Alternatives to the Blizzard Downloader as a means of downloading Starcraft 2?

Solution 1:

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:

• WoWTorrentEx (win32 binary, c sources included - I recommend this one)
• extorrents (perl script)
• biz-extorrents.py (python code on pastebin)
• web app (sources also available)

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.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

_{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

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

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

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