Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing GW2 for almost 4 years. I have a pass for DR Royal Terrace. I use it often.

The load times for Royal Terrace have gone to over 30 seconds in the last 3 months.

I know it’s Halloween in LA, but the load time there is way longer than last year.

I have fast Uverse, i7 3.8g, 32g Ram, Seagate Hybrid drive and nVidia 960. The same setup for 3 years, it’s not me.

Edit: Windows 7 Pro
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Hopefully, others can later refer to this thread for ideas.

The longest I have experienced lately is 10 seconds or so, and my rig is much slower.

Try running a ‘repair’ of your client. Instructions on the wiki at:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments#-repair

Allow for 20-30 minutes. That will reduce loadscreen times for some people.
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Another possibility is to create a new copy of your .DAT file:

• Find your GW2 installation folder.
• Find the gw2.DAT file, select it, and right-click to ‘copy’ it
• Paste into the same folder, creating a ‘copy of gw2.DAT’ or ‘gw2 copy.DAT’ depending on your settings.
• Rename the original to ‘gw2.DAT old’ or even ‘gw2 old.DAT’
• Rename the copy to ‘gw2.DAT’
• Run the game to make sure it works. Close the game.
• Delete the ‘old’ (but don’t empty recycling bin)
• Restart the game to double check.

Both ‘procedures’ will fix some loading issues due to improperly closed internal files or fragmentation.

Since neither process is guaranteed to reduce load screens, I also recommend creating a ticket (follow the links to support, at top left) and work with Support directly. If you end up resolving things, you can close the ticket.

Or get an SSD, and find out how badly you’re network bottle necked. :P
(PS, its not a lot)

indeed SSD does help a ton even with my pc form 2006 fast load times in anything.
my awesome stats
Q6600 2.4ghz cpu
8 gb ddr2 800mhz ram
gtx 680 classified gpu
ssd from intel.
oh, i forgot, its a dell that uses motherboard on wrong side of case~

SSD is always a good choice to reduce loading times. And prices are going down all the time.

I used to have 3 minute loading times in LA. Thank god for the Royal Terrace pass. I’ve found that where I log in in the Terrace makes a difference. Longer loading times next to the bank, shorter times away.

Remember, the more players that have extra effects, the more there is to load. Lots more wings, and such, nowadays.

get an SSD, hybrid drives are nowhere as close to the performance , in terms or raw power my PC is not even 1/4th of yours and mine loads everything way fast simply because of an ssd

hybrid drives mainly use their SSD portion as cache so not good for gaming

Yep toss that kittenty drive and get an ssd.

The only time this gets annoying is when you use an Emergency Waypoint in WvW from another map, but because of slow loading, you get send back to your spawn waypoint when the EWP closes.

I recently spent 500 gems on transferring from an EU server to American. (I’m in Australia now – but when I bought the game was in the UK and had no trouble with loading times)

Since being in Australia the loading times have become insane – at least 52 seconds minimum. I have been in touch with support several times, checked my client, repaired it a few times and no errors and no noticiable difference, so finally they said to transfer server regions. So I purchased gems on Friday night and still no reduction in screen loading times.

Lame question – Is there a difference in buying and using an SSD card to using an external hard drive? I’m asking as I tried running GW2 from my ext hard drive and it made no difference so I am reluctant to try an SSD card and find no difference.

Thanks

anx.7549:

I recently spent 500 gems on transferring from an EU server to American. (I’m in Australia now – but when I bought the game was in the UK and had no trouble with loading times)

Since being in Australia the loading times have become insane – at least 52 seconds minimum. I have been in touch with support several times, checked my client, repaired it a few times and no errors and no noticiable difference, so finally they said to transfer server regions. So I purchased gems on Friday night and still no reduction in screen loading times.

Lame question – Is there a difference in buying and using an SSD card to using an external hard drive? I’m asking as I tried running GW2 from my ext hard drive and it made no difference so I am reluctant to try an SSD card and find no difference.

Thanks

well at least check its rated Write, Read Speeds and IOPs
it should be faster than an external HDD but it might depend on the motherboard and the port used as well, if your system doesnt have even usb 3.0 minimum dont even bother

by ssd card what do you mean?

Perhaps the OP is confused between a Solid State Drive and an SD card. The posters above are suggesting you replace your Hard Disk Drive with a Solid State Drive. SSDs have much faster access and retrieval times.

Good luck.

Yeah I admit I was confused by a solid state hard drive and an SSD card. My bad! Thanks for the info guys!

anx.7549:

Yeah I admit I was confused by a solid state hard drive and an SSD card. My bad! Thanks for the info guys!

if you do buy an ssd dont get rid of your HDD and use both

this might help

I should have asked, using ‘-maploadinfo’, what do you get for a load time ?
( halloween times) – I’ll repost new times afterwards
1. LA Forum ? (30 seconds)
2. DR Royal terrace ? (12 seconds)
3. Alpine Borderlands ? (9 seconds)

Regrettably, I didn’t record times before the following changes:
1) I defragged and copied gw2.dat to a new file, just in case it was sitting on a bad sector
2) after discovering MS defender slows files copies quite a bit, I added an exception for GW2.exe and for the gw2 install path

I seem to have gained a little bit of speed after doing those.

I’m going to add a small SSD to put the GW2 installation on. Then I’ll check the times again and report in a later post.

I have SSD and in heavely people loaded maps (LA looking at you) the load time is ALWAYS long no matter what (20-38 seconds).

Royal Terrace and captain airship pass are almost the fastest (though i see ppl with SSD4s lately loading faster then me, wich suggest less fragmentation on their end). Guild hall loads fastests of anything.

I have similar setup to op but 512gb SSD.

I finally got around to adding that SSD. . .

I didn’t see any postings describing the benefits of using an SSD with GW2. I had become bothered with load times into Royal Terrace and into our (bloated) guild hall. So here are my numbers.

I recently added an SSD to Intel 4 core 3.7GHz, 32GB, 960 FTW and 2TB Seagate hybrid drive with 8GB cache. (I picked small SSD because price was $40 and I only routinely play gw2)

I left my original GW2 directory. I made a copy of it to my SSD and ran the other copy from there. During SSD use, C: showed 0% utilization.

I have a toon parked on the Terrace near the portal. I timed from when I selected the toon and the mini-map was finished 3 times after restarting the game each time. On the 3rd time, I took the portal to LA arriving at the NE portal cluster. Went to our guild hall and waited for all decorations to appear. Pressed B and went to Eternal Borderland, then took the portal back to LA arriving at the South portal cluster. I did this during non-peak hours within 10 min (4pm EST Friday)

with HD: 1st load(49s), 2nd(19s), 3rd(17s), LA-(25s), GH(28s), EB(10s), LA-returnviaportal(16s)

with SSD: 1st load(18s), 2nd(18s), 3rd(17s), LA(16s), GH(10s), EB(7s), LA-returnviaportal(14s)

Biggest difference was with initial load and guild hall scenery load times. Conclusion: SSD helps, but not a huge difference

EDIT: To clarify, the SSD in my test is NOT the system drive. I don’t want that since I boot only once a week or so and rely on sleep for unused times.

its not anets fault or the game being porly optimised u should get an ssd

Clear the cache:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5bncp5/psa_dont_forget_to_clear_your_cache/

And yes, to all, an SSD is a good thing to have. Also, depending on how small the SSD drive is; it can be a problem because SSDs do slow down when they get too full. Windows takes up a good chunk. Gw2 takes up 20. On mine, I redirect all photos, documents, videos, and the desktop to the regular hard drive. They don’t really need the speed and I usually download large files straight to desktop.

Anyhow, I uploaded a gameplay sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm0X_ydAMfc&feature=youtu.be

This is par the course when it comes to loading times.

From 49 to 18 sec is not a Huge difference ? I beg to differ.

Let’s say you either get payed 18 bucks an hour or 49 bucks an hour..Is this a huge difference now ?

Remember, that’s only for the FIRST load of the game.

First off, putting your OS on the SSD isn’t just for boot. It speeds up when it needs to do things like search for files or when processes run in the background— which is always.

Also, I tried copying Gw2 to my 7200 RPM regular HDD, and blech….. the load times were definitely worse to the point it was too boring for me to bother trying. However, it still took around 15-20s at most to load a map (Back and forth between Royal Terrace and Lion’s Arch). I think there’s a problem if my regular hard drive loads just as fast as your SSD. And my internet is just some slow as molasses DSL connected to really shoddy house wiring.

I mean, I used to see 40+ second load times on my old, overheating Core 2 duo machine, but I’m pretty sure if I put an SSD on it, it wouldn’t be as bad.

There’s definitely something wrong on your end. Could be the internet or drive. Or maybe heat issues, hard to say.

Finally, 30 seconds a day over the course of 365 days equals 3 hours. I feel that does matter especially since I know it’s more than that over even a brief game session.

If it weren’t for GW2 load times, I’d never have time to check the forums.

:D

Excelsior.

Many things in this thread are just plain wrong or missing important information that make even the basically correct suggestions and tips useless.

The “get an SSD” is one side of the coin. I am running this game off of my HDD just fine, loading does not change that much over my SSD. If you check the low memory usage of the game I thought it’s by far not the raw data troughput many of you talk about in this SSDvsHDD conversation. But it’s not as easy as the commercials want you to believe.

The internet connection is not the reason at all, the stuff you need upon entering a map and during gameplay could probably be received via one-channelled ISDN (64 kBit/s) easily, as long as it’s fast and stable.

Seeing that basically a map takes like 500 MByte which is accessed in a couple of seconds on either [a] SSD or HDD, I just blame the game (engine). Also, many CPUs are bottlenecking. Same mass memory storages but changing from Duo Core to Quad Core or using a real architecture (AMD vs Intel) can also change a lot.

Since GW2 contains of a huge, single file that contains everything, I just assume browsing that uge GW2.dat is the real reason for slow loading times. Not sure it really works, but while it’s being super portable, having literally hundred thousands of entries within a single file can slow down compared to have it split up, but then again, I do not know how the structure exactly works. My defrag tools always have to defrag the whole GW2.dat after updates because these tools want this 34 GByte to be adjacent on the disk.

When I load Cities Skylines for example off of my HDD, it fills up my VRAM in a couple of seconds. 4 GByte of VRAM and additionally other game files to regular RAM in, like, 15 seconds. I monitor that trough widgets on my desktop. In GW2, I load 5x as slow but barely have any memory usage going up, the VRAM stays almost empty and the system memory’s usage is not worth mentioning.

But don’t worry, FF14 is the same: It loads for comparibly long time just to see a dungeon and all the memories of a major city consumed 700 MByte in total, but loaded for so much time a benchmark would load you 10 GByte. Or League of Legends: Eats up exactly 1.0 GByte and takes 15 seconds to load.
1.0 GByte in GW2 is, due to the sheer masses of assets, graphics, voice files, sfx (probably FMOD files even), textures, objects, 1 minute of loading. All of that need to be (slowly) accessed and loaded from that one bloated GW2.dat. No matter if from [a] SSD or HDD.

EDIT: This kitten filter….

It definitely is a hardware issue. I use to load maps in under 10 seconds. Now it has dropped to 20-30 seconds. Now that is mostly because I haven’t upgraded my computer for 5-6 years. :p