free WLAN access .

Once again, thank you all for your help!

The whole gw.dat file is approx. 3.7GB in size. So if you download the whole game via internet, you would not transfer more than that. If you install the game from DVD, only the updates since creation of the DVD will be transferred. It is probably no more than a few MB, perhaps 100-200MB. This is a one-time transfer.

The daily bandwidth during gameplay is negligible. As far as I know, the game is designed to support even 56k modem users.

So I recommend:
- install the game from DVD
- start playing
- don't worry

If you bought via internet and have no DVD, download the game from the Ncsoft website and start out in one campaign. The initial download is perhaps 800MB-1GB. You download only the data for areas you access. If you progress slowly through the game, you stretch the complete 3.7GB over many weeks or months. As measure how much you downloaded, you can watch the gw.dat in the Guild Wars directory with Windows Explorer.

So my recommendation for the internet download:
- install the game from the Ncsoft website
- start playing and don't hurry all the way through the game
- don't worry

Hehe, good one .
If all updates are really under 500 MB when installing from DVD then I don't have to worry at all. Even 1 GB should be fine I guess.

Thanks again !