By packs I was referencing your post, not my own downloading habits. I'm not sure if you meant packs as in the conventional sense of "packs" like on 0day sites, or packs as in TV seasons, but in my experience, when downloading seasons of TV shows (what is that, ~6-8 gigs give or take), it takes me weeks and weeks of purely seeding BMTV torrents to even have a chance of seeding it back, and even then it's not guaranteed. And these are on more recent, modern TV shows, imagine how hard it would be on older, more obscure shows? Maybe you're getting lucky with your show selection and how much interest they garner at BMTV, but given the general sense of the FST and BMTV forums, I would assume that your seeding success is a definite minority.
And at that point, it really isn't even fun anymore. When you're spending more time worrying about whether you can "afford" to download a season (and no, I don't mean constantly downloading packs, I mean downloading a season of a TV show once every few weeks) than actually viewing the content you download, what's the point?
While introducing things such as seedpoints certainly do raise concerns of torrent longevity, ultimately the biggest factor in torrent longevity is simply activity. If more people are willing to jump on to a torrent because it won't as drastically impact their ratio, it'll tend to outnumber the losses you'd get from those who don't feel the need to seed the file anymore. The perfect example of this is TVT: while there are absolutely no seeding length requirements and you can hit n run as much as you like without repercussions, I consistently see 5-6 times as many seeders on obscure season packs than on BMTV, not to mention that simply put a lot of the time those season packs are dead and abandoned on BMTV. Why is retention on TVT better, even though it has absolutely no rules on hitnrunning? It's because the sheer amount of peer activity resulting from an easy to seed environment (helped by things such as 1.5x upload bonus for seeders) far overcompensates for the amount of people that drop off a torrent because they have no motivation to continue seeding it.
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