Issues, Workarounds & Localization

Bump this thread until CCP takes notice please!!!

PROBLEM: CRITICAL FILES ACCESSED BY HTTP REQUESTS ARE NOT CONFIGURED TO SUPPORT ISP CACHING AND OTHER WEB CACHES.

SOLUTION 1: CONFIGURE HTTP HEADERS OR HTML TAGS TO PROVIDE EXPIRATION OR CACHING INSTRUCTIONS TO ISP AND WEB CACHES.

SOLUTION 2: CHANGE THE URL REQUESTED BY THE REPAIR TOOL AND THE LAUNCHER TO INCLUDE A RANDOM BUT MEANINGLESS VARIABLE ON THE END. THIS WILL FORCE THE CACHE TO REQUEST A RESPONSE FROM THE ORIGINAL SERVER. (e.g. http://client.eveonline.com/patches/premium_patchinfoTQ_inc.txt?VARIABLE=k12j43k1234h1k2h9s8df79asd87f)

One of the largest providers of internet access in Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, and the surrounding areas uses an ISP cache. Many ISP's around the world do this.

This cache is not updating critical files needed by the repair tool and launcher which firsts produces the incompatible protocol error and later a failed download.

I tried updating for over a month and failed. After I noticed a file on my web server was downloading an out of date version I checked out the issue and found that FTP would download correctly but HTTP would not. Further research found it to be an ISP cache. Adding a worthless GET variable or POST variable to the request downloaded the correct file. I suspected that might be the problem here. Heres what I found:

The website (http://client.eveonline.com/patches/premium_patchinfoTQ_inc.txt) downloaded via firefox returned this result:
BUILD:551409, 551409, 2013.06.07
0,0,0

When downloaded from a proxy it returned this result:
BUILD:567916, 567916, 2013.07.09
0,0,0

Obviously other files are being rendered similarly. I traced the source of the file to my ISP's cache. I thoroughly deleted all caches in my gateway and router as well as all my browsers. I also flushed my DNS.

The solution is obviously to configure caching instructions in the appropriate pages or add a meaningless and random variable to the end of the URLS requested by the repair tool and the launcher.

I am able to download the installer at about 8kbps. This will take me a couple of weeks to get the full version. Already the version I'm downloading is out of date. Without a manual patch I'll be unable to play eve. I will probably recreate the correct file locally and redirect the URL to it in order to get a patch to install. However that solution is obviously far inferior to CCP simply configuring caching instructions on the pages in question.

Thank you very much for making us aware of this! The HTTP caching instructions are indeed things we have to look at, so I've just filed this as a defect to increase priority of this.

Nice work Chromoburst