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Game updaters using Bittorrent

Zap

Zap

Elite Member
Last night my wife went to play WoW and it started doing an update. It was going really slow and said "your computer may be behind a firewall." I looked up how to fix the problem and besides two TCP ports to forward, it suggested an additional port range of 6881-6889 or something. I was like "hey that looks like the original Bittorrent port range." I was right. Seems like the WoW updater (and also Steam) uses Bittorrent as the backend to save on bandwidth costs.

Now, that's a great idea and I support it, but IMO the implementation is flawed. Why do I say this? Well, after "fixing" the port forwarding, the WoW updater worked faster and didn't complain, but we could barely hit web pages. Most current Bittorrent clients allow you to cap the upload speeds to avoid these problems. Wouldn't it be trivial to implement a quick upload bandwidth test to the Blizzard servers, and then cap the upload at about 75% of the tested bandwidth? That way while the update is downloading you can at least go check email without Gmail/Yahoo timing out.
 
Originally posted by: Zap
Last night my wife went to play WoW and it started doing an update. It was going really slow and said "your computer may be behind a firewall." I looked up how to fix the problem and besides two TCP ports to forward, it suggested an additional port range of 6881-6889 or something. I was like "hey that looks like the original Bittorrent port range." I was right. Seems like the WoW updater (and also Steam) uses Bittorrent as the backend to save on bandwidth costs.

Now, that's a great idea and I support it, but IMO the implementation is flawed. Why do I say this? Well, after "fixing" the port forwarding, the WoW updater worked faster and didn't complain, but we could barely hit web pages. Most current Bittorrent clients allow you to cap the upload speeds to avoid these problems. Wouldn't it be trivial to implement a quick upload bandwidth test to the Blizzard servers, and then cap the upload at about 75% of the tested bandwidth? That way while the update is downloading you can at least go check email without Gmail/Yahoo timing out.
Click to expand...

It's the worst crap out there, Blizzard is just too cheap to spend the money on the bandwith to get you the patch themselves. The worst part is if you have more then one PC this becomes a major PITA! I always just end up downloading the patch elsewhere.
 
At least it allows you to disable P2P sharing. But I ended up downloading the update from a mirror @ 500k/sec

Couldn't wait for a 76 meg file @ 3-4k/sec 😀
 
Meh, it's fast enough for me.
I actually should go download it right now, though... =D

EDIT: It finished in the time it took me to piss.
=D
 
I don't know why everyone always has problems with Blizzard's torrent dowloader. I always get the patches at 150-200k/s with it.
 
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