PoE client as Torrent download

That seems like a good eway to do it Zeto

Yeah, I think that sounds like a pretty good way to go as well. I think WOW did something similar to this in their free trials except that you just streamed the content after a little front end download.

Many games have had small downloader programs, but they almost always just download the entire installer at once from that point... then launch a lengthy install.

I think a streaming installation where you can fire up beginning content within minutes and download the rest later is really the only acceptable way of deploying a next gen game.

I don't think that the registry is a good thing either, and responsible developers shouldn't use it. HDDs are huge nowadays... every install can be almost totally modularized.

Those two things I feel are important and I've seen them done. I've also seen live streamed patches done where there is essentially no scheduled downtime or external updating... you can be playing the game and new features simply become available... new areas and content. The only time such a front end would have to restart to apply a patch would be to change core methods.

Do I think we'll see that here? Not really... but do I think that games should utilize these technology improvements? Yeah.

Not all computers do well with an installation/streaming and playing the game at the same time though. Plus some people don't like torrents because of their reputation. I agree though that there should be an option and would lessen the burden of the beginning of the downloads for closed beta.

There's actually a reason why some don't do well with doing both at the same time... it's because the user doesn't throttle their connection, or the installer doesn't throttle disk access.

I once played on a game that wrote replays to your HDD in real time, and in certain cases it would lag lower end systems out. So eventually the dev updated their disk cache-write system and nobody ever had problems again.

what if you're net sucks balls :P

wait till it's finished?

Unless your internet is literally exactly enough to run the game stream, there'd be room to throttle a torrent :P

You'd need something akin to dialup though, in which case you probably shouldn't be playing games... you should be working harder to pay for better internet.

I never saw a problem with just downloading and installing the game. No real need for fancy streaming stuff. As long as GGG can reliably provide it at a good speed then I'm perfectly happy.

Yeah I never saw a problem with <insert old thing> so why bother innovating and inventing <insert better thing>.

Because its a waste of time ? :D