Something I’ve recently noticed, since I keep so many games (especially MMO’s) installed, are the two distinct policies for patching an MMO.
- Patch and Play. Funcom [see Note 1], NCSoft, Turbine, and every Asian F2P game I’ve tried all use this policy. Run the launcher, it checks for updates and handles any required patching prior to logging in. This is my preferred method as it allows me to keep games up-to-date even if I am not maintaining an active subscription at the time.
- Login Required. Blizzard, Flagship, and SOE are the big three that come to mind here. They ask us to login first, verifying we have an active account, before updating. If our account is inactive, no updates.
The second option provides obvious bandwidth savings to the hosts since only currently active players will be able to download the new data. I have to wonder if it costs them players in the end, however?
Look how many players complained about the size of Vanguard’s installation, something around 17GB. That took quite some time just to install, if I recall, then awhile getting all the updates. I’m only one month inactive so getting GU5 whenever it’s released won’t be that big of a deal but if I’d uninstalled Vanguard, it might be another story. Vanguard’s 17+ GB is chump change compared to Age of Conan…
If I were to have a moment of near-complete neurological failure-level insanity and decided to play WoW again, I’d be looking at installing from the CD and then downloading three and a half years worth of patches via their torrent downloader. Or manually downloading the patches from an external mirror. Either way, I’m guessing I’d be looking at several hours worth of patching alone. Possibly the better part of a day? If I remember, WoW also makes us login after each individual patch so it can check and verify that another patch is needed? If that is still the case, the total patch time would be longer because I’m not going to sit at the computer all day watching 40+ months worth of patcher progress bars scroll by. By the time it’s finished, I may not be as in-the-mood as I was when I first inserted the CD.
I’m a guy, so I’m obviously into instant gratification. Barring the possibility that I’d uninstalled a game, when I want to play, I want to play now. The morning after I get home from a trip, I habitually run the various launchers on my desktop which ascribe to the “patch and play” policy while I make my coffee and catch up the blog and forum scene. Shortly thereafter, I’m typically awake enough to jump into a game, and I’d much rather have been able to just click the launcher and read my blogs than have to login first. I can only tolerate City of Heroes for maybe a month out of the year, but I like to keep it patched and ready to go for when I do reactive my account. Next time I’m in the mood for Vanguard, I’ll have to wait for updates, which will be a deciding factor to which game I decide to play that morning. Perhaps that entire day. Perhaps at all.
Note 1: On a whim this morning, preparing for tomorrow’s admittance of the technical beta testers into the full closed beta, I ran the Age of Conan launcher. It updated itself to a new launcher which now requires me to login prior to checking for further updates, but it specifically calls itself a “Beta Update Login” so I will go out on a limb and assume (yeah, I know…) that post-launch AoC will return to the “patch and play” method.
Tags: MMO Gaming
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I don’t think so.
How was that for a general disagreement?
I’m not sure all MMO players have MMO ADD like you do.
I try to limit myself to two MMOs at most, but I usually end up playing only one at a time. I tend to uninstall MMOs when I feel I’m “done” with them. For example: I own EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2 (hehe), DAoC, AO, PS, SWG, MXO, CoH/V, VG, WoW, probably another one or two I forgot to mention (I just remembered them; GW, DDO and TR) and I might have access to one or two I can’t mention, however, I only have WoW on my system at the moment.
I usually uninstall as a disincentive to play again because I know I will have to re-install and patch the games up again.
Unfortunately, it’s not all that discouraging because you can run most patchers overnight or get most of them caught up to date in a couple of hours (during which time I suck up to the wife before she learns I’ve subbed to another MMO).
Really, I don’t notice any difference because I will only patch what I’m playing and subbed to anyway.
Hmph… well, aside from MMOADD I bought this huge hard drive when I build this system so… I just keep stuff (except WoW) installed. Actually this is a post-WoW system so it was never here to begin with.
The original idea was to dual-boot XP and Linux since I absolutely *loved* playing Guild Wars and WoW in Linux! The performance was better in WoW and let’s be honest, instant desktop switching is so much better than the craptastic resource swapping that occurs in Windows when we alt+tab in and out of games.
However, much as I loves me some Linux, I just don’t feel like putting up with the headaches, the configurations, and the whole “doesn’t *quite* work as intended” that Cedega and WINE give to the majority of modern games.
As I said, I’m into instant gratification, I can’t even be bothered rebooting just to game these days…
One of the things that most impressed me about Guild Wars when it first came out three years ago: the way that game handled patching.
In parts. As you needed them.
You downloaded a small client. That client would patch itself very quickly, under 30 seconds, and start the intro, character selection, etc.
Every new area you went into, you downloaded a small patch. If you’d previously installed the map via CD, the update would only be ~500kb or less. The full map would be about 3-5 MB. Chump change really, with download speeds of 100-200kb/s. And it just looked like a loading screen. (Hell, it loads faster than AoC does.)
They also used to sneakily stream some content to you as you played the game. Don’t know if it still does, but there used to be a slow trickle so that future load screen times would take even less time.
I loved that Guild Wars never once inflicted upon me a horrible wait time as I downloaded every single last byte, some of which I might never ever see (raid areas, etc.)
Yes, I’m a Guild Wars player as well, and I really wish other developers had taken note of Arena.net’s ingenuity with their streaming patch ability. The launcher itself is the “patch and play” variety but I always appreciated their ability to make changes while the game was live, and your client would stream the patch while you played, updating your game on-the-fly.
None of this “Tuesday is Maintenance Day” or “Tomorrow the servers will be brought down from 7am to 1pm for a content update” we see everywhere else.
goo points here, I think it would be better to only have to download maps as you visit them and not have to install them on all on your machine beforehand. Its hard to say though maybe the other companies have tried this and haven’t been able to pull it off with decent load times, or maybe they just don’t care. I have been thinking that it would be really nice if whenever a company comes out with an expansion that all the free updates before it come on a separate dvd or something in the expansion box. This would mitigate strain on the interweb too.
Guild Wars actually does that too. Buying the box means installing two CD’s but even then you have three years worth of patching to catch up on. Thankfully, GW’s patching system is pretty quick and painless. But if you’re using the digital download version, just click the installer and you’re in-game in roughly fifteen minutes, if what I’ve been told is accurate. Seems it installs the engine, etc. then only the current zone you’re in. When you walk to another zone, it will take a minute or two to download that. And so forth.
It’s noticeable when you’re grouped with someone on their first time into a zone, but it’s not game-breakingly slow. Most of GW’s zones’ loading times are just textures anyway; once you have all the textures on your hard drive, your zone changes are very fast.