Guild Wars 2

Why is it, for the past few days, every time I launch the game it downloads something that is 10622kb?
Is this happening to anyone else, or am I the only lucky one?

You might try doing a -repair on your client.

You sound like you have a corrupted .dat file.

The repair method may work but if it doesn’t you will have to re-download the whole .dat file. When this happened to me I had to restore an older backup of the file.

The 10mb file is the actual binary executable for guild wars 2, yours is corrupt.
Defrag your hard drive, then do a -repair on your shortcut for gw2.

The -repair function does not download the entire gw2.dat file, it verifies the integrity of each and every file and only downloads the corrupted and missing ones, it only looks like it’s downloading them all.

Also check the ability of your files to be written to as it sounds like something is read only and has to be re-downloaded each time.

• Close your game completely.
• Right-click your GW2 game shortcut and click on “Properties”.
• On the “Compatibility” tab, check/enable the box for your game to “Run As Administrator”.
• Hit OK after making sure this setting is enabled.

Then:

• Ensure the ‘Read Only’ attribute is not set in the right-click > Properties for Gw2.exe, Gw2.tmp and Gw2.dat files in the installation directory.
• Then re-launch and see if the issue persists.

May still need to re-download this file one time after this change is made but future loadings should not. Perhaps load your client twice to make sure it has fixed the problem.

Also:
Check the game for errors and repair it

• Close your game completely.
• Next, make a copy of your Gw2 game shortcut and rename it “GW2 Repair” or to something that you will recognize it for being only for running a repair on your GW2 installation.
• Now, right-click this “Gw2 Repair” shortcut and click on “Properties”.
• On the “Shortcut” tab look in the “Target:” field, you should see:
  “C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2” or wherever you have Guild Wars 2 installed.
• After the closing quotation marks in this line put a space and then add -repair
  It will look like this but with your GW2 install location:
  “C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2” -repair
• Hit OK after making this change.
• Run this repair shortcut. Your game will run through a repair cycle and fix any damaged files it finds.
• After it runs through, start the game using the normal GW2 game shortcut (not the repair shortcut) and see if your game can start up properly.

You can always make a copy of the .dat file, then uninstall GW2 – redownload the game off the website, then drop the 20GB .dat file that you copied back into the game folder (so that it doesn’t redownload the entire game). It’s possible that doing so might force the launcher to only download the 10mb files once.

I know playing on OSX that there is a folder we can just purge if we have this issue- so removing everything apart from the .dat file might work for you.

gw2.exe is just the launcher, the actual game executable is inside the gw2.dat file and that is what is being fetched each time (gw2.exe is 22mb).
That file inside the .dat is corrupt, thus the suggestion to defrag so it’ll move the data around.

Might I suggest a checkdisk on your drive, it might have some faulty sectors (check the image). Right-click on the drive gw2 is on and click properties, then follow the screenshot.
The second check box is for a comprehensive scan and you might need that, it’ll take quite a while and if gw2 is on a system drive you’ll have to restart your computer to do the check.

Thank you all for the helpful and detailed responses!

Running the -repair fixed it.

Being a refugee from the Warcraft forums, I must say that the community of this game is restoring my faith in humanity! You guys are awesome

wolvenra.9617:

Thank you all for the helpful and detailed responses!

Running the -repair fixed it.

Being a refugee from the Warcraft forums, I must say that the community of this game is restoring my faith in humanity! You guys are awesome

The Warcraft forums are very toxic. If not careful, one could come away from reading those boards suffering from major depression.

At best, these boards can make you mad. Big difference overall. LOL