Blizzard's Downloading SystemFollow

NetLimiter? I think this is the type of program I've been looking for. Is it freeware?

I think they should team up with mirrors like fileplanet.com or something, hell what they would save by paying fileplanet a flat rate would probably be infinately cheaper than the 10 terrabyes of bandwith that these patches probably push through thier servers.

Maybe it would be helpful if some of you who got it to download in 5 minutes can tell us how to disable our router firewall?

I totally agree KithPine - I didn't have a problem with this being the distribution during beta since it was free - but asking for extra holes in the firewall just to get the patches for a subscription game is pretty rediculous.

I'd like to see Blizzard offer an alternative - even if it's slower - just so I'm not being forced to use this method.

Yea it really is a pain, I'm really surprised no one has tried to hack my pc through those named ports. I don't know what kind of data could be sent through them, but i'm sure you could easily send something the user wouldn't want.

I totally agree about the thing with it having no place in a pay-to-play game. However untill they devolpe a game that doesn't need certain ports opened for some people this will be here to stay.

Edit: Forgot to say that this also totally takes all my bandwidth, causing everything else to become worse then dial-up (no offense to those who have dial-up) which is really a pain.

Edited, Tue Dec 21 15:51:44 2004 by Tomec

We'll I don't know why exactly but it has taken me 3-5 minutes for every patch I've had to download. Maybe it's because I hit the port forwarding according to blizzards website. But I'm not really sure what all this is about.

With the amount of time it's taking you consider yourselves blessed. Even with my Cable Modem it takes me about 3-6 hours average to download updates for FFXI. All depends on how big an update but they almost allways take that long.......

Thank god I found it on a mirror... transferring it to my Dial-Up'ed friend.. was going to take him a day and a half.. now will only take 3 hours.

Off topic: Woot! 200th post~

Bless you for the torrent. I'm actually downloading it MUCH faster that way. Blizzard conked out at 28MB.
They have GOT to do something about this.

This is the whole point of bittorrent, to offload the bandwidth to the users. So Blizzard is only providing the T1/T3 or whatever bandwidth they have to the intial people that download the patch, and then those that are downloading can transfer what they have downloaded so far to everyone else. If everyone has the router/firewall borked then you can't connect to them, only to the original seeder. If you setup your port forwarding and its still slow, then your doing it wrong.

Go here for some help:
http://portforward.com/

Well the mirrors are supposed to be quicker... So I would try one of them. Besides that I don't think you can do anything. I don't even go past about 60kbs and I have dsl...

Ive had no luck with this. I use bittorrent and have no problems but this is just hell. I turned peer to peer off and that helped a bit but Im still downloading slow as dirt on a high end cable connection (5-30k/s). I tried the port forwarding and it didnt help any either. Ill just have to wait till I get off work to play I guess.

Normally, nothing listens on those ports (no normal OS software or anything else I can think of). The only thing that would probably be listening is the update client and WoW.

Now unless WoW has some security flaws in the code that listens on that port, it shouldn't be a problem. If WoW's not running, there's nothing listening and the person (or cracker) would get a connection refused if they tried to connect on that port and it wouldn't show up as anything useful on a port scan (port scanners are used to browse large sets of IP addresses for common security holes on known ports).

It's a security risk allowing holes into a firewall for a user at a company's network (for lots of reasons) but as a home user, I wouldn't worry too much about it. You can always disable the rules after you're done with the download.


Edited, Tue Dec 21 21:13:51 2004 by HalfEmpty