There has been some discussion over on the Beta forums about the new launcher, mostly centering around the impact on testers to have to download the entire beta again. While I can understand their gripes this is going to happen at least once more during the beta, there are times when it simply makes more sense to scratch install rather than to try and put effort into coding the tweaks needed to upgrade from one dev build to another.
More importantly how good is the new launch system?
It rocks, certainly for those of us with a good sized pipe, as you can see from the screenshot the game was playable after only a few percent of the entire 15Gb download, and it was playable. I can only assume there is some seriously sexy technology behind it doing some pre-emtive prioritisation of content based on where the player is in the world. The only problem I encountered was being booted out of the game when I tried to enter Gnomer, however on relogging I zoned in with no problems. This may or may not be related to the ongoing download given the stability of the servers at the moment (world server crashes at least hourly).
So, I for one welcome our new launcher overlord and what it means for future patch days.
