Base 'Estimated download time' on the user's download speed

[Muut]

When you click a game in the library and choose to install, Steam displays a handy popup that tells you:

- The install location.
- The size of the game data.
- The estimated download time, in hours and minutes, at a speed which is unrelated to your download speed.

For example, If I choose to install Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I'm told that it will take almost six hours to download at "2MB/s". My download speed is 70-80mbit, so a more realistic estimate would be somewhere around an hour and a half. There's quite a difference when you're planning to know when you can sit down and see how far you can get without it crashing again (but I digress..).

I've seen posts about this issue going back years in various places, but I can't remember the estimate ever having been anything approaching accurate for me since I first installed Steam to load up that new game about portals.

My suggestion is therefore to either:

- Allow the download speed to be set as a preference (in doing so, I'm sure most users would be happy to accept some inaccuracy based on their input if they don't happen to achieve the throughput that they'd anticipated).

or

- Base the download speed on an average of recorded download speeds.

or

- Just remove the estimate, as it's currently on a similar level of usefulness as "This potato would cost you 1.74% of your weekly income if you earned [some amount different to what you earn] a week."

(Or unless it's sometimes accurate for some people? Or maybe there's already some XML file or account preference buried somewhere that allows the speed to be set?)

[Gwarsbane]

Peoples speeds are always going up and down and never at a steady pace because of many reasons. The speed is only based on the speed that the downloading is going when its sampled. When the speed changes, the time is also altered.

It can't tell you the actual download time because again your speed keeps fluctuating.

And the speed is set as a preference in the downloads section of settings. I have mine set to 10 megabit.. but even then its always going up and down when downloading its never 10 megabit from the second I start till the second it finishes.


It will not tell you an average time it will finish based on an "average" because that average would be half way between what you actually have it set for and 0 because again your speed is constantly going up and down.



Valve can flood any net connection a person has at home. But there are always issues with peoples computers, or the net connection from that persons computer to their ISP's servers, or from the ISP to Steams servers, or all of the above or it could be a routing issue cause lines somewhere are being worked on, being disconnected and reconnected and rerouted and so on.

What we have is pretty much what you get. Just look at downloading stuff in windows. Its pretty much the same thing. It will estimate how much down you have left on a download by what ever speed its going at right then and there. Just earlier today I was downloading something and at the different times I looked at it, the estimated finish time was either 25 minutes, 3 hours and 45 minutes, 4 minutes, 6 days or 3 weeks. 53 minutes. In the end, the download took about 3 minutes in total.

[Muut]

For clarity, I'm talking about the value that's used for time calculation in the pop-up before installing a game, not anything that's sampled while actually downloading.

(ie. mine is always shown as "2MB/s" in the popup, which makes the initial time estimate wildly inaccurate)


The bandwidth configuration in Settings -> Downloads is a bandwidth limiter, not a way to configure the value used by the pop-up's estimate (and it appears to make no difference to the estimate whether set or not).


I'm sure that the majority of people will appreciate that a time estimate is only an estimate given that - as you say - network speeds are volatile in practice. But - it would be useful if it was based on a speed figure which is related to the user's actual bandwidth.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Muut:

For clarity, I'm talking about the value that's used for time calculation in the pop-up before installing a game, not anything that's sampled while actually downloading.

(ie. mine is always shown as "2MB/s" in the popup, which makes the initial time estimate wildly inaccurate)


The bandwidth configuration in Settings -> Downloads is a bandwidth limiter, not a way to configure the value used by the pop-up's estimate (and it appears to make no difference to the estimate whether set or not).


I'm sure that the majority of people will appreciate that a time estimate is only an estimate given that - as you say - network speeds are volatile in practice. But - it would be useful if it was based on a speed figure which is related to the user's actual bandwidth.

And that would be even less useful than how it is now because people would be screaming "it said it would take this long, but it took minutes/hours longer".


How its setup now is just fine.

[Supafly]

If you want something accurate to you max speed/Download limit/speed cap just use any of the various online calculators. First result I found

https://www.download-time.com/

Valve won't do it because if it takes longer that it says users would start complaining. For it to be 100% accurate everything needs to go perfect from Steams servers > Third party networks > users network and computer.

At any point through that process things can happen to slow the download speed.The majority would be outside of Steam servers.

[Muut]

@Gwarsbane, @Suicidal Monkey, I do take your collective point about possible complaints, had also wondered if that was the case tbh. Are not the majority of Steam users aware that download speeds are never guaranteed?

Makes me sad if that's the reason why it's never been fixed :( ;)

[Supafly]

@Muut plenty of users like to assume things, not just on Steam either. It's the same reason why Valve will never update store pages that tell users a game will run on their system. Even if users system meets the minimum requirements there is no guarantee it'll run to an acceptable level for everyone. Valve wouldn't want to be liable when users complain and demand refunds after Valve told them it'd be playable.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Muut:

For example, If I choose to install Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I'm told that it will take almost six hours to download at "2MB/s". My download speed is 70-80mbit, so a more realistic estimate would be somewhere around an hour and a half. There's quite a difference when you're planning to know when you can sit down and see how far you can get without it crashing again (but I digress..).

I fail to see the issue.

It may take 6 hours, based on a 2MB/s connection for that game. Your speeds are about 10x the one estimated (80Mb divided by 8 = 10MB/s) so it being faster would be expected.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Muut:

@Gwarsbane, @Suicidal Monkey, I do take your collective point about possible complaints, had also wondered if that was the case tbh. Are not the majority of Steam users aware that download speeds are never guaranteed?

Makes me sad if that's the reason why it's never been fixed :( ;)

To be frank, most people who play games, are computer stupid. They don't bother trying to learn the system they use to play games. They don't bother to try to learn why their system does certain things.

So I would have to argue that no, most people on steam do not understand that the download speeds are just estimates that get updated all the time based on the current speed. Same thing goes on in windows when you download something. It gives you an estimate of when the download will be done, and the time will change depending on current speed.

For example, I'm downloading a large file right now. The speed keeps jumping around between 8k/sec to 14k/second. The time left also keep jumping around from 6ish hours left to 3 hours and a halfish. I use ish because well it just keeps jumping around so much and there is also a bit of lag on the time estimate too because its so unstable. I know for a fact this is not an issue with my system because the server I am downloading something from (not a steam server) is very slow.

But I also know computers and I know that downloads are never fully stable, they are always changing. Even when you have a very fast download, its always changing in speed, but usually its not enough to change the download times by any noticeable difference.


If most people were not computer dumb, they would understand that the speeds are always changing and would there for understand that having a specific time saying "if your speed is set to this, it will download this fast" would not be good because speeds are always changing. This is why we have estimated download times that keep changing because its all based on what your current speed is based on the speed at the time of the check. which is I think something like once a second or at least thats what it looks like in steam and windows.

[Muut]

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

I fail to see the issue.

It may take 6 hours, based on a 2MB/s connection for that game. Your speeds are about 10x the one estimated (80Mb divided by 8 = 10MB/s) so it being faster would be expected.

Yes completely correct - when 2MB/s is used for the calculation then the download time is an overestimate - that's exactly the point I'm making.

The purpose of the pop-up seems to be to provide some helpful information before you go ahead and install:

"I see you're about to install this game. It's this big, I'll put the files here, and it will take about this long to download."

But rather what it's saying is:

"I see you're about to install this game. It's this big, I'll put the files here, and it *would* take about this long to download *if* your internet speed was this number that I've chosen for you (but which is not your internet speed)."

I'm suggesting that the first version would be more helpful ;)

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Mine still says 1MB/s for the estimated speed. I have a gigabit connection.

[Junipercat]

I understand this thread is a bit dated, but still current events.

Getting a download estimate of 267Kbps prior to install is not useful. Either be based on an average of rated speed, or give me an option to set a default estimate.

Where do you get 267Kbps? That is faster than dialup (56Kbps) but slower than broadband which would be in Mbps (minimum 20Mbps for Federal acceptance of being broadband.

Bottom line, let me have a drop down or such saying what is the estimate based on an average of this speed. i.e. estimated time for 40Mbps (such as if I set my throttle to that).

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Junipercat:

I understand this thread is a bit dated, but still current events.

Getting a download estimate of 267Kbps prior to install is not useful. Either be based on an average of rated speed, or give me an option to set a default estimate.

Where do you get 267Kbps? That is faster than dialup (56Kbps) but slower than broadband which would be in Mbps (minimum 20Mbps for Federal acceptance of being broadband.

Bottom line, let me have a drop down or such saying what is the estimate based on an average of this speed. i.e. estimated time for 40Mbps (such as if I set my throttle to that).

As pointed out already, that would be pointless because the speeds are always bouncing up and down. Because of this you would have people complaining that "I have it set for 40Mbps and it says 20 minutes to download it, but its been 25 minutes already and its not done" and they would be complaining because they don't understand, as has been pointed out that net connections are not stable, they are always going up and down.

[Muut]

Necro! But still a valid issue imo.

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

[...] they would be complaining because they don't understand [...] net connections are not stable, they are always going up and down.

i) I think you have to give people a bit of credit here - you'd have to both not understand the concept of "estimate", and be stone-age-level tech unsavvy, to expect that a clearly-labelled estimated download time is a guarantee. (Or a "Calculate my download estimates based on this speed" setting).

ii) It's already an estimate! It's just a very bad one right now.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Muut:

Necro! But still a valid issue imo.

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

[...] they would be complaining because they don't understand [...] net connections are not stable, they are always going up and down.

i) I think you have to give people a bit of credit here - you'd have to both not understand the concept of "estimate", and be stone-age-level tech unsavvy, to expect that a clearly-labelled estimated download time is a guarantee. (Or a "Calculate my download estimates based on this speed" setting).

ii) It's already an estimate! It's just a very bad one right now.

I would give people credit, if it wasn't for the people posting here, many times, that complain about the estimated time to downloading always being wrong and always changing., meaning they don't know what estimated means and they don't know how computers work.

And in many cases they keep arguing their point even if they don't have one because they do not understand that its not a straight line from Valves server to their computer. That there are many other servers in between.

So sure Valve could make it based off of what ever the current setting is in your downloads if its not already, but people will still complain because the estimate will keep changing, keep bouncing up and down till the download is done.

Till that stops, people will keep complaining, the problem is that it will never stop happening.

[Edifier]

Originally posted by Muut:

The purpose of the pop-up seems to be to provide some helpful information before you go ahead and install:

"I see you're about to install this game. It's this big, I'll put the files here, and it will take about this long to download."

But rather what it's saying is:

"I see you're about to install this game. It's this big, I'll put the files here, and it *would* take about this long to download *if* your internet speed was this number that I've chosen for you (but which is not your internet speed)."

I'm suggesting that the first version would be more helpful ;)

I know you made an earlier post but this is basically what it seems to boil down too.

The problem with going on a fixed speed calculation is that when it takes longer than expected you'd probably be back here to complain that the ETA timer is wrong.

Because of various things can change and impact the download speed.

Steam keeps calculating the amount of time it takes depending on your download speed. Much like any other program out there. Steam just stating that it'll take x amount of time without considering that the speed could go up and down would just cause more problems when it exceeds that time.