As my frequent readers know, I moved to a remote location for my husband’s work earlier this year, and our internet (while available) is not that great. I’m unable to stream at all, uploads are almost non existent, and I can’t download any faster than 300-500 kb/s (yes, that’s KB, not MB). It makes you realize how privileged we are to have good internet, because it’s simply not a thing everywhere.
I decided I wanted to download EQ1, which took an entire night overnight. Then friends started playing LotRO and I wanted to join them. Now, I actually have this installed on my PC already, but it needed to be patched and as luck would have it, my patch ran into a patch that was being done on the game, and it corrupted my files. The only solution was for me to do a 26g download to repair. So I’ve been doing that for a few days.
I also wanted to download FFXIV, I had it in the past and I’m not sure why I removed it from my PC. It might have been when my SSD failed, I can’t quite remember. Anyway, that one took around 3-4 days to download, then I upgraded to Shadowbringers and it was another night of downloading content.
WoW has a small 100-500 mb update every few days which takes me a few hours to grab.
Steam games each have small frequent updates on their platforms.
Epic games.
GoG games.
You can see where this is going. Now, the issue is not downloading itself – but the fact that the rest of the house cannot access the internet if anyone is downloading. We don’t have cable, so that means the children can’t watch netflix, my husband can’t patch his shows, we can barely access email when things are being used. I’ve restricted myself to patching at night, but even that isn’t ideal since my husband works shift work and I don’t want to deny him the internet while he’s awake waiting on calls.
Our situation won’t improve any time soon, but I hope to finish off all of these downloads shortly and then maybe I won’t notice our issue quite so much. So far ping rate in-game has been totally manageable even around the 150-200 mark, but I wouldn’t want to see it get any worse.
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Wow, that sounds rough to me, you have my sympathy. When I first moved into the place I’m living in now, we had no internet for almost two weeks. I din’t realize how central to our lives it had become until we had to go without it for so long. Offline games were installed from CDs, gaming consoles were fired up, DVDs were purchased and books were read.
It also reminds me of the olden days. Back when I first started playing WoW, I only had dial up at home. I used to sometimes bring my PC in to work and plug it in so it could patch, or find websites that posted patches and bring them home on a burned CD.