Data Monster

[Jonoth]

Hi all!

So, in my excitement of post Cata thrills, I noticed something very saddening. In my (mostly in OOC) time, I had managed to use over 2GB of data over the course of an evening (I have a 6GB monthly plan), easily exceeding my monthly usage.

An immediate solution is to seek out some free wifi locations, but naturally I'd like to not have to leave my house every single time I want to RP. I found one option I had to uncheck to reduce bandwidth, though it made no significant difference.

My question is, is there any other way I can cut down on how Cata is eating my data? Or am I at its mercy and have to either wifi hop or find a new data plan?

To note, I didn't have bandwidth issues with wotlk. It would take insane amounts of playtime to go over, so that's why I'm wondering if there is something I can do, or if this expansion is just a hog.

[Clovis]

Hi all!

So, in my excitement of post Cata thrills, I noticed something very saddening. In my (mostly in OOC) time, I had managed to use over 2GB of data over the course of an evening (I have a 6GB monthly plan), easily exceeding my monthly usage.

Are you positive all that date usage was from being on the Cataclysm server and not something else? Cause that is an extraordinarily high amount of data to be using in one evening just to be logged into a game. :x

[Jonoth]

The only other things I had open were my browser (no video, just wiki pages for reference), and Skype (again, no video, just chats), and having those open combined with wow was never a data issue before. Hell, even Rift doesn't eat anywhere near that data amount. It seemed very odd, but Cata is the only different thing I'm running.

---

As a note, is it possible Cata is DLing stuff in the background? I have seen a mini circle loading icon once i get to new areas, and was curious about it.

[Kage]

Cata downloads game data to your computer to make moving to new area's easy. When you go to a place you haven't before, you see the circle, it's just the game trying to make your life easier. Once you've gone to the place however, you wont have to deal with downloading it again.

[Rigley]

Are you using the streaming client?

[Jonoth]

I'm using the client downloaded from here. Not quite sure if streaming client is different. And I start up directly through wow.exe

[Clovis]

If you have a green circle icon on the top of the screen, then yes, the game is downloading data.

[Jonoth]

Is that something that happens once for a zone and that's it? Or does it frequently re-update? Just trying to figure out if I could go somewhere to DL all the content once so it doesn't do it again.

[Jonoth]

So I opened up Resource Monitor on my compy (didn't even realize I had such an awesome program XD), and the numbers don't lie:

Idling in OOC on wotlk: 1,000-1,300 b/sec
Idling in OOC on cata: 90,000-108,000 b/sec

I'm trying to figure out why it's so high. And it's the same when I disable add-ons, so I ruled that out. Heck, it spikes at least to half the data just by starting wow up and being at the login screen.

[Kretol]

Not really sure what it may be if you downloaded the full client, to be honest.

[Jonoth]

Aha! A possible development!

I was testing different things when in the corner I saw something that says "Download: 87% complete". So the game certainly is downloading something! I will let it complete so I can see if the data consumption levels out afterward. Updates to come!

[Jonoth]

So I have confirmed today that it was the streaming client, and that after 100% download bandwidth usage has normalized!