The 99hour limit for time left for downloads is too short imo, it’s only four days. Four days or four months makes quite a difference for wether I would choose to wait for the download.
Yep, but that’s an instant estimation (i.e. it’s based on the speeds your client is getting at the present moment). It changes dynamically according to your download speeds.
So, who’s to guarantee you that if you have at present time a speed of, let’s say, 60-150KB/s, you won’t have after a few hours (when 1-2 seeders dropped the swarm) just 1-5KB/s.
It also works the other way around, for a task which at present time has 0-5KB/s in a couple of hours you may get a few hundred KB/s.
So how much will then the present ETA time count?
You should take those values with a grain of salt. They’re right, ONLY if the average speed of the task remains unchanged for the whole duration of the download.
If the download duration is 99:99 hours, then it’s already a warning sing (save for very big torrents, where you’ll have to use you common sense and make an approximation from the average speed, for how much it’ll take you to finish it).
It’s true, the team could perhaps use 3 or 4 digits for the hour counter if they choose to follow your suggestion, but you’d still have to use your common sense when looking at those values.
I have always taken the 99 hour value to mean, “impossible to compute. It will take forever, till the stars grow cold, at this rate. Something’s wrong.” I’ve never seen a real, legitimate download that would actually take 5 days to download.