Adding Torrenting Feature
Before you report this post, or have wrong ideas or assumptions about me, let me make it very clear that I'm not promoting or encouraging any kind of illegal activity. The technology of torrenting is not illegal in itself, it's the data shared that makes it illegal.
I was downloading FIFA 18 Demo and Mass Effect: Andromeda Trial and my speed is stuck at 970 KB/s even though I can easily get 1.5 MB/s in my browser at busy hours. The Demo took 2+ hours and the Trial is showing 14+ hours to download. I am planning to buy a game and the download speed has disappointed me very much. I know that like me, many people can't afford or even get a speedy connection, and for that at least some people don't buy and pirate the game.
A well seeded torrent can reach 5+ MB/s easily in almost any connection. When I read that Origin downloads are fast, I thought that this might be exactly that. Although I haven't downloaded huge games, I can say Origin's biggest competitor is definitely faster. My idea is that Origin starts its own torrenting feature through Origin Client to make the download faster and easier, even for low speed connections. If thousands of people can keep a torrent alive through determination, then why can't EA? I hope they really consider this idea and soon make it happen. This would be an immensely useful feature.
I already shared this idea with EA a few days ago in a survey feedback but I also want your opinions about it, like what the problems are or why it is impossible or possible. I'm just an average guy and I don't know any technical stuff, it's just an idea. I'm sure at least one of the professionals at EA must have thought about this, and I don't know why it was not done. I just wanted to share this idea with you all.
Thank you and Happy Gaming!!
@tukykarmakar Hi. Thank you for the thoughtful suggestion.
We have considered the idea of P2P distribution in the past, but there are a number of challenges with commercializing such a system.
One of the key challenges is that such a system would need to be strictly opt-in. P2P's effectiveness is proportional to its network size. Opt-in means low utilization, which would result in few peers, and slow download speeds.
Second, if the network is opt-in, then we also need to provide a network for non-opted users. That either means also supporting a non-P2P network (which adds complexity, since we're doing the same thing in two different ways) or providing EA seed servers around the world and using P2P in download-only mode from those seeds. At that point, the P2P network would probably just resemble our current network, and likely not perform any better.
Given the choice between the two, we believe most users would opt for the latter (why contribute your electricity and upload bandwidth if you have a viable alternative?), further reducing the value of using P2P.
That's not to say we'll never do this, but hopefully this should give you some insight into why we haven't done it yet.
Origin's downloader should definitely be faster than downloads in your web browser, as browser downloads tend to be single-threaded, whereas Origin is multi-threaded. I'm not sure why you're seeing something otherwise. You might try turning on safe mode downloading in the Origin Diagnostic settings and see if it helps. Alternatively, maybe our support team or other users will have other ideas about things you can try to diagnose or increase your download speeds with Origin.
