For most people, I assume, when they’re downloading videos or whatever with their bittorrent client, they simply queue up their torrents and let the program do its thing. This is how bittorent worked early on, before the advent of uTorrent, Bitcomet, Vuze and the many other clients that allow serious tweaking in the options menu.

Impatient as always, I have found myself tinkering with these settings any time a torrent is seemingly dragging its feet. The problem is, I have already set my client (I use Azureus) to optimal settings for my connection, but I can’t seem to stop myself from adjusting things like the upload speed and peer connections in the hopes that I can somehow accelerate the transfer.

The idea that I am somehow shepherding the file fragments onto my hard drive, like some RTS where I’ve sent my peasants out to chop wood and mine gold, is a thought I can’t easily put to rest. I realize that most of the time I’m probably not contributing very much to the outcome of the transfer, but it feels better than remaining passive through a long, arduous download.

Do you ever find yourself obsessively managing your torrents? Drop me a comment if you’ve turned file sharing into a computer game.