Re: Spending two and a half hours installing a SINGLE game is normal?


"Shawk" <shawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1154784523.44774.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Werner Spahl wrote:
On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, JT wrote:

To back up your point. I had to reinstall my OS recently so I have to
reinstall HL2. It's downloading now and will probably be done in less
than
an hour and I'll have a fully patched ready to play classic game.

Now this is a bad example. With a normal game after a OS reinstall using
the original CDs/DVD and burned patches it will be playable in 10 min!


Sounds reasonable until you suddenly realise that Werner has missed one
small but very important point.... to compare fairly don't you have to
d-load the patches first to then burn them? How long does that take?

I d-loaded and burned the patch when I installed the game the first time so
that's an already amortized cost. The only incremental cost that counts in
this comparison is to whip out my last monthly backup DVD.


Your 2.6 patch for Vampires took 13minutes to download 'after' spending 30
minutes waiting for a spot of the free servers. This is on a 1MB
connection - what about the poor dial-up users that pc games champions?

Which model restricts your choice of download PC to the one that's actually
going to run the game being patched?

If my game machine is stuck with dialup, I at least have other options with
the burnable patches - like using a different PC to d-load the patch or
getting a friend to d-load it for me.

Not so with Steam. The Steam attitude can be summed us as follows:

Clerk: Sir, that bottle of motor oil you're buying is the wrong viscosity
for the car you drove up in.
Customer: I'm not planning to put it in that car, stupid, it's for my
other car parked at home. The one that
I can't safely drive until I put this oil in.
Clerk: Sir, this bottle of motor oil does not fit your car. I will hold
this for you until you go home and
drive back here in your other car.







This is of course only an 84MB patch. How long do you think it would take
for Painkiller? 1.62 was 108MB and 1.61 was 338MB. How long on dial-up
for those eh?










.

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