The best way to get Guild Wars 2 to use files on DVD for initial installation

After one or two months/weeks of indecision (& playing Star Wars: The Old Republic), I purchased Guild Wars 2 today. Physical box copy. Excitedly I popped the first DVD in the drive, ran the setup, and was rather taken aback by the game installer 100% ignoring the +-14GB worth of info on the DVDs, & basically starting to download the full game client. All 233000 files of it. Yuck. I attempted quite a few items however eventually managed to get the GW2 gold game to agree to use the files from the DVDs as at least a starting point, and then patching the +-6 months worth of patches, bringing the download count down to only about 80000 files. Here's how:

Start up the DVD installer and let it download the first bit, restart itself, & allow you to pick where to install the game to. You've likely gotten this far already.

Exit the installer.
Use explorer to browse to the 1st DVD and copy the Gw2.js0 & Gw2.js1 into a temporary folder.
Do the same for Gw2.js2 & Gw2.js3 on the second DVD.
I did the following on an Ubuntu server to incorporate these 4 files into a single file:
cat Gw2.js* > Gw2.dat

If you are a Linux user, you'll know how/what to do to get the files to your server in the very first place, I won't go into that here.

The equivalent steps in Windows would be:
Use Explorer to navigate to the folder where you copied the files to.
Keep the Shift key on your keyboard in & right-click anywhere on the white part of this window
On the resulting popup menu, decide upon "Open command window here"
Type the following command & press ENTER.
copy /b Gw2.js* Gw2.dat

I attempted the above COPY command on my Windows machine, although it took forever, consequently doing it on the Ubuntu server. I cannot confirm 100% that this "cp /b" command works for this purpose, however I'm fairly confident it should. Can anybody confirm?

The point is, what I'm doing above is combining the 4 DVD install files into a single Gw2.dat file, & "seeding" the installation process with those files. Like the installer ought to have done in the first place.

Now, you need to copy the resulting Gw2.dat file into your C:Program FilesGuild Wars 2 folder - you could just open a 2nd Explorer window, & drag & drop the file into the Guild Wars 2 folder. Windows will in all probability complain about administrator rights, agree to let the file copy, and overwrite the silly temporary file that was there.

That is it. Once you run Guild Wars 2 now, the game will realize that it already has a big percentage of the game files already, & only download the differences. Which from what I can tell, at time of writing this, is about 7GB worth of data. That is a little better than the full 16GB of data. Please feel zero cost to let me know if this worked for you? PS. I suspect the Guild Wars 2 gold game installation might "work appropriately" if you are not connected to the net once you start the installer up, as it will not know that there's a newer version out there, so will just use the DVDs in the first place. I may be inaccurate though, I didn't try this.

Important source:


http://forums.countrysampler.com/post?id=6223544

http://gw2goldnet.techmaza.in/2013/02/20/renown-hearts-are-insurance-against-broken-quests/

http://www.hubmesh.com/content/does-profession-specific-pve-team-build-good-or-not

http://www.gmbase.com/bbs/Topic-B7-T12196.aspx

http://forum.primax.co.tz/member/blog_post_view.php?postId=8638

http://concern-liberians.org/chat_room/view_topic.php?id=83256&forum_id=1