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up vote 7 down vote favorite

Last time I tried installing the game using the download client it had uploaded more data than the one I received and took so much time to finish.

Is there an (official) way of downloading Starcraft2 directly, or a sanctioned torrent instead of using their download client?

or any alternative method, as long as it's from trusted, legal sources

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As I understand, there is a way to prevent the downloader from being an uploading peer. Maybe there's an option somewhere in the installer? – tenfour Aug 2 '12 at 12:34
Yes, you disable P2P and download it only via the http connection, which makes it slower. I do not mind the sharing, its just that it seems the download client is the slow no matter what options you choose. Some external torrent seems a good solution for me. Any other ideas? – Bruno Pereira Aug 2 '12 at 12:36

3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

You can extract the corresponding torrents from the Blizzard Downloader.

On a mac, you can just look for the torrent file within the Blizzard Downloader folders (as already mentioned here).

On Windows, you have to cut the torrent out of the downloader binary. Here you can find the following list of tools/scripts which do exactly this:

You can also extract the torrent by yourself either manually by using a hex editor or by writing your own script to do the work. The source code comments from WoWTorrentEx provide a nice documentation on how to find the torrent within the binary.

After you successfully extracted the torrent file, use your favorite torrent client for downloading.

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Nice input! Thanks. – Bruno Pereira Aug 2 '12 at 13:33
up vote 3 down vote

You can disable the P2P part of the launcher download from the Options menu in the launcher. The main reason why it's slow even with the P2P option enabled is because the Blizzard torrent implementation is rather naive and not customisable to your internet connection at all and it usually ravages your ability to download anything. I almost always leave it off and get much better speeds.

I'm unsure if this still works, but if you have a Mac you used to be able to extract the .torrent file from the .app folder of the background launcher by opening the folder instead of running it and from there use whatever torrent client you like. I'm not sure if you are able to get this easily on a Windows computer or not though. I wouldn't trust any third party torrents you might find.

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Oh, nice tip about extracting the torrent, will have a go at it. – Bruno Pereira Aug 2 '12 at 12:48
@BrunoPereira: I haven't had a Mac for a couple years now, so I'm unsure if it still works (I discovered it for WoW, but all the Blizzard launchers are the same). I thought it worth mentioning though, just in case. – Matthew Scharley Aug 2 '12 at 13:01
Worked, thx for the help. – Bruno Pereira Aug 2 '12 at 13:24
up vote 2 down vote

Based on this guide and using the excellent input from Matthew.

  • Download the client file from Blizzard (in my case StarCraft_2_EU_en-GB.exe)
  • With a hex editor open the .exe file. I used Bless Hex Editor for Linux, apparently Notepad++ for Windows can also do it

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  • Look (as text) for the string d8:announce

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  • Delete all lines from the start of the file until d8:announce

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  • Save the resulting file as foo.torrent and open it with your favorite torrent client

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This is a start, but not a safe method to get a valid torrent file from a Blizzard Downloader. Blizzard sometimes puts other data (e.g. certificate data) at the end of the downloader binary which is not a part of the torrent. It is more safe to find the 4-byte signature first which marks the end of the included torrent data, and then going backwards from there. Also, sometimes a Blizzard Downloader contains more than one torrent. – speakr Aug 2 '12 at 15:19
Right, had a quick look, the web app looks awesome as a good alternative to extract it. – Bruno Pereira Aug 2 '12 at 15:32

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