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Bandwidth Use In MMOs
Massively is running a story about bandwidth costs for MMOs and other virtual worlds. It's based on a post at the BBC on the same subject which references a traffic analysis (PDF) done for World of Warcraft. Quoting:
"If you're an average user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage (it varies depending on just where you are). For you, sucking back (for example) a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for — and quite often you have to plan for in the following month. Even a 500MB download has to be handled with caution. MMOGs as a rule don't use a whole lot of bandwidth in actual operation. However, the quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, where there are large numbers of mobs, or on raids, and takes quite a much larger jump if you're using voice as well."
WoW and Eve offered standalone ones owing to the fact that autoupdate's don't always work correctly.
You mad
There are standalone patches available.
http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/patches/worldofwarcraft/patch.html
TFA gives the size of a patch or a game download. But that information is easily found. What would actually be useful is the information on how much bandwidth gameplay actually consumes, perhaps in Kbps, for a few of the more common MMOs like WoW.
Such information is also easily found: http://www.google.com/search?q=wow+bandwidth
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No clue how you put Canada on that list. I live in Calgary Alberta. And not a single ISP offers Uncapped Downloads unless you pay for a small Biz Line. Caps start at 20 Gigs for the slow internet 200kbits/s up to 100 Gigs for 10Mbit/s
Stand-alone download installers for WoW patches are indeed available, albeit not always easily so. Certainly, Fileplanet makes them available, but with heavy priority for subscribers. That said, there's often a bit of a wait for the stand-alone downloads to appear, particularly for the non-US versions.
The best piece of advice that I can give about getting WoW patches is to not use the Blizzard torrent client to get it. Let the update start using the default client, then cancel it immediately. You can then grab the .torrent file from a temporary directory within your WoW folder and feed it to a "proper" bittorrent client, which has actual connection configuration options. The default client likes to max out my upstream (and can't be disuaded from doing so easily), with the result that my connection become near-unusable and my downstream speed suffers horribly. By using a proper client and capping the upstream 10k/sec below maximum (which still allows for a decent upload speed and maintains my status as a good citizen), I was able to achieve almost 10 times the download speed I was getting from the official client (going from 60k/sec to 550k/sec), while also keeping my connection vaguely usable for other things.
On an unrelated note, Blizzard are absolutely horrible at rolling out patches. I used to be a hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and since then I've had short bursts in Lord of the Rings Online. FFXI patch-day bugs would be things like "some obscure fight in the Den of Rancor which nobody's done for weeks now has a bit of a pathing-bug, which we'll fix overnight". LotRO patch day was a bit bumpier, but that's understandable given it was a new game at the time and even then, stuff was fixed quite quickly. Any major patch from Blizzard effectively means at least a week (sometimes more) of seriously disrupted play, through server instability and massively disruptive bugs. The most recent patch has resulted in innumerable server crashes and restarts, severe intermittent latency issues throughout the evenings, disconnects when zoning in and out of instances, and a number of graphical bugs affecting machines with SLI graphics cards (albeit bugs with workarounds). The previous patch (2.4) effectively made Heroic instances unplayable for a week, along with the usual latency and disconnection problems. All of this is despite Blizzard having one of the longest and most public testing cycles in the industry for new patches, via the PTR (test realm).