Why do I get the feeling the majory of the most, ah... vocal segment of the community that hates impulse are ones that haven't bought the game and therefore cannot update?
I know literally dozens of people who have Impulse and I've never seen one with a major problem with it.
No, there are some legitimate issues that we're dealing with but they're very specific cases.
First, you have the people who, for whatever reason, had trouble with the InstallAware web downloader we used to install Impulse in the first place. That's a big chunk of the people. We fixed that by making a new full install that's only 8 or so megs.
Second, you have a group of people whose timeclock, for whatever reason, isn't synced with ours and so the security check is barfing. Again, it's not Impulse. Even if we had a pure stand alone patch you can bet we would have at least used an SSL download server. We should have that somewhat addressed shortly.
Third, you have a group who do not have an Internet connection on their home computer that they use Sins on and you cannot install updates without an Internet connection on the machine to validate the user's account. We are addressing this by placing the user account info into the archive so someone could use a third party computer to download the update and then move it to their home computer.
Fourth, there are just people who have strange issues. Maybe they don't have .NET, maybe they have some other issue that we don't know about.
But yea, there are the much larger groups of people that fall into either the category of crank (and yes, I'm saying crank, as CEO of Stardock, I think having Impulse turn away obnoxious cranks from ever ever ever buying something we develop or publish is a feature) who object to Impulse purely on some strange principle. As if downloading an 8 megabyte download updater that lets them get updates vastly faster is somehow the end of the world.
And there's the even larger group of warez users who are bummed they can't go to File Planet or whatever and simply download it and thus have to wait until some torrent or whatever shows up.
Ironically, Impulse isn't an anti-piracy solution. It's just a very smart, very cool digital distribution client for minimizing download times through a combination of only giving you what you need and getting it from the fastest, closest server in the world.
