Speaking to your example with Blizzard: The Blizzard downloader does provide an option to disable P2P transfers which then downloads direct via http from Blizzard.
Yes, the update software defaults to allow P2P but it isn't like they are forcing it upon their users. I have seen Sony do the same thing and have never seen a downloader that you couldn't disable that option if you like. -Kevin -----Original Message----- From: Harry Strongburg <harry.na...@harry.lu> Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:03:43 To: <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 04:16:46PM -0400, Rodrick Brown wrote: > I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher > distributes files through Bittorrent I personally love Bittorrent. It is wonderful for CDN - for both legal and not-so-legal files. I however despise the game-loaders not giving you more options to control this traffic. For example, many run as a daemon that does not stop seeding - even when you're in-game. You could manually kill it, but it will re-run again. If you remove it, enjoy not being able to continue to play the game if it updates. "Pando Media Booster" (which I have had to deal with), detects your upload speed and uses about 3/4ths of it. The game installer never even had you accept an EULA - just when PMB.exe started when it was installed, it says on the bottom "you have accepted the EULA". EULAs don't really mean much now of days, sadly. This ruins the network quality, especially on large LANs, and most people don't even realize it's using all their connection. My personal verdict on it is: Give the users the option to limit the upload speed to whatever they want, and an option to disable it when they don't need to download any updates; if this is done, I personally see no problem with it. If this option is not added, I see it as malware that should be deleted. As I said above, I have no problems with using Bittorrent as a method of CDN - it's actually one of the best methods. But, the end-users need more control over it.
