Okay, I pay for the damn service for the convenience factor, and today I go to download the Natural Selection beta 4 patch, and it’s saying I have to get some download manager? No thanks, not gonna throw more spyware at my system. Is there any decent place, free or pay, that you can just go to and download recent stuff anymore?
Just click “no” when it asks if you want to use the Fileplanet download manager and you can still download your stuff the same way you always have. At least, that worked for me last week.
Well, there I go making assumptions. Typically I see something like that and I assume that if I click no, it’s going to abort the whole thing. I think I hit the X in the corner…
There are also mirrors that don’t use the download manager. Any of the ones that don’t say “DL CTRL” for example.
Myself, I think the download manager is pretty damn spiffy. I don’t believe it contains any spyware, either. It’s kind of unfortunate that spyware has caused many of us to automatically assume that any plugin is going to be nasty and/or annoying, though. I don’t install ANYTHING from a site unless I 100% trust it.
I guess maybe they figured that anyone naive enough to pay for what should be and historically always has been and still is with many alternatives a free service would also greatly appreciate the sheer convenience of gator filling in their forms and stealing their creditcard information? Obviously these hypothetical naive users have too much money anyway.
It doesn’t do either of those things.
Adrenaline Vault used to be a good download site, apparently that’s changed as I just learned a few moments ago…
Feel the velocity! There’s still Fileshack however…
I haven’t bothered using the Download Manager yet, as I don’t see a reason to install it. I get nice speeds and dropped connections are very rare. Just skip past it.
I’d shoot myself before paying to an annoying service as fileplanet in order to download files that are available everyware (Except a few “exclusive” files… wow… how exciting)
Usually you can find the files in their respective owners sites…
-Shiroko
The only problem with Fileshack for me is that it doesn’t have quite the catalogue of files that other sites have.
That’s what I thought, so I asked a friend if I could borrow his subscribers login. No more queues.
And where, pray tell, are these “many alternatives”? Have you tried to download anything recently via traditional means (http or ftp) ? The sites that have anything new are few and far between.
I have better luck with bittorrent and looking for the Torrent on Gametab than with more traditional methods lately.
For patches I normally use the Patches Scroll if the publishers web-site doesn’t host it, or they’ve gone bust. Demos again I’ll get from the publisher’s/developer’s web-sites. On the odd occasion that they use Fileplanet as a mirror I haven’t noticed any really long queues, i.e more than a couple of minutes - the advantage living in a non-US time zone I suppose.
I can’t believe that you could get a popular demo off a publisher/developer’s site unless they’re linking to FilePlanet/Shack/whatever mirrors or you’re doing it months after the fact. Publisher sites get slammed.
When it works I always head off to filemirrors.com to get my patches/demos/movies, soon though I’ll be hopefully using my ISPs free downloads section… no line waiting there either, plus they have a ‘request file’ bit… YAY!
I like to use 3dgamers.com whenever possible, as they have both regular ftp downloads from a few mirrors, as well as bittorrent downloads for those times when things are a bit crazy. Filerush.com is good for game demos and trailers in torrent form as well.
I pay for file planet. its been good to me.
If they want to make it difficult to d/l their demo, that’s their problem. not mine, they’re the ones who want my money. Normally I just go back a week or so later or forget about it.
I found that the flieplanet DL manager is actually faster than using my download accelarator.
Okay, I figured out that this was a problem with fileplanet not liking the Mozilla Firefox browser… this works fine for me in IE but not in Firefox. Sorry for the venomous post :P