Why does this game have a 2 hour long "patch" after downloading the daily update?

[setupwizard]

I swear the distribution is asinine at best, I did the exact same thing yesterday.

[Vicpool]

Cause those hotfixes are so damn hot.

Dunno, they could be cooking something big, shadow-patching it just to press the UNLEASH button any moment now for a smooth release, but that may be too much mental masturbation considering it's AH, so you never know.

[Mahjik]

If it took your device 2 hours to download and unpack the updates, you have something going on with your device.

[DrLamp]

2 hours? Might be time for some upgrades.

[setupwizard]

I'm being facetious it doesn't literally take 2 hours, more like a half an hour and change, but I noticed the progress resets whenever I pause it

[Bum Ghost]

>the rest of the illuminate got uploaded and the game's engine requires redownloading entire resource files
datamining is fun

[nizzemancer]

the patch is like...50mb, if it takes you half an hour you might want to fix your dial up

[Solidus Shane]

I was just going to complain about the same. and no,i don't need a 5090 to run subpar graphical games. The download is always quick but good lord the actual disk patching is rough

[DeaD_EyE]

It should not take so long. The last update was ~70 MiB. Maybe your HDD/SDD is degraded/bad or your internet connection is actually limited in bandwidth.

[Mahjik]

The patching process will depend on your device's I/O throughput. It's actually pretty intensive and this is done to reduce the file size (i.e. make the download smaller for those on metered connections).

Basically the "binary differences" of the files are sent down. Then the process makes a copy of the files it will update (which requires more disk space), patch in the "binary differences" and then copy the files back into place. With some games, when it's a patch that effects a lot of game files, it's actually easier to uninstall and reinstall as it avoids the patch process and just downloads new files (but it's a lot more bandwidth).

All that patching and copying is a lot of disk I/O. If you have a not-so-fast disk, then it will be slower. Also, depending on the type of drive, some of those throttle slower traffic when they heat up. NVMEs do this and other drives do as well.

Most developers use this process as the size difference of sending the files verse the binary deltas is substantial.

[Vespertellino]

That's because they have the whole game packed in 1 giant archive for some reason, instead of several smaller ones
So you get unpacking and packing the whole giant archive and it takes time

[Jakeolicious]

Seriously… a 74 mb update shouldn’t take and hour! Every. Single. Time. They always seem to have an update every time my friends invite me to play.

[Slaanesh]

The update don't take hour, the repackaging of 12go ressource might, if you're using too much you PC at the same time, or if you rig is old, or still using HDD.. Because if I'm not wrong, reorganizing files is hard drive related.

Why do so much files need to be reorganized at each little update.. This I don't know, somes might be more experts on the subject.

[mcsquared]

Your internet connection must be extremely slow. I get the updates in about 1-2 minutes.

[Mika]

I have the game on an HDD and in the worst case 15 minutes to download and install.

Originally posted by Dango:

Because if I'm not wrong, reorganizing files is hard drive related.

Windows 7 and earlier it was very common to use an HDD so the OS looked for the largest space available to avoid fragmentation, if the space was very limited then it tried to make room by moving some files and that increased the time.

Windows 8 and later, the OS simply writes in the first space it finds available, thinking about an SSD, which results in the files becoming very fragmented and in the case of an HDD its performance is terrible, I recommend defragmenting the files after every update. Between fragmented and defragmented the difference is like day and night.

[Jimbo]

Gen 4 NVME, 5700X3D and 1.6gbps download speed and it still takes 30mins+ for an update. It's just silly. It took far less time to download the entire game in the first place.