Every F2P game I've played has had a terrible updater/patcher program. And every pay to play one I've played (which actually isn't that many, and that includes Guild Wars) has a good one.

Atlantica - their updater causes no end of problems. Basically updates are simply dozens, hundreds even, of zips files. Once they are all downloaded, it then goes to unzip all the files. But what happens if one is corrupt for some reason? It dies and spits out an arcane error message. Every time a patch comes out, dozens of people post for help trying to get the patch to work. If not for helpful users and the guy who originally figured out how to find the bad file in question, none of these people would play the game again.

Runes of Magic - I really wanted to try this game. But I can't. Because apparently the patcher doesn't have a resume function. Some people have superfast connections. But many people have slowish one. It can take 6+ hours to download a patch that is a gig or two. They can't devote that long to one devoted session to simply patching a game. Or what if something happens? I tried like 3 times to patch this, and each time failed.

Most the other ones have similar issues (most are more like Atlanticas)

And yet, these are very simple things to do, I think. I don't know about resume (which doesn't seem to make it into web browser built in downloaders), but for corrupt files, there's all sorts of checksum methods. It amazes me that these companies are throwing away all these potential customers, when it would have just taken a little bit more effort (not that much) to make a more robust patcher.

For all my complaints about LOTRO, the game, it's patcher is wonderful. (Well, I have heard some bad things about the Turbine Download Manager, but that's different)

 I agree, 1 more reason why i like P2P games :),  i hate those cheep free-ish  patchers... rather pay for quality

my favorite patching system is from WoW, Blizzard, always download patches 2 mb/ps mwhaaaa! got them patches in notime! always worked fine for me

P2P patchers -> F2P patchers. word

The biggest difference?  That's an exaggeration.  The biggest difference is that one requires you to pay a subscription fee and the other has an optional (often more expensive) item mall.

I've never had issues with a F2P patcher before (though I've had friends have problem getting ijji's patcher programs to work), but I've had a problem with Champion's Online patcher that required me to reinstall the game.  I'm not sure if it's just luck or not.  I do agree that a resume function should be necessary on a patcher (or any downloader) and I've actually had issues downloading a P2P once because there was no resume and I lost about 3 gigs worth of downloading time when my computer decided to do a restart for a window's update.

Never had trouble with f2p patches myself... The difference seems to be more about companies quality of service, granted some f2ps may have more issues with this, but that is no reason for generalizations.

I think F2P are the blood suckers of the MMO world and are putting people of playing MMO’s. Just saw a post from a guy on the 12 Sky forums saying how he had been ripped of, this is endemic of F2P and the sooner we wise up the better.

Originally posted by trancejeremy

Every F2P game I've played has had a terrible updater/patcher program.

*Shrug much*, every F2P MMO I have played have had good patchers, the latest were a Gpotato game and the free trial of Free Realms. Both patched fine, regardless if I liked them or not.
 

Don't know what you're talking about, maybe you had bad luck.

Guild Wars had/has the best updater of any game that I have played.