I dont understand what the point of the limited background download over the past weeks was if we are still going to get 8 hour maintenance. This patch is even relatively small compared to the monsters we got in legion, two expeditions, a warfront, a vendor, and some number tuning. Im forced to ask, why even bother with the background download if the result on patch day is the same? This isnt even me flaming the patch itself, Im just very confused on why it was even bothered with.
So that people don’t all stress the Bandwidth’s by downloading the whole thing all at the same time…
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I think the question wasn’t “Why do we have background downloads?”, but rather “Why do we still have 8 hours of downtime despite the game being downloaded well beforehand due to the background downloading?”
I know this sounds crazy, but they’re also patching the servers.
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Because updating servers is nothing like updating your client? The Background download has NOTHING to do with actual maintenance
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Pre downloaing the patch to YOUR computer has nothing to do with how long it takes blizzard to update and do maintenance on THEIR game servers.
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The background patch we received was a client-side patch, which is going to be a grain of sand in comparison to what the server side is currently undergoing.
It’s better to get most of the client-side patch that does not go-live until the upgrade earlier to save time when the essential pieces are downloaded today.
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There is more to the patch than this.
The pre download allows the entire player base to download in a big window instead of millions of people downloading it on the same day causing stability issues.
Maintenance is also not for us… it’s for them and their servers/systems. It takes so much more than a simple press of a button or a flip of a switch to push a patch through.
The under the hood change with multi-threading alone is worth the 8 hours (even though I doubt it will be that long) it might take. Don’t underestimate a 20-25% performance increase with the changes to direct x12.
During the ptr I was getting a nearly 50+ fps increase due to the changes made for dx12.
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They have done quite a bit more than just what you mentioned. They have also redone the file structure of the game. Now, if you have the retail game installed, the PTR, and Beta, and then classic when it launches, ALL of the data for ALL of those will be in a single data folder. Instead if gigabytes for each taking up space. So if say you had the PTR installed and up to date, your patch DL was very small. The retail would have in a sense switched to the PTR with a minimal download.
Do not know how this affects people like me that have other copies of the game on a different HD(PTR, BETA), and then having them run when the data folder is on my SSD, but we will see.
I deleted the PTR and BETA just in case, my SSD had 45Gb left before the 16Gb patch.
16Gb is NOT small for a patch, not by a long shot.
Oh my i just stuck up for Blizz, what has happened to me?
If they did not do it people would be on here crying that their internet is to slow to download all of it at once. And its taking way to long and they want to play not wait.
Maintenance has nothing to do with you having the necessary data to run the patch.