PLEASE Do Something About These 2 GIG daily Downloads!

My patch problems weren't with the steam client, it was the SOTA client hiding patches in cache folders...

I once deleted 50 gigs of patches that were outdated and already applied... It only happened once lately, so I guess it was an issue with the patch client. Now when it happens, I stop the client, and go delete the extra patches, and the problem is resolved on restart.

 

That's really a problem on the Mac client, because it stores stuff in dotfile folders (name begins with a period, which is unix-ese for invisible files) in the home directory. Whoever came up with that idea was not a Mac user and probably just copied it over from Linux, because mere mortals can't access it to delete old stuff. It also stores the downloads in the current user's home directory, so too bad for you if you have multiple users both playing SotA, stuff might lay around for a while before the right launcher purges it.

 

that is exactly it !

I had to download a special program and find them manually with it... but I'm on windows !

 

The launcher keeps them inside of the Program Files folder along with the SotA app and game data, very sane. I'm sure Steam uses a twisty little maze of cache folders, all different.

 

Steam just sucks for patches in all games. Other games I played had this same problem. C'est la vie. There are better things to get annoyed about tbh. Like having to go to work when there is double xp.

 

I have about 600 games on Steam, and only two ever cause me problems with patches: DCS and SotA. Both of these games seem to always do multi-gigabyte downloads. The largest game I have is DooM2016 at about 70Gb, and its patches tend to be under a gig.. sometimes less than 100Mb.

I signed up in the middle of 2017, and every month the releases are about 6Gb. I have a very patchy 2Mbit internet connection, so it can take me a week or more to download the monthly release.

By the time the monthly release has downloaded, it INSTANTLY starts downloading the next patch (always 2Gb).... This can take a day or two. If it does, then the moment it completes, it INSTANTLY starts downloading the next.

It's not uncommon for me to be unable to play SotA for about 2 weeks after each release. Considering that the releases are monthly, that's 50% of the time I can't play the game, and I've never been able to take advantage of the double-XP week!

Let me just reiterate: I have over 600 games on Steam, many of which are bigger than SotA, and it is one of only two games that feature mahoosive patches every single time.

I don't doubt that Steam is part of the problem, but it would be really helpful if it could be looked into. I'm going to try to moving over to the SotALauncher instead in the meantime, but if I can't use my Steam login with SotAlauncher, I'm scuppered!

For now, it looks like it's not a priority to resolve it, so the devs are recommending using the launcher...

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?posts/934872/



Cheers,

DBM.

 

Steam is absolutely not the problem, it's the way Port is setting the new files up with Steam. I've never had to redownload everything with anything else on Steam. Literally every other game in my library downloads just what it needs for patching.

 

Guess I'm the prescient, or lucky, one. Never used Steam and most likely never will.

 

Well I think I've found one issue with the SotA Launcher already... There's doesn't appear to be a download throttle in it, like in Steam, just a P2P throttle. Downloading gigs and gigs of stuff takes days, so I have to throttle it to allow email and web browsing to occur... The SotA launcher doesn't seem to allow me to throttle the download

 

you can open the torrent with a third-party torrent client and set the throttle where you like.

 

If I had a scooby what that meant, I'm sure it'd be very a cool solution. I'm afraid, however, that from the launcher itself I'm unable to set the rate at which I can download, so anything that involves torrenting using other programs is a bit beyond me, I'm afraid. Thanks for the tip though, I'll do some googling to see how this workaround might work...

 

Upload throttling is usually much more important with BitTorrent because of asymmetric speeds. If the upload isn't capped to no more than 85% or so, everything will suck because acknowledgment packets fall on the floor. But I suppose it's possible to get downloading choked if you get too many incoming connections, something else a proper torrent client will let you control.

I suppose you could let the launcher start the download, close it, then go into the downloads folder and open the .torrent file with your torrent client of choice to finish it off. At that point there is almost nothing to mess with except configuring the upload cap.

 

Ahh! I understand.. That explains what someone else was trying to recommend... Using a 3rd party to do the torrenting. These are all just sanitary things that would make the game a lot easier to deal with. I think What I'll do is stop the steam client from downloading, and play the SotAlauncher version.. then when that version is downloading, play with the steam client, and so on...