Amongst myriad other changes in World of Warcraft's 1.10 patch lurks a somewhat more insidious one. WoW's patching system works off of the Bittorrent protocol. In previous patches, the patcher would only upload while you were downloading the latest patch, or kept the WoW updater window open. However, this is no longer the case — the Blizzard forums are full of reports that the Blizzard Downloader is now constantly running, regardless of whether or not you close the Download Patch program. In other words — you're paying Blizzard so they can suck up your bandwidth for you.

Although Blizzard's usual gaggle of fopping fan boys point out that Blizzard draining your upload bandwidth is "part of the terms of service"... hey, guess what! Terms of service aren't legally binding contracts. What disturbs us about this is more along the lines that this change was made with little to no warning. Although it's easy to say "it's just 5k here or there, who cares?" you need to remember many people still have bandwidth allotments from their ISP every month, which counts against upload as well as download. Blizzard making this change is basically a drain on a lot of people's checkbooks without their permission.

Ultimately, we tend to side with the Blizzard forum poster who said: " No you can't use my bandwidth for your stupid bit-torrent crap. Buy some file servers." It is completely unacceptable that an MMORPG as rampantly profitable as World of Warcraft expects its users to do its digital distribution for them. That they sneakily tried to alter what was once a free agreement to help upload a file to another player into a compulsory obligation on the part of the player is really crappy. The good news, though, is that Blizzard has caved to forum complaints and updated their downloader FAQ with instructions on how to stop the Downloader from continuously starting up.

Pls Explain Strange Game Behavior [Blizzard Forums]

Contact information for this author is not available.