Update Downloading Alternatives

[Nauq]

I would like to thank Koga for hosting yesterday's update on his website!!!

After getting home from work, I logged on to the game to begin the update process over POL. I tried reconnecting 4 times, my download estimates would range anywhere from 3-6 hours. I decided to cancel this and try another route. I downloaded the update from Koga's website in about 25-30 minutes, moved the files to my FFXI folder, and then reconnected to POL. The POL file check only took about 15 minutes. So all in all, the update took me about 50 minutes from start to finish!

When my character was finally connected (at 6:15ish cst), there were only 210 people on the server, so I know that many people were having problems. I'm not sure if hosting updates is standard practice or not, but I will definately go this route in the future! (And obviously this only works for PC.)

Thanks again Koga!

[Nauq]

In case you missed the link yesterday, Koga posted it on page 1 of Advanced Player Discussion > Mar 11, 2008 data mining thread (data only, no comments).

[Aux]

Yes, let's hope we can put more discussion into this long term issue SE seems to have and never bothers to fix.

After remoting into my PC from work to get the downloads started.. And coming back 5 hours later to see it was still waiting at 3 hours, I decided to try alternatives. I too downloaded Koga's copy of the files, backed up my FFXI folder, and extracted them into the destinations. The whole update process took as little as up to 40 minutes, 25 for backing up, and 15 for file check.



In the future, is it possible that we could get some people in on this method so that there are alternatives rather than waiting in the download line, which will likely never change after all these years?

WoW utilizes bittorrent p2p patches that solve the problem of sucking server bandwidth, you'd think Square could learn a thing or two by now.

My Limbus LS had to push an Omega run back a week just because of not being able to finish downloading 4 hours post update release. Not that it's a bad thing.. This method was able to get us to at least get one of the chips required.


Can you edit the thread title to reflect something more detailed? Something along the lines of "Alternatives to downloading updates" that way we can get more into this.

[Dolmen]

I too found this method extremely helpful. It took around 100 retries to even get the POL update downloaded... I'm going to start hosting the update files for my LS I feel, because we had too many people that endured 12+ hour downloads.

[Koga]

Just saw this post. Glad it helped some others... I've been doing it for my LS for a while.
Every update I post the updated files in our forums, linked them here for data miners.

I'll make sure to do this again next update.