WoW

[cdybedahl]

Since Blizzard has announced that at least for the US servers, this week's maintenance downtime is going to be an extra-extended 12-hour affair, it's pretty much certain that the preparatory patch for Wrath of the Lich King is about to go live. The game itself has  been downloading stuff for the past few days, which also hints strongly that a hefty patch is coming soon.

To be more precise, it's been downloading roughly 1.5GB of patch data.

To almost 11 million players, worldwide.

That's over 16 petabytes of data. That's a lot of data. 16000000 gigabytes. If you're on an 8 Mbit/s ADSL line, it'd take you roughly 700 years to download it all. If you upgraded to gigabit Ethernet, it'd still take five and half years. If you burned it to disc, you'd need about 58 tons of blank DVD-Rs.

And since they're using the BitTorrent protocol to do the distribution, they quite handily do it in less than a day.

Comments

[prettybird.livejournal.com]

...

I hadn't thought about that. That's actually really impressive. Guess I'll stop cursing my slow download. :P

[scarimor.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the figures. I took a look at its progress in the options and that's when I realised it was using the protocol - sweet.

The patch has just installed but the realms are still on downtime. I hope they fire up before I go to bed so I can quickly log my eldest's character and sort his talent points for him, before he wakes at the crack of stupid and wants to play before breakfast :D