The Secret World and Download Issues

Normally this is the sort of ranty complaint you’d put in a game’s forum, but I have my own blog, where it can be more conveniently ignored.

I got a copy of the Secret World, which as far as MMO sign-ups went was remarkably smooth. My account was created with a minimum of goofiness, and since there was no payment to do after purchase, I was away. I just had to download the game.

It was thirty gigabytes.

Now, in Australia, it’s fairly common to have download limits, usually split between two periods of time – on-peak, and off-peak. A typical amount I’ve had to deal with at my economic level is 100 gigabytes on-peak and 100 gigabytes off-peak.

The Secret World, in order to install, downloaded 30 gigabytes. Then it ran and immediately failed and didn’t know why. So it asked to run a repair. Rather than check its files and see which ones were damaged, it instead downloaded every file again. When it booted up, it tried to run again – and it redownloaded again when it failed.

Every time I wanted to try a different set of settings to make sure this game worked, it took a 30 gigabyte chunk of my 100gigabyte a month download limit. I could therefore try three configurations of this game a month, and none of them were guaranteed to work.

Don’t do stuff like that. Don’t just assume a user can download infinitely to patch your pile of code.

1 Comment

  1. Yeah, this happened to me too. I think I got past it by modifying the desktop shortcut to force it to run as an administrator. Not sure if that helps :(

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