Saturday, September 25, 2010

FF14 Uses BitTorrent to Patch Itself

Final Fantasy XIV Collector's Edition
I picked up Final Fantasy XIV this morning, specifically the ginormous collector's edition so that Sora and I can play together during the 30-day trial.

By the time I got home with the box, I had an hour before I needed to leave for somewhere else. No problem, I figure I'd have at least enough time to install the game, watch the opening movie and roll a character. There has been a patch or two since the game came out, but my ISP provides 16Mbps downstream.

Only problem there, is that Square chose to use BitTorrent to update their users. As I write this, 50 minutes have passed, I've downloaded 10% of the patch, and my current U/L is 8.0KB/s to zero.

That's right, I'm uploading this patch to other users while my 16Mbps downlink sits idle. Why Square doesn't have *any* usable seeds running in my vicinity is beyond me, but this has so far been a terrible experience.