[valarauca1]

1. Blizzard uses torrents where people downloading the patch also act like P2P seeders (you can control the download/upload speeds).

2. Assets are bundled via the zip like mechanism, and individual "zone maps" are separated by hard loading screens. If you travel from 1 continent to another in WoW you get a had loading screen as assets are unloaded, and reloaded.

3. Which continent you log into is the only one you _need_ data for, so as you log in the client can prioritize certain assets higher then others.

4. Blizzard/Activision have a lot of experience with this. In 2008 blizzard had 10mil + players downloading 4GiB+ patches within 24hours so they've had a while to tune and make adjustments as this is part of their core customer experience.

5. Large publishers don't general optimize for this, because the people who whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).

[EpicEng]

>1. Blizzard uses torrents where people downloading the patch also act like P2P seeders (you can control the download/upload speeds).

They removed that functionality years ago.

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/16283439122

[ryandrake]

> the people who whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).

Not only that, but they will buy the next game and the next one too. This is the reason so much game software is buggy, bloated, and user-hostile: people keep buying it, release after release. You’re rewarding the company for crap! The whole “buy, complain, buy the next one” cycle keeps products of all kinds awful.

[hinkley]

At one point th high res assets were nearly half of the download, so they put them at the end. If you logged in early you couldn’t run straight to the end game content and some things were not as pretty as they could be. I think some other games have started copying this pattern.

[LinuxBender]

That makes sense. Thankyou! I can see why non subscription games would not bother with doing this. Maybe they just minimize their cost using CDN's.

[tprnz]

They don't do it because creating such a system that works well is a very, very hard problem.