What's the point of buying retail if you still have a ginormous download?

[bypeep]

<p>I'm just complaining, don't mind me - I was very excited about this expansion after watching my b/f play it on beta.</p><p>So the question is this:  Why bother to buy the retail box if it doesn't save you any download time?  We both started patching early this afternoon and had about 5 hours to go on it when UPS showed up.  We jumped for joy thinking that our problem was solved and we'd actually be able to play tonight.  Installed the game, launched and.... no change.  Still 5 hours.  What exactly did the box version install? I'm completely confused.  It added tons of files, spent about 15 minutes just loading the two disks, but it had no effect on our download time.</p><p>I hate the gigantic .vpk downloads.  There's got to be a way to spread them out or cut their size down or something.  We've both been downloading the same file for about an hour now and it's just crawling.  We've restarted our router, restarted launcher, everything but we're both hanging at exp05_rgn_innothule.vpk.</p>

[Mies]

<p>I'm in the same boat.  Any advice would be helpful.  At this point I'm looking at 4 more hours of downloads... not taking into accoutn the 2.5hrs already spent on it.</p>

[Cassea]

<p>I installed the 2 game disks and had a 10 minute download.</p>

[Aragas]

<p>Any online game is going to patch.  I'm sure those retail discs were stamped weeks ago.  Saves the bulk of downloads, but still needs updates.</p><p>That said, are you running on slow connections?  I used the TSO Retail discs and patched in about 20 minutes....and that was when the EQ2 servers were at peak loads just after noon-time on launch day shortly after servers came up.</p>