Extremely slow updates & downloads

So, I recently bought the Trilogy on steam (having previously owned the origional from ages ago (retail boxset, and long-forgotten account details...)) and, after creating my character (and noticing the fact that it wanted to download 32,000 files for the first city), I decided it'd be best to just use -image and do somthing else while it downloads.

Frankly put, I'm getting an absolutely pathetic speed for the download.
Whereas I got roughly ~4.5mb/s for the download from Steam itself, after booting this up, I'm lucky to even scratch 100kb/s.

There is absolutely nothing on my end that would cause this (no traffic shaping from ISP, nothing that would interfere with the transfer (I've disabled my VPN for now), nothing running that would have any impact on it what-so-ever etc.)
To avoid making this page much longer than need be, this is a link to an image of both my connection speed and the speed I'm getting from the downloader: http://i.imgur.com/TY7Q0.png

While I understand that some slowdowns are expected (and likely) due to the possibly vast distances between me and the servers, I can't help but feel that slowdown should not be on the verge of more than 45x slower.

I'm certainly looking forward to playing it again but, preferably, I'd like to do that -before- GW2 is released. >.>
Any and all help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Not much you can do, it might just be a high load on the download server. When I downloaded huge amount of files, the transfer rate was very unstable. But when I left it online during the night it was still done in maybe 3 hours when I estimated probably the double time.

Around a year or so ago, GW went down for a day or so and they moved servers (read: downgraded them to shitty ones).

I used to download maps at 250k, and since they moved them 15k or so if we are lucky here in Australia.

Fortunately GW doesn't require much in the way of bandwidth to play so you will be fine once downloads complete

Note that when you buy a game on Steam, it downloads it from the Steam servers. Guild Wars updates, however, are downloaded directly from Arenanet. The two speeds you mention are thus not related to one another.

As it has been mentioned above, this is (sadly) the speed you will get when downloading content from Arenanet.

I'm aware of this. I was referencing the fact I'm on a 50mbit/s connection (with around 45mb/s being what I actually get after overhead etc.), and that I'm barely even getting 1/45th of that.

The fact that they also seem inclined to send you every file individually as opposed to a cache or compressed archive (like many, many other games in existence) is also slightly strange. This will just cause problems for a lot of people with standard HDDs, since read/write speed is typically much faster on one continous file than, say, 130000 tiny seperate files. Last of all, the game is on Steam anyways - why not just use their content servers?

I'll just deal with it for now, I guess. Here's to hoping for modern server equipment for GW2!

Their archive system was designed to work this way. Files are downloaded on the fly so the game came be played without downloading the entire archive first. Therefore, no two dat files are alike — each one may have their files downloaded in different orders and in different locations/offsets inside the archive.

In all likeliness, GW2 will use a very similar archive system (with the flaws in this one improved upon).

last patch downloaded at 2kbs this morning for me

Not much you can do but if you create/copy a shortcut to GW.exe with the -image switch and use that before going to bed once in a while, or when they've posted update notes.

So I recently have purchased the game and its just impossible to download at this speed. I average at 30/KBps and I did the math it would take about 30+ hours download time to download the whole game.

I have tried the -image command and it still doesn't raise the download speed.

What I really need from the community or Aranet is to upload the latest files to somewhere else (rapidshare, mediafire, torrent) and let me download them from there.

Is there any place else I can download the files? Its just so hard to watch and wait the 0% bar in the download client

-image won't affect your download speed...if anything it'll make it take longer because you asked the game to download EVERYTHING before it started, not just the starting cities etc that it normally would.

Short of finding a retail ISO somewhere that you can download and image to install, I don't know how you're going to get it much faster than that. With that said though you would have to be really suspicious of ISOs because they could have keyloggers etc in them designed to rip off your account info later.