The more we go forward, the larger and faster the gaming industry grows. Each day, more people are jumping online for fast-paced action.
Unfortunately, the online games of today are huge in size, and because the majority are played online, they consume data and can amount to the same as video streaming.
One of the biggest titles in the world is World of Warcraft, and for many gamers, the question is, how much data does online gaming use?
Here, you can learn more about how much data you consume playing World of Warcraft, and how you can stop your ISP throttling your connection during extended playing sessions or when streaming. (Read Does My Internet Provider Know What Websites I Visit)
How Many MB is World of Warcraft?
World of Warcraft is a massive game, and you may wonder how many gigabytes is World of Warcraft to install. When fully installed, the WoW download size consumes around 79 GB of hard disk space.
Besides the size of the game installation, you need to add in the size of patches and updates, so the 79 GB is just the base level without usage.
Patches and updates can vary in size from 100MB to 4 GB and up to 16 GB for major updates and expansion packs. If you are on a mobile computing device, you need to be sure you have a good connection and no chance of hitting your data cap.
The other alternative is to turn off all your automatic updates in-game and then update from a physical connection once or twice per month, depending on update release.
You may even wonder, when did World of Warcraft come out? They released it in 2004 with all rights reserved, so there can be a considerable number of patches and updates you need to install to get all the Warcraft Worlds.
Does WoW Use a Lot of Data?
Aside from downloading any updates which range from hundreds of MB to several GB. You may wonder how much data you get through while online.
This exact data per hour level can vary depending on the number of other like players in your game.
Included in your data usage is player locations and the stats for every player.
Here is an overview of what you can expect for data usage as a comparison.
A standard raid may only use around 25 MB data per hour. Compare this to a 30 vs. 30 standoff, in somewhere such as the Darkheart Thicket, or Halls of Valor on the Broken Isles. You may find you end up using around 160 MB per hour of gameplay.
If you even like voice chat while you play, then you can double the amount of data used as can the server tick rate. If you are on a 128-tick server, then you will consume more data than a 64-tick server will.
How Much Mobile Data Does World of Warcraft Use
If you look at user use in related articles, then you can find out that World of Warcraft consumes around 36 MB per hour or 600Kb per minute.
If you even like to play for around 5 hours, you can consume about 200 MB approximately. However, if you take part in larger BG’s or raid, then you can consume more.
One thing some players do to reduce data usage is to close the bnet launcher, and in some cases, it can nearly halve the data per hour WoW games use when online gaming for extended periods.
Besides this, users who use Twitch can also find their data usage creeps up without them knowing. It is better to set the Battle net desktop app to close as soon as any you launch any game.
While there may not be any updates for games, the launcher may have an update, or there is a new video for the news section.
How Much Data Does WoW Use a Month?
The amount of internet use may affect some games more than others are. Much of this depends on the plan they have. Unless they are on unlimited data, there may be a point where you reach your limit.
While gaming doesn’t tend to use the same volumes of data when you are on the internet gaming as video streaming does. As soon as you begin downloading a game of the updates, you can see your allocation vanish before you know it.
In the worst-case scenario that has been seen for World of Worldcraft, gaming usage has been around 70 GB in one month.
Breaking this down, you have 30 Kbps and can be seen in raids or when zoning into a city with lots of action. Although to reach up to the 70 GB, the game needs to be running 24/7, which isn’t feasible.
A more realistic assumption is you consume around 2 Kbps. You will then be using about 7 MB for every hour on the internet gaming (not including any other apps, voice chat or streaming).
You can then take the number of hour’s usage per day you spend on the internet gaming, and then multiply the total by 30. You can then find a reasonable estimate of your World of Warcraft data usage per month.
One thing not often mentioned when playing WoW is the use of a VPN. It can be a wise choice because of the number of places that ban its use, most likely because of the data use.
Using a VPN for your online gaming can help you get around work, school, or other locations where online gaming isn’t allowed.
A VPN will encrypt your connection, so no one can see what you are doing while on the internet.
Besides this, you can open up another world of gameplay. You can access World of Warcraft on servers that may not be available in your region. It can be government censorship, or Blizzard decides not to host servers in a particular area.
All you need to check is you use the best VPN for gaming, and you may find yourself with an advantage while stopping your ISP from throttling your internet connection and ruining your online games.
