TBH ive never had a problem with the downloader. Downloaded Witcher 1 (which is plenty big enough) over the weekend and no corrupt files.Installs fine. (waiting on TW2 as im running low on quota...)

Dragonfell you're absolutely right that we, as customers, should provide feedback on our experiences. It's absolutely brilliant when people go in to detail about not just bugs they find but on the whole user experience. And I do agree that GOG could make some things clearer.

As to your personal experience I think part of the problem is to do with the different philosophies between GOG and Steam. GOG considers itself to be competing with pirates so the way it works in a similar way to if you were pirating a game.

In case you don't know, to pirate a game first you would usually download the setup files (or an iso) in bittorent. So that's what GOG downloader does. The settings in GOG downloader "Save Downloads to" is where the setup files are saved.

The next step is the same if you pirate or use GOG: you run the setup program. GOG does this automatically when the download is complete. With GOG setup programs you can click the "Options" button before you install and this will set where the game is actually installed to. Note this may be different to where the downloaded setup file was saved.

Does this make sense to you?

True. Not all my experiences with the downloader have been peachy, at least in the past. At some point I learned not to trust the downloader, if it claimed the download was successful, yet the installer might have been corrupted. But that was awhile ago.

For instance with Bittorrent (e.g. downloading Humble Bundle installers), I always feel confident that if the download was finished, then I have a perfect, uncorrupted download on my hard drive. I wish the GOG Downloader was there already, but I am not confident.

That's a curious case indeed. Was the file really downloaded through the downloader client (ie. you saw the Witcher installer files listed in the GOG client), or is it possible that even though you had the client running, you didn't have the downloader option enabled in your account (web browser)? That would explain why the installer files ended up in a different place than what you had configured in the client, ie. you accidentally downloaded them with the browser instead? But then, I'm pretty sure you would have noticed that...

Just to be sure, check the attached picture, it shows when the downloader client option is off, and when it is on.

FWIW and no offense meant - the proper avenues regarding issues with the GOG Downloader, is not to create a new thread in the General discussion forum, but:

1. To post in the "STICKY: GOG.com Downloader (Windows & Mac client) discussion" thread which is the place people report their issues with the GOG Downloader and the one the people developing and supporting it check and reply in.

2. To send your log/ report file from within the GOG Downloader - the people that receive this file are the ones mentioned in #1.

3. To contact support using the proper section from here (it's the second entry) and detail your issues.

i think the corruption issue appears for users with slow internet and disconnections, they should really make the client downloader recheck files before resuming downloads

You weren't here when somebody figured out they could embed scripts into the forum titles. And for as long as I can remember malformed quotes will result in a post taking literally forever to post without any sort of indication that it's not going to work.

The downloader has its issues, but it is simple and I rarely have issues with it.

I used the downloader back when it was still the Adobe Air version (didn't have problems with it, though I seem to recall lots of people did). When it switched to the .NET technology and thus did/do not work under Linux with Wine, Nowadays I just download directly through browser.

Well, I don't know about any of that, but as for the downloader: I used to have terrible(!) connection speed and reliability here up until late last year, and guess what, I still managed to download games, including some fairly big ones. That thing is magical, I say!

Nowadays my internet isn't exactly state of the art, but decent enough that I can download games with or without the client. Again, hardly ever any problems.

Maybe you guys just don't love GOG enough. :(

When it works it works, but it's not terribly robust and I've had to go into my profile and delete the entire data directory because it got all bollocksed up.

No, you are not, you internet connection is awesome, but you aren't

Then again, after looking at my shelf of games, you have given me a few, so I guess, yes, your both awesome.

To the OP: I'm not a computer wiz but I consider myself to have above average knowledge of computers (I work as a Storage Planning Engineer). I haven't had any problems with the downloader. In fact, it even does exactly what I want it to do but life has taught me that when it comes about computers, the more you know about them, the more you have to dumb you down to be able to use "user-friendly" applications.