Comments on the other post reminded me of how patching can be done well: City of Heroes, yet again leading the industry from five years ago. Patches pre-load, with this being an automatic option when you log off in the week before a major patch. This does not help much if you are returning to see the new stuff, but current players have it pre-loaded. (Again, yay for Steam for doing that on upcoming releases.) That frees up bandwidth for those returning players.
Note two different parts: automatically updating without more clicks, and it does this as an option when you log off. It does not keep you from playing right now, which is what we all want. I believe the PlayNC updater will do something similar to what I like with Steam’s automatic updates, but I do not keep it running because I rarely have multiple NCSoft games active at once.
: Zubon
That does sound nice!
But it’s hard not to be jaded against the hope that such good ideas will become popular, when we still live in a world where some MMOs make you wait through the 30-second log-out before you can CLOSE THE PROGRAM. manwhat. Need and alt-F4 macro. :P
LoTRO has decided that pre-patches are bad, it seems, having given up on one for SoM. The post from the devs is here on the subject: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?p=4207792#post4207792
Considering there is no other way to get the media for the game (it’s digital only), this has to be the worst idea ever concieved in this game, and that is coming from the perspective of a person who really likes both the game and the quality of the dev work normally.
Yes and no.
I totally hate the Blizzard Background Downloader, which seems to be similar to what you mentioned.
I don’t want ANY application hogging my bandwidth and downloading stuff when I didn’t tell it to.
Fully agree with the “1 click from start of download to playable game” though.
CoH’s prepatcher is completely obvious about what it’s doing and can be cancelled at any time, so I wouldn;t say it’s all that bad.
And for my money, Guild Wars’ patching method is perhaps one of the best there’s ever been. The only way it could be better is if it was predictive, so that it starts patching area two while you’re fighting through area 1.
Turbine has been doing well for me with DDO and the Turbine download manager for me.. I’ve set it to just go ahead and update as it pleases, downloading only when my (always-on cable) connection is idle. I’ve never even seen it have to apply a patch, let alone download it when I want to play.
The initial download was also pretty nice, letting me start to play once it had the character generator and starting island, while getting the rest of the game ready as I rolled up and did tutorial type things.
Guild Wars was great IMHO, pre-loading patches and streaming in new content as well. I remember being amazed at seeing the little lightning bolt indicating new stuff was downloading for the game back when it first launched.
From personal experience, it seems to be a general rule of thumb that if they have a stable and have finally made the jump to having their own download manager to work with all of them, they’re pretty good about it.
Most NCsoft titles are good about it really, thanks to the Launcher. Turbine, as mentioned before is also good about it. Haven’t looked into SOE lately though… everyone else to my knowledge is sub-par.
I like being able to tab out during patching and do other stuff, such as read and post on these blogs. I’m hardly ever in a rush to log in and I welcome the slow lead-in of a patch downloading.
Are people really so impatient that they must log in with one keystroke right the second they sit down at the PC? I’d say, as a rule, I take between 30 minutes and an hour between clicking on the icon to start the game loading and when I actually start playing. I very often sit here posting with the log-in music playing for half an hour or so in the background, or my characters idling on character select.
I can’t pretend I would actually MISS patching if it was all seamlessly backgrounded, but it in no way irritates or annoys me. It’s a thing in and of itself, and it has its own pleasures and attractions, as all things do. I used to really enjoy trying to read the filenames in EQ as they flicked past. I’d try to guess from the names what might have been changed. On a really long patch, I’d sit and read them out and Mrs Bhagpuss and I would speculate on what we might see different when we logged in.
There’s treasure everywhere.
I’m going with “yes.” If I have an hour to play tonight, and it takes 30 minutes to patch, I am not going to have time to find a group, get to wherever we’re going, and do anything meaningful.