Really really disappointed

[dominicbeesley]

It's been nearly a year since I got a chance to play and today I've finally got a day off work with no family commitments and want to have a go on horizons. The files have been syncing for 1.5 hours and have 3 hours to go so that's that: no Elite for me.

I was an early backer of this project and did play quite a bit at first but got increasingly off with the constant need to update and the hopeless sync speeds. I've paid a lot of money for very little joy and feel very let down. I have several friends who have said the same, mixed reviews of the game play but all have given up due to the -poor downloader / syncer.

The downloader needs abandoning and some decent bandwidth obtaining for straight non p2p nonsense downloading. I have neither the time nor the patience for this.

Updates should be that - why do we need to constantly re download the whole bloody thing for a few code tweaks

The game is locked down by having to log in why cant you release the major downloads and patches to mirror sites

Dom

 

[Kazacy]

Suddenly i started to think i am very fortunate to live in Romania with our awesome internet speed, at very low price.

 

[ratchet5000]

A lot of the syncing takes place only on the hard drive to check if the game files are intact (especially for the small "code tweak" updates), so it's likely you have a slow one. For my ssd equipped computer, syncing registers speeds of almost 100 mb/sec before slowing down to my internet download speed when it actually downloads the update.

 

[Wicz]

I feel for you OP. What puzzles me though, is that we currently have an FTTC ( fibre to the cabinet ) connection from a budget UK ISP ( Plusnet ) that maxes out @ roughly 4MB/s, and whenever we have an update it runs at it's maximum speed.

Which country are you in and what kind of connection do you have?

 

[Flavourless]

Suddenly i started to think i am very fortunate to live in Romania with our awesome internet speed, at very low price.

Bit disingenious that. Loads of users report snail downloads despite having excellent internet service speeds.
FD's servers seem incapable of communication with some otherwise healthy access points.

 

[Kazacy]

Bit disingenious that. Loads of users report snail downloads despite having excellent internet service speeds.
FD's servers seem incapable of communication with some otherwise healthy access points.

Ok never happened to me. I installed Horizons a few good days after launch (namely this weekend) and it was around 15 min.

 

[steevaavoo]

It's been nearly a year since I got a chance to play and today I've finally got a day off work with no family commitments and want to have a go on horizons. The files have been syncing for 1.5 hours and have 3 hours to go so that's that: no Elite for me.

I was an early backer of this project and did play quite a bit at first but got increasingly off with the constant need to update and the hopeless sync speeds. I've paid a lot of money for very little joy and feel very let down. I have several friends who have said the same, mixed reviews of the game play but all have given up due to the -poor downloader / syncer.

The downloader needs abandoning and some decent bandwidth obtaining for straight non p2p nonsense downloading. I have neither the time nor the patience for this.

Updates should be that - why do we need to constantly re download the whole bloody thing for a few code tweaks

The game is locked down by having to log in why cant you release the major downloads and patches to mirror sites

Dom

Hi Dom

Sorry to hear you were/are having issues downloading.

I must add though that the infrastructure that you download updates from is AWS from Amazon - and as far as I understand it, it's not P2P - that's just a part of the multiplayer aspect for minute-to-minute updates.

Also - no offence intended - but if you were already peeved with the constant "updates", you clearly already knew that they happened quite regularly. Would it not have been worth switching on the computer and leaving the game to update a few days/hours prior to your current intended session?

I can't say I've had the same experience that often, but when my download has been slow it has annoyed me occasionally.

But then I can say the same for my XBox One, which chooses the worst possible moments to tell me about console updates. Then again that's my fault because I run it in Power Save mode so it doesn't update overnight. Even so, I'm on Fibre and the XBox Updates even take forever sometimes.

The most recent updates have been large code overhauls, so if you've not logged in for quite some time, unfortunately the nature of an ever-evolving game means that the longer you leave it, the larger the updates. Such is the way with most things. Including Windows 8.1 - I just had to download 2GB of updates for a PC I'm building, for example.

 

[777Driver]

Download speeds have never made much sense to me, out here near Dubai I am using a wireless connection, download speed for the last update took a few minute's, the horizons download took 15 minutes.

My 50Mb Virgin fibre optic connection in London.. 6/7 hours if I am lucky.

 

[eza]

A lot of the syncing takes place only on the hard drive to check if the game files are intact (especially for the small "code tweak" updates), so it's likely you have a slow one. For my ssd equipped computer, syncing registers speeds of almost 100 mb/sec before slowing down to my internet download speed when it actually downloads the update.

^this is usually the case for those reporting slow downloads.

My adsl net connection is awful: bad quality cable running twice the distance it needs to, connection drops occasionally, in the summer there's always a week where it's down every night, etc etc. It's the worst connection I've ever had.

Elite's always updated itself at a minimum speed equal to my maximum download speed. Most of the time the speed is a lot higher, and it's because it's verifying existing data on my SSD drive.

If you have Elite installed on an old slow HD then it's going to take a long time to read all that data.

Check in Windows Resource Monitor to see what the updater's up to. It's most likely accessing the disk most of the time.

 

[xyphic]

It's been nearly a year since I got a chance to play and today I've finally got a day off work with no family commitments and want to have a go on horizons. The files have been syncing for 1.5 hours and have 3 hours to go so that's that: no Elite for me.

I was an early backer of this project and did play quite a bit at first but got increasingly off with the constant need to update and the hopeless sync speeds. I've paid a lot of money for very little joy and feel very let down. I have several friends who have said the same, mixed reviews of the game play but all have given up due to the -poor downloader / syncer.

The downloader needs abandoning and some decent bandwidth obtaining for straight non p2p nonsense downloading. I have neither the time nor the patience for this.

Updates should be that - why do we need to constantly re download the whole bloody thing for a few code tweaks

The game is locked down by having to log in why cant you release the major downloads and patches to mirror sites

Dom

The patcher *does* do incremental update, but if you're updating to Horizons, then you'll pretty much have to do a full update due to the nature of the changes, especially if it's been a year since your last update. Since launch Frontier have released 5 major updates (not counting Horizons) and the Horizons update changes from 32- to 64-bit, so anything that wasn't touched by those 5 updates will probably be accounted for there. The patcher is also able to pool updates, so if you'd installed the Beta client it wouldn't redownload the whole thing again when moving to release. In short, I don't think there's much wrong with the functionality of the downloader.

As to download speeds, bandwidth is provided by Amazon AWS, and Frontier spool up servers according to demand. There shouldn't be huge demand at the moment (except for those updating to 2.0.02) so I don't think it's a problem with bandwidth, more one with routing. There's probably a weak link somewhere between you and the Amazon server, and you're right that it's something that mirror sites (selecting alternate AWS servers would help negotiate any poor route choices) or P2P would alleviate.

One final note: if you want things to change, ranting rarely helps. The suggestion of P2P or mirror selection is a good one and a respectfully worded post in the suggestions forum is much more likely to drive change than a rant in the general forum which will quickly degenerate and disappear.

 

[Muzz UK]

It's been nearly a year since I got a chance to play and today I've finally got a day off work with no family commitments and want to have a go on horizons. The files have been syncing for 1.5 hours and have 3 hours to go so that's that: no Elite for me.

I was an early backer of this project and did play quite a bit at first but got increasingly off with the constant need to update and the hopeless sync speeds. I've paid a lot of money for very little joy and feel very let down. I have several friends who have said the same, mixed reviews of the game play but all have given up due to the -poor downloader / syncer.

The downloader needs abandoning and some decent bandwidth obtaining for straight non p2p nonsense downloading. I have neither the time nor the patience for this.

Updates should be that - why do we need to constantly re download the whole bloody thing for a few code tweaks

The game is locked down by having to log in why cant you release the major downloads and patches to mirror sites

Dom

Only had problems during launch which is to be expected... need to know more about your connection and location really before we can blame the game/Frontier!

 

[dominicbeesley]

Thanks for the replies,

I have tried this on two VERY fast machines equipped with SSD hard drives. My internet connection is not the issue, I've just downloaded Android and installed SDK (1.2G) and JDK 8 in the time it took me to drink a cup of coffee...

I knew there were constant updates 1 year ago, and expected to have to download the new game. I also suspected that something would have been done about the crappy experience of having to wait half a day to start playing, half an hour maybe an hour 5, 6 , 7 hours just really is not on.

This was a great and (for me) enjoyable game but I suspect that this has finished it for me - I only get small and unexpected windows of free time and spending them waiting for something to download is just not on

D

 

[PiLhEaD]

Download speeds have never made much sense to me, out here near Dubai I am using a wireless connection, download speed for the last update took a few minute's, the horizons download took 15 minutes.

My 50Mb Virgin fibre optic connection in London.. 6/7 hours if I am lucky.

As 777 alludes to, unless you know what's happening at each point in the interconnecting network topology at the exact point in time you are trying to download, it's impossible to put the blame at any single entity.

 

[Runnybabbit]

Sorry to hear that you're disappointed Dominic, but (and I know this will provide zero comfort) there's an old British saying that I grew up with...

"You pays your money, you takes your chances"..

As do we all...

 

[dominicbeesley]

Sorry to hear that you're disappointed Dominic, but (and I know this will provide zero comfort) there's an old British saying that I grew up with...

"You pays your money, you takes your chances"..

As do we all...

That's an American saying as far as I know. There's also a British saying "I've paid my money and I expect some bloody service"....

 

[magicaces]

No matter what connection you have it will depend on the bandwidth of the supplier/how busy they are with other down loaders. Always best to download a day or two earlier before you intend to play....that goes for any game you need to install/update online.

Also thats why I installed on steam they provide a much faster download service than frontier do simply because they have a much bigger investment in bandwidth.

And finally if you are playing Horizons for the first time it isn't just a few tweaks its a big update!

 

[Stigbob]

My tiny cottage in the wilderness is great, but the horizons download is 3 days. I set it downloading before going on holiday. It'll be ready to play when I get home, for updates I do it overnight. The trick to a really slow connection/service is planning ahead.

 

[xyphic]

The patcher *does* do incremental update[...]

Case in point, I've just updated from 2.0.01 to 2.0.02 and on my terrible ~6 Mbps connection it took less than 3 minutes.

 

[Lowievisser]

It's been nearly a year since I got a chance to play and today I've finally got a day off work with no family commitments and want to have a go on horizons. The files have been syncing for 1.5 hours and have 3 hours to go so that's that: no Elite for me.

I was an early backer of this project and did play quite a bit at first but got increasingly off with the constant need to update and the hopeless sync speeds. I've paid a lot of money for very little joy and feel very let down. I have several friends who have said the same, mixed reviews of the game play but all have given up due to the -poor downloader / syncer.

The downloader needs abandoning and some decent bandwidth obtaining for straight non p2p nonsense downloading. I have neither the time nor the patience for this.

Updates should be that - why do we need to constantly re download the whole bloody thing for a few code tweaks

The game is locked down by having to log in why cant you release the major downloads and patches to mirror sites

Dom

Dude , minor code tweaks lol , we get freaking landing on planets.

also ever heard of letting your pc on at night so you dont have to w8 , and only after one year one day of game time? get a divorce asap. <-- kidding ofcourse , if you love her.

 

[fennster]

I just swapped across to steam. What was 8-9 hours ETA became 30 minutes ETA. Afterwards you can always untie the account and move the files to where the stand alone launcher points to.