Just wanted to know if I could DL this game for my brother, because he has a very crappy internet connection with limited bandwidth.
Sure can. Download and install it and move/copy it to your brother's computer. It doesn't have any obscure registry files that don't get carried over that it needs or anything.
If you are talking about somehow giving him your client, I would not see why not, I've transferred many MMORPG, MMO's, FPS...etc over to another computer with a Flash Drive. (WoW is a big game, around 22 gigs. I did it with WoW because I don't like waiting for downloads as I have DSL 756k....only like 300-700kb, usually around 370kb a download. If you only have small flash drives of 4-8gb, you will need atleast 2 to equal above the disk space needed which is around 10gb. Put half the files on one flash drive, and half the other files on another, Just make sure you remember what files you put on which and you put those files in the same folder when you extract. If you have a 12gb+ Flash Drive, that will do the trick just fine Virtually you are getting the same files that you would when you normally download.
My internet has a terrible speed so I actually downloaded it during my lunch time at work, put it on my phone's internal memory, and then put it on my PC when I got home. The easiest method I've found is to download it on Steam, create a backup through Steam (just go to the Steam library, right click Planetside 2 after it's downloaded, and click Backup Game Files), and then just move the backup onto a flash drive/phone/what have you. Then put it on your friend's computer, go to Steam, and click Backup and Restore Games in the Steam dropdown menu at the top left. Steam will unpack the files and install it for you. If you don't use Steam then just install the game normally and throw the whole game folder into a .rar. I used to do it this way but sometimes my .rar files would corrupt, so I started using Steam. Steam will also split the game into multiple files if you don't have a big enough flash drive for the whole thing.
Ok. Thanx guys. Just to clarify though... Since I installed PS2 on my secondary HD, I can just copy that whole folder onto his Primary HD then?
No No No - Never used Steam's backup feature. It is awful and much more time consuming than it needs to be (also it doesn't work properly with Planetside 2 since it is takes out the patches and forces you gigabytes of re-downloading) Just copy the folder it has in your steam folder and paste it on the other machine - better result - easy as pie.
Uhh, no it doesn't. Like I just said above, I used Steam's backup system to bring PS2 home from work and it worked flawlessly. You're thinking of Steam's "validate files" system. THAT is the thing that, if you run it, it will make you download 3gb of game again. Also it packs the game much faster than putting it into a .zip or .rar. EDIT: Woah woah woah, do NOT just drag everything over from your computer to the flash drive. That's almost 10gb of individual files. If you're going to just move the folder, pack it into a .zip or a .rar first. Otherwise you risk corrupting the files during transfer.
No I am not - try making a backup now, move it to another computer and watch in horror as the launcher decides to download another 3 gigabytes of data. Why is that? Because it uses the same goddamned system as the validation tool. It checks with the STEAM servers for a checksum of files, strips it of anything else and then packs it up for you. Since SOE does not use Steam's download service for patches (and why would they - they take days to validate and seed a patch from 3rd party companies) you'll be missing out of anything after the last Steam version (which incidentally is Retail 1.0 as I recall) And you would be wrong because it uses the exact same methods of compression - the only difference is level of compression, but who the hell uses compression when making game archives anyway. Just use the "Store" level and it won't compress at all. It's not like you're going to be keeping it as a permanent backup anyway.
That all sounds convincing but I just used Steam's backup for PS2 last week and I assure you I did not have a 3GB download waiting for me. If I did it would have taken at least a day to download on my connection. It doesn't compress the files unless you tell it to by specifying a disk size. It just puts it into a format that's safer to transfer, similar to a .rar, but it's faster. Try it on something. My work computer, running an old core 2 duo, backed it up in less than 5 minutes. When I try to .rar anything more than 4gb on that thing it usually takes at least 10 minutes (mostly because of the compression).
