Posts with tag downloading

It's patch day, of course, and people are having plenty of troubles with upgrading their clients to the latest 3.1 version. But worry not -- most of the issues we're seeing, while relatively widespread, should be fixed by the time the realms come back online. Here's a few tips to help you get through the time of trouble.

Help! My patch isn't downloading? It's stuck at 68%/73%/xx%!
It probably is downloading -- be patient and let it run. Blizzard uses a Bittorrent-based system to distribute the game's patches through the official client, and those systems depend not just on Blizzard and their ability to distribute the patch, but also how much of the patch all of your peers have. If everyone around you has xx%, that's all you'll get for now. But an hour from now, someone will have spread the full patch around, and then you'll pick it up no problem. Patience is a virtue, and until the realms come back up, you can't play anyway.

Also, the patcher will stop showing progress around 70% or so -- at that point it'll start installing the patch, and you'll need to click another button to see installation progress. But if you just let it run, it'll update.

What does "The tracker is not responding" mean?
Another Bittorrent issue that should resolve itself after a little while. The patch will need some time to disseminate, and if you get a message like this, it just means your client hasn't found all of the connections that it can. It will.

I get a weird "Unable to Validate Game Version" message when I log in. Is my client broken?
No. Blizzard's servers aren't all upgraded yet (hence the reason we can't play). When they are all upgraded, your client's version will match the server's, and everything will be hunky dory.

I'll admit it-- I'm a lazy addon user. Whenever Blizzard updates the client, I always manage to forget about my addons. I'll log in, realize I have no addons working, and then jump back out and just "enable out-of-date addons." Eventually, those addons will show bugs, so I'll log back out, disable them, and then keep playing without them for a while.

And sooner or later, as happened this past weekend, someone will point out that I'm not running KTM, or that I don't have the latest version of CTRaid up and running, so I'll write down a list of everything I need, go and download them all at once, and refresh them all completely. When I do this, it's a good feeling. It makes the game seem new again to me-- everything works, and everything does what I want it to once again.

Until Blizzard puts out a patch, and then the whole grueling process starts over. I would just download new addons when a new patch drops, but addon authors aren't all on the same schedules. And I know programs like the WowAceUpdater help (by checking for updates for me), but so far I've never gotten around to installing those programs either.

But that's just me, and I've got to deal with my own problems. How often do you refresh your addons completely? Do you have a good system for keeping your addons up to date, or, like me, do you only get around to redownloading everything when something stops working?

Today's release of patch 1.11 was the first chance we had to see how the new background downloader application would help us on patch day.   The full patch file ended up being about 150MB, but for me, the background downloader had previously snagged 127MB of that, making the patch download fairly quick and painless.  Of course patch day itself wasn't completely painless - the servers came up a few hours later than anticipated and the login server was sluggish when things first started coming online, but over-all the patching process seemed to go fairly smoothly.  Did anyone have any negative experiences with the patch downloading process today?

If you happened to attempt to multi-task while playing Warcraft today, you may have noticed the Blizzard Background Downloader running, downloading a file with an unusually generic name of "wow-patch."  So was some kind of patch released today?  Well... no.  However, there's an official post explaining exactly what is happening here.  Before the background downloader was implemented, on patch day millions of people would be attempting to grab the patch at the same time - and my experience with this has been entirely negative.  With the background downloader, whenever you log on to play, you'll be checking for updated files and start downloading them (very slowly - as to not interrupt your play-time).  So as Blizzard finalizes parts of the next patch, the downloader is already grabbing them, which means that come patch day, you should already have most of the patch, making getting patched up quick and painless.  I guess we'll wait and see how well it works in the end...!