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Comic for: August 19th, 2004
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World of Warcraft: "Bit Tornado"
Posted: Thursday August 19th, 2004 by

Ted is pretty much the implement of my wrath in Today's Comic. I was completely frustrated with Blizzard's Torrent for Wednesday Night's patch. Don't get me wrong, it's NOT the delivery method thay've chosen for having us download information. No. What frustrates me is that there are MUCH better ways already out there that we could be using to speed along the process. I'm just not sure WHY they are hanging on so stubbornly to their current Torrent Client.

Here... let me explain.

Downloading the beta patches for World of Warcraft have been a pain from the start. Blizzard is using a Bit Torrent system that the vast majority of the testers have been fighting with every step of the way.

Up until the most recent patch though the results were not uniform. Some people would download the patch lightening fast, while others struggled to see over 10K per second. And when you're downloading 2+ gig pushes and 753 meg patches... 10k per second is brutal.

But, this most recent patch introduced Blizzards "optimized" bit torrent client. The result? Everyone was having issues. I started the download at a blistering 8K and it only dropped from there registering between 1 and 2K all day long.

Then, luckily, I received some help from Kudane (from EQ Interface). He told me how to use a different Bit Torrent client (called Bit Tornado) to download the patch. Now, it was only a little over 30K per second, but compared to 2K? I rejoiced. My completion time came down to 5 hours from 24.

Now, for those of you that don't know about Bit Torrent, it's a idealistic upload/download environment where every user that is connected is sharing the information they've already downloaded. A poorly put together Torrent will slow down everyone.

Now, I call the Torrent an idealistic environment, because it only works if everyone is playing nice. What happens though is that people throttle their output to maximize their own download time. A pipe can only carry so much data back and forth simultaneously (bandwidth). So, if you close down the upload capacity, then you open up the download capacity. The problem with this is the more people closing down the upload aperture, the less info is being shared at any given moment, slowing the transfer of info down to an eventual crawl.

So yeah. I think I've "preached" long enough. I still love Blizzard. I just wish they'd consider a better Torrent Client. **coughs** Bit Tornado **coughs**

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