Hope you have business class T1 for Origin software - "Download in Place" bug

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collegeboy69us

Supreme [H]ardness
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So I'm installing my first ever game via Origin last night - dead space 2, a freebie from EA for pre-ordering.

I generally had no complains about origin up till this morning. The interface seems useable, fair amount of options, clean look. Cool right?

Apparently Origin uses something called "Download In Place" for installing games. What does this mean for you? Well it means (as in my case) you can download 30% of a 9GB file and if your internet cuts out at just the wrong time, you get sent all the way back to 6% to resume from. Did some googling and came up with this response from an origin forum employee? http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/7171963.page Bascically it downloads the game in chunks. Sounds normal so far. If any of these chunks gets cut or is corrupted it throws it out and starts over. Still... sounds normal. who the hell decided that 2GB was a normal size for one of these chunks?


A little background: My internet at home is via AT&T, not my first choice, but sadly it's the only choice where I live. Speeds range from 3mbit to 6mbit download rate, notoriously unstable though. Sometimes you can download for hours, sometimes you can only get 30 minutes in before the line itself craps out.

Who was the genius at EA that came up with this? Especially in the days of capped bandwidth becoming more popular, downloading and trashing multiple gigabytes because of some crappy code really bites. Should a user have 2, 4, or 10% of their monthly allotted bandwidth thrown out the window because of something like this? Has nobody at this multi-billion dollar company heard of hash checks? Or distributed delivery systems? I literally wasted an entire 8 hours last night downloading/installing this only to be sent back to the start box.

Funny enough -- I'm reluctant to go to the EA forums beacuse any form of bitching over there about a legitimate concern could always get my account (and my games) taken away from me (what a great company huh?)

Anyone else run into this sort of issue?
 
Same thing happened to me. Was re-downloading BC2 about half way done and my computer went to sleep. Came back and it reset to 0%. I said fuck it and just decided not to re-install it. I wasn't sure of what happened until now, but I really didn't care about it much as my only origin game is BC2. Even though this is basically EA download manager (so not new), I'll give them some wiggle room because I remember how bad steam was when it first launched, but if they're requiring it for BF3, they better hurry the hell up and iron out the bugs.
 
yeah i think they need to take lessons from bit torrent.. theres a reason bit torrent uses 4mb packet transfers. so that any one packet that gets corrupted gets tossed and redownloaded... dee dee dee!!! wake the hell up EA..


as far as your games getting taken away for complaining on the forum its the same way with steam. so its not like theres any better of an option. only choice is proxy plus fake account if you are really worried. its why i stay as far away from buying digital download games as possible..
 
Yea this happened to me in the BF3 alpha test as well. My download went down from 49% to 19%. At the time I just thought it was the software being randomly useless but after reading this thread I realize that it's intentional due to incompetent design.
 
This happens to my nephews and I also. Our internet isn't stable as in it doesn't go out but sometimes you click a link and you get no response, but if you immediately click refresh it loads. Well Origin doesn't like that so infinite download time unless you get lucky. Too bad you can't post problems on their website without the fear of getting banned. Kinda sad but you have to remember it's EA. It's what they do.
 
Zero82z said:
That's not how it works.
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true -- but it's one of the perks of a distributed system like that. Errors are unavoidable sometimes, the more fragmented your payload is the less time it takes to re-download the bad pieces.

Hell even if EA setup their system to re-download 50MB or something crazy like that, I'd have no problem. But to trash gigs of data? I seriously would love to meet whoever coded for this platform and ask them what they were smoking that day.
 
Well, this will be fun when we're downloading SWTOR in a couple months.
 
OP, you do realize a business class T1 (mentioned in thread title) is only 1.544Mb/s speed? Your DSL service you listed is 2 - 4 times faster.
 
On one hand it's easy to say "It's not EA's fault your internet sucks ass", but it's kinda dumb that they have such huge chunks instead of smaller ones. Even a couple hundred megs would be a much smarter idea. My internet is fairly rock solid so I haven't run into this problem, but if I did I would be very unhappy. On paper they have a good idea, in practice they really screwed up on implementing it.
 
They are incompetent, how can other companies do this one thing so well, yet EA fucks it up?

They have no concept of how to serve the PC market.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
OP, you do realize a business class T1 (mentioned in thread title) is only 1.544Mb/s speed? Your DSL service you listed is 2 - 4 times faster.
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The reason I said business class T1 is due to the much higher reliability and uptime related to anything business class. (which is exactly the problem im experiencing) Speed is not a factor anyway, I could ahve a 10mbit pipe from AT&T, what good would it do if I have to restart my download from scratch every 20 minutes due to origin's shitty software.

AT&T doens't give two shits about residential DSL going out for customers on a regular or semi-regular basis. I'd ditch them if I could, trust me.

My statement is perfectly valid and applicable in this particular case.
 
Derangel said:
On one hand it's easy to say "It's not EA's fault your internet sucks ass", but it's kinda dumb that they have such huge chunks instead of smaller ones. Even a couple hundred megs would be a much smarter idea. My internet is fairly rock solid so I haven't run into this problem, but if I did I would be very unhappy. On paper they have a good idea, in practice they really screwed up on implementing it.
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I agree - it's easy to say "your internet sucks" (and in fact it does)

However if you look at the state of broadband in general in this country (USA) we lag FAR FAR behind everyone else in terms of speed, availibily, and cost. Do you think for a second that a 150GB/cap per month would fly over in Tokyo when most of the country is getting 20-50mbit piped straight into their house? I'm sure if I moved to the right part of the country and shelled out a few hundred a month I could get 50mbit to my house. Other parts of the world they might only pay 75 dollars.

I fully realize part of the reason is the sheer physical size of our country, wiring a country like japan costs nothing compared to wiring the US.

Outside of the sheer techincal fail that is their download/resume system, it makes no sense in terms of the market they are catering to. If you knew your targe market had (overall) substandard access to high speed internet, why on earth would you create a system that gives up at the first sign of a disconnect or interruption?
 
collegeboy69us said:
So I'm installing my first ever game via Origin last night - dead space 2, a freebie from EA for pre-ordering.

I generally had no complains about origin up till this morning. The interface seems useable, fair amount of options, clean look. Cool right?

Apparently Origin uses something called "Download In Place" for installing games. What does this mean for you? Well it means (as in my case) you can download 30% of a 9GB file and if your internet cuts out at just the wrong time, you get sent all the way back to 6% to resume from. Did some googling and came up with this response from an origin forum employee? http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/7171963.page Bascically it downloads the game in chunks. Sounds normal so far. If any of these chunks gets cut or is corrupted it throws it out and starts over. Still... sounds normal. who the hell decided that 2GB was a normal size for one of these chunks?


A little background: My internet at home is via AT&T, not my first choice, but sadly it's the only choice where I live.

Anyone else run into this sort of issue?
Click to expand...

I just did the exact same thing as you. Got DS2 free from Origin for pre-ordering BF3. I have AT&T 6mb DSL. No problems. I never get drops. That's the one thing that's good about ATT for me. It doesn't hurt that i'm 1 block away from the regional hub. I had Comcast before. Fast internet...but plenty of drops. Sucks when you're in the middle of a strafing run in BF2. Let's hope AT&T serves me better for BF3.
 
Considering how new the service is I would just give them a bit of time to work it out. Steam was pretty lousy when it released as its been said.
 
Godmachine said:
Considering how new the service is I would just give them a bit of time to work it out. Steam was pretty lousy when it released as its been said.
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EA Download Manager has been around for like three years now, if not more. Origin is nothing more than EADM reskinned so it's logical to expect them to have ironed out a lot of things by now.
 
Origin has actually been around for 4 years.

EA is just drawing more attention to it now with BF3
 
If only there were some sort of popular segmented download protocol which solved all sort of issues back in the early 2000s... bit stream? byte torrent? Something like that. Oh, well. NIH strikes again.
 
Filter said:
why i bought a boxed copy
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You won't have your box copy in hand when headstart begins. Everyone who bought a box copy and plans to play during headstart will be downloading SWTOR along with those of us who bought digital copies. :D Enjoy!
 
I am really surprised they do not do it the way Steam does, or Blizz does. Both have proven to work.


Steams current method is really quite good most of the time. Launch hiccups are still occasionally a pain, but have become more rare.
It stops downloading when you fire up a game so the disk and network access does not interfere with your game, then restarts when you are done. If you shutdown the PC or Steam, upon restarting Steam, it picks up very close to where it left off.
As a general rule, If you want to cut out the middleman, you have to offer the same service as the middleman, or cut your prices. They need their client to resume downloading in a seamless fashion without having to start over. Of course if you can't be better, and you don't want to be cheaper, you can always just cut your competition out of the loop.

Then again, it is not as if I intend to use the Origin service anyway, so I really don't care if they fix this issue or not.
 
GregP24 said:
Well, this will be fun when we're downloading SWTOR in a couple months.
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devs have said multiple times swtor will be using it own downloader/patcher and won't be using origin for downloading.
 
I had no idea people were having download issues with games from Origin.
I just recently downloaded 60GB+ , 4 games I had added to Origin, a free game, and a game I purchased, and didn't experience any hiccups.
I just couldn't use the home phone for 5 days while it downloaded. *67 is your friend.
 
Fail said:
They are incompetent, how can other companies do this one thing so well, yet EA fucks it up?

They have no concept of how to serve the PC market.
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Thats the truth. I can't really speak of the OP's problem from experience. After the clusterfuck that was battlefield 1942 I pretty much swore off buying any EA game for the pc. I did get a good laugh when the same problems happened with bf vietnam though. Showed then they didn't care for QC. They haven't given me a reason to give them money again for a pc game.
 
All services have their problems from the start, let us not forget the first 2 or 3 years of Steam were absolutely terrible.
 
theNoid said:
All services have their problems from the start, let us not forget the first 2 or 3 years of Steam were absolutely terrible.
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We remember the issues Steam had, we also remember Direct2Drive, Impulse, GOG, and the like, apparently learning from Steams errors. Also, as already stated by Derangel, this is pretty much just EADM with a fresh coat of paint. They have had a few years to fix issues.
 
Valshistixol said:
This is the first legitimate complaint I've seen about Origin on these forums.
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Sort of... If he had a decently reliable ISP this thread wouldn't exist. Case in point: me. I have Cox cable internet and it's been incredibly reliable over the years downloading very large files. I understand that Origin doesn't do their downloads like Steam just yet, but again, if the ISP is reliable it wouldn't matter. Just sayin'... :D
 
theNoid said:
All services have their problems from the start, let us not forget the first 2 or 3 years of Steam were absolutely terrible.
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Yea it was. I remember not being able to get into my css clan matches because steam couldn't verify my software.
 
swatbat said:
Yea it was. I remember not being able to get into my css clan matches because steam couldn't verify my software.
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I remember not even being able to even register for Steam for over a week, the still buggy offline mode, Steam fucking up all the HL mods and server mods, Steam taking tons of ram, Steam crashing, so on, and so on.
 
Maybe I'm way too nice of a guy but for the time being I got my issues sorted out with Origin.

On top of the download issues themselves -- I ran into trouble with how origin installs the game (and WHERE it installs the game)

Seems that no matter where you have the origin software installed (mine is on the X:\games\origin) it takes your downloads and automatically installs them on the C:

Now I run a 64GB SSD so you can imagine where this is going.

Granted there is an option (after some digging) to manually change the install directory to whatever you wish, however it's never presented on its on you have to go LOOK for it. On top of that Origin does not automatically move your games to a new install directory if you tell it to. You literally have to manually uninstall and reinstall again (if you didnt manually backup the download file you get to wait another 5 to 12 hours)

Seeing as how EA has had download software for years, putting a tidy interface on it and calling it a day is way under par. They are trying to compete with steam -- if they want my business they should offer the most basic functions that steam has. They copied the game overlay feature perfectly? Why can't they copy the download protocols, and the backup options?

Origin has exactly 2 months to square their shit away to redeem themselves.
 
Ok Steam just downloads it where its installed no choices either. So that point is moot. You always have to research a little bit before you just go installing stuff.

Also which router do you have? Or are you connected right into the modem/internet? I know that when I went from my old shitty linksys to a new Netgear and some new adapters my internet is now rock solid and download speeds went from max of ~500KB(average of about 350KB) to max of 2.4mb/s(average of 1.5mb/s)
 
this sucks for everyone who has a bandwidth cap and for ea wasting data like that,

but i am glad i dont have a bandwidth cap and my internet is solid as can be, so i am ready for what ever happends with bf3 and ea, i am buying bf3 no matter what happends, i will just go to the store and buy the game, no biggie i did it like that in the old days.

Everyone has become lazy by the internet, and how you can buy games online, i just buy my games from the store and be done with it.
 
Never had a problem with Origin. Not a problem there. You need a new ISP.
 
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