How do YOU download the FM patch?

Right then: A quick bit of market research on a subject that has been nagging at me for some time. I've always wondered why downloading a FM patch from SI involves a little bit more of a palaver than, for example, downloading a patch for Fallout 3 or Bioshock (both of which I downloaded quickly and easily from their respective websites). For example, I struggled to find a suitable download of the FM08 patch to the point where I gave up trying and only ran the game twice. Ditto FM09 9.2.0 (I'm still labouting with 9.1.0)

So then: Am I being difficult, behind the times or could obtaining a patch from SI/ Sega be a much more simple process?

I get it automatically from Steam and in past versions i never found it too hard to find a patch

I just googled the patch and then downloaded it.

i normally wait till the day after release and download the first .rar mirror that appears, if its made more widely avilable through the likes of say rapidshare or filefront or even megaupload it would take a big burden off SI servers and allow most people to get hold of it straight away

Blimey - 3 replies and I never even got as far as the poll! Must type faster!

i normally wait till the day after release and download the first .rar mirror that appears, if its made more widely avilable through the likes of say rapidshare or filefront or even megaupload it would take a big burden off SI servers and allow most people to get hold of it straight away

I'm guessing that this will be the most common response of regular forum users - but I'd like to see whether it is actually the case.

I'm sure rapidshare links have been provided in the past for patches, they were pretty fast.

Last year I was unaware of a patch being available, so I played 8.0, which was rather enjoyable, my 11 year career that ended up winning the league with my boyhood club Liverpool. I went a long way from Bromley to Liverpool, with a trip to Italy in between, with taking Aldershot from League 2 to Prem League being the other club.

This year I get auto-patched by Steam.

It is a big ask when you get tens of thousands after a ~200MB file in one night - that's the kinda volume that requires an infrastructure specifically designed to handle it which I think it's unreasonable to expect anyone to have really, it's the reason things like Rapidshare can afford to offer free services because enough people need their paid ones.

It also helps to have a few mirrors because with that volume even with sites like rapidshare you'll start to get a bottleneck on that particular download/server.

From the official SI website, because usually am downloading the patch minutes after the release and no rapidshare or sth like that links

I presume your real answer is torrent then? I don't think SI have hosted any full downloads this year, but I could be wrong.

Steam does it for me, so much easier

I tried out two or three mirrors until a found one which had decent download speed.

Steam (which I hate!)

Steam is what I use takes a maximum of 5 minutes to download a patch and you dont have to look for it. Its just downloaded for you!

Steam for me

Steam, takes the hassle out of the whole thing.

The torrent link is always the fastest for me. Takes about as long as it does to open a page on here once its been released.

Just download it straight off Steam hassle-free.

The torrents go so much faster, and is always available. That'll be my pick.

Cheers to everybody who's replied so far. Some interesting stats there:

The majority download the patch in untorrented form;

Steam has been embraced - at least - by the forum and is proving a popular way to authenticate and patch (if not necessarily download);

Relatively few people download from the SI site, even though that's where the 'check for updates' option in-game takes you;

And everybody seems to have missed my pointed reference that you can't download the patch from the publisher's website

I wonder how these stats stack up against SI and Sega's experience.

Personally I would like the 'check for updates' approach to link to a much faster server; my attempts to download from the sigames website have been abandoned after the expected download time exceeded 20 hours .

for 9.1 check for updates did link to the mirrors so you had a choice of where to download it from. Don't know why that changed

i love steam <3

Steam

it's the only thing i like about being on Steam, the patch get d/l hassle free and quickly

From Gamershell. Tried the SI site and got a dl speed of 5k/sec, which placed my dl at 12 hours :-) So googled and went to gs, 12 minutes.

Well, i have for now uninstalled FM09 - but when the new patch is out, i will re-install via Steam and i think it should automatically download the 9.0.3 patch for me ...is that right?

I use bittorrent.