The Downloading of Vanguard January 8, 2007
Posted by Wilhelm2451 in Vanguard SOH.trackback
Vanguard is in open beta and, because of the whole Station Access lure, I decided I wanted to give it a try.
I saw that it was available for download at FilePlanet, where I have an account. I opened up Firefox because I had some oddball issue with IE and FilePlanet at one time, so I figured I would play it safe. I started the download and it said it would take about 8 hours to move the 16 GB Vanguard_install.zip archive to my machine.
I let it go and went off to do other things.
A little over 6 hours later I checked the machine. Firefox said the transfer was complete. I went to open the archive.
And I could not find it.
It wasn’t in the destination directory. I did a file search on the machine for the archive name, then for files modified in the last 6 hours, and then for files greater than 10GB in size. No joy. The file was not there to be found.
So I tried to start the download again. But, for reasons I do not understand, FilePlanet declined to send me the archive again. No errors. The download just would not start.
What to do?
I remembered seeing on the SOE site, when I got the beta key, that there was a link to download the beta. I decided to try that route.
Via the SOE route, you download the basic game framework, about 3 MB, launch it, and then the patcher downloads everything else.
I kick off the application, got the very familiar SOE launchpad and then the very EQ2-like patcher application. Once the patcher settled down, it reported 10 hours required to download the files. I cancelled the download, played some EQ2 for a bit, then set the patcher running again before bed.
The next morning, as the patcher was finally counting down the last 5 minutes, with me there watching, it suddenly reset the progress bar and the timer. Now it wanted an additional 13 hours. Joy.
I let the patcher run for most of the day. We are planning to move this year, so I have plenty to keep me busy around the house every weekend. (We’ve only been in our house for seven years, how did we collect so much stuff?)
I quit the patcher in the evening to do some other things on the computer. (I probably could have let it run. In fact, I did let it run when I was in WoW for a little while. Go figure.) Then resumed it before I went to bed. Only an hour remained when I turned in for the night.
This morning I got up and check my machine. The patcher was done. The button said “Play.” So what did I do?
I quit the patcher and started it again. Sure enough, there was another file update since I finished up. But it was a small one, just a minute or two and I was back at “Play” again.
Vanguard was on my machine at last. It only took 36 hours to get there.
About a day and a half download for me as well. Once I realized how long it was going to take, I played WOW off and on while it chugged away.
Yes, like so many other things that do not seem to bother WoW, some other game patching in the background seemed to make no difference at all to it.
[...] Enter the 10-day free trial. Digital download, so what the hey. I’ll give it a go. Digital download of the client is about 2.3 GB and a download manager is recommended. Having experienced the challenges of a DL this large with LotRO Beta, I fired up the Get Right, the download manager I found that worked well for that. Apparently all download managers are not made equal and your mileage may vary, so fumble around and find something that works if you don’t have success with the first (or second or third…) one. With four streams pouring in on my cable connection, download time was only about 2 hours. The big advantage of a dl manager like this is even if its screwed up the first or second time, you can get two or three attempts in the time that it would ordinarily take to do one—aka the dreaded “wasted overnight download.” [...]