SoM PRE-PATCH FOR EUROPE NOW ACTIVE!

We in Europe have often had occasion to grumble, not without reason, about the imbalance between what Turbine does for its subscribers Stateside, and what we get from Codemasters in Europe. Well, Codemasters have gone some way to redeeming themselves today, with the release in torrent form of a Siege of Mirkwood pre-patch. I'm not normally a great fan of torrents, and the speed currently (Monday afternoon) is averaging no more than about 25-30 kb/s, which means it will take a bit more than 24 hours to download the whole 1GB, but what the hell... we won't be able to use it till Thursday anyway, and anything that helps bypass the projected server log-jam is more than welcome. Now, if we could only have a look at the patch notes...

TORRENT OR CARRIER PIGEON?

Well, the good news was that yesterday, Codemasters released the patch for the eagerly-awaited Book 12 a day prior to the update going live on the servers. The bad news was that for some strange reason, they decided to only do so as a torrent - the problem with that being, as shown by the howls of anguish on the forums, that a great majority of players hate torrents with a passion. I have to admit to being one of them myself, but the passion doesn't seem entirely unjustified when you consider that many people were reporting estimated download times of between one and five days...

By early Thursday morning, the system seems to have collapsed gracefully, resulting in a flood of "tracker offline" or "torrent rejected by tracker" messages. One generous player, RevHellfire by handle, went so far as to mirror the patch himself and post the link on the CM forums, adding the warning "no promises as to how long I'll leave it up if it gets hit hard".

At the end of the day it hardly matters, since by early afternoon today we should be able to get the entire update off the servers, but it does leave you wondering why they opted for torrent when they could have used carrier pigeons - so much more efficient.