Guild Wars 2

I have a pretty good computer, it can run battlefield 4 on high settings fine, and yet it takes a solid 10 minutes for a loading screen to finish in this game. I can’t keep playing if this doesn’t fix itself, and it was never like this when the game first came out.

Get an SSD… it’s by far the best QoL upgrade you can make (for the money spent) on your computer.

By the way, I believe load screens have 2 phases.. one is loading the map from your hard drive and the other is loading other players from Anet’s servers — that’s why loading from LA takes often takes longer. The SSD will only help the hard drive phase, of course. My load screens are rarely longer than 5 seconds.

They are so expensive though :/ I guess I could save up for one if they really do help with loading times.

10 minutes? Is that an exaggeration? If it literally takes 10 minutes, then upgrade your hardware. My PC is around 6+ years old now, and i load in less than 30 seconds. In Swtor though, it takes me around 2 minutes.

If your load time is 10min, time to start checking if you have too many services running for your computer to handle. I mean, if you have top of the line hardware, run as many as you can, but if not and you have aging computer, get your PC lean and mean thru cleaning registry, removing non-essential programs, defragment your hard drive, and maybe update drivers.

My PC is about a year old with 120GB SSD, and the only zone that takes 10s-15s to load is L.A….every other zone is like 4s-6s and I have everything in max settings (Win7 64bit 16GB RAM, 660ti video card)

SSD are not that much and they are getting cheaper. If your going to be a gamer you realty should get it one. Not just for GW2 but for all games pc games are going to get bigger and bigger being able to lode up faster will help you get more time out of your games. That and having a pc boot up in less then 10 sec is soo nice.

Have you played Skyrim? There were load screens for the loading screens just so you could go to the next room to see another loading screen and those took forever!

GW2 loading screens are pretty fine for my 1 year old computer. The only tough times I have are loading LA at the start of any LS content or also starting the game fresh when my character was parked in LA. I generally avoid that awful place.

As they said the ssd is a great investment I can run gw2 on both my computers in my room of similar specs and the one with the ssd can load lions arch almost 4 times before the one with the hdd can load it once

Uvatha.5476:

Have you played Skyrim? There were load screens for the loading screens just so you could go to the next room to see another loading screen and those took forever!

What? No. I’m playing it right now and the loading there takes five seconds tops (literally, there’s a hard cap on how much time it’s allowed to take).

GW2’s loading times, on the other hand, are ridiculous. More than two minutes on “high” settings is way over the top. Lion’s Arch is just… no.

Spoiler: GW2’s loading times have little to do with how much it actually has to load.

It’s to do with the incredibly poor filesystem and organization. Source-based games suffered from the same issues until Valve changed their file structure and streaming methods.

Basically the game has to index an 18Gb file for every tiny script and texture it has to load, so several thousand times over per each zone.

I hate LA for the sole reason of loading screens. Best loading seems to be in Ebonhawke, where there is a bank & black lion trading post.

I wish we could just log into WvW directly though. Would make things sooooo much simpler for us.

Lion’s arch can take up to 3 minutes to load. Not to mention starting the game itself allows me to go and take a cup of coffee to come back still seeing a blank screen.

A while ago, people claimed that there was a bloating issue with local.dat which could increase load times. Although some said deleting the file sped up their load times, others said it didn’t change anything.

local.dat has been moved around. It used to be in the Guild Wars 2 folder under Documents (where your screenshots are located), but it seems to now be located under:

%appdata%/Guild Wars 2/

Over time, as more content is added to the game, the size of GW2.dat can also bloat. The only way to fix this however is by fully redownloading the game. Hard drive fragmentation can also play a factor, but ever since Vista, Windows has kept disks mostly defragmented.

-

Testing load times between my SSD and HDD, loading in to the bank in LA takes roughly 16s on the SSD and 20s on the HDD.

Healix.5819:

A while ago, people claimed that there was a bloating issue with local.dat which could increase load times. Although some said deleting the file sped up their load times, others said it didn’t change anything.

local.dat has been moved around. It used to be in the Guild Wars 2 folder under Documents (where your screenshots are located), but it seems to now be located under:

%appdata%/Guild Wars 2/

Over time, as more content is added to the game, the size of GW2.dat can also bloat. The only way to fix this however is by fully redownloading the game. Hard drive fragmentation can also play a factor, but ever since Vista, Windows has kept disks mostly defragmented.

-

Testing load times between my SSD and HDD, loading in to the bank in LA takes roughly 16s on the SSD and 20s on the HDD.

wow
only 4 seconds faster?…

I don’t know about unplayable, but I’ve started taking naps when I zone into LA.

Files may also be streamed while loading if you have a partial dat file. If you add -image to a shortcut to GW2, the full dat file will be downloaded at once.

You could also add -maploadinfo to the shortcut to see what is taking so long to load.

Example shortcut target: “C:\Guild Wars 2\GW2.exe” -maploadinfo

Nausiation.1469:

I have a pretty good computer, it can run battlefield 4 on high settings fine, and yet it takes a solid 10 minutes for a loading screen to finish in this game. I can’t keep playing if this doesn’t fix itself, and it was never like this when the game first came out.

a little tip, since I started using SweetFx my loading times went down incredibly, I’d say 50% faster average

I use maploadinfo and, at least, it makes the loading screens more interesting. One trick for loading into LA is to load your character away from the bank or the portals to WvW. It makes a heck of a difference.

delete gw2, defragmant yor pc and install it again. i know what are you talking about.

I used to have loading times of some 2-3 minutes in Lion’s Arch.

I then bought a better and pumped up PC, naturally since it’s a new PC I had to reinstall GW2.

I’ve noticed no difference, it still takes some 2-3 minutes to load Lion’s Arch.

I kinda have the other problem… loading screens are too fast.

When they’re finished there are lots and lots of textures that haven’t been loaded yet, and they appear as transparent. Objects, skills and ground invisible, making it almost impossible to play

Uvatha.5476:

Have you played Skyrim? There were load screens for the loading screens just so you could go to the next room to see another loading screen and those took forever!

Skyrim’s loading screens were awful. I avoided entering buildings unless I absolutely had to.

I was running an AMD Phenom II 6 1045T and loading screens were a bit slow, but I upgraded to an 8320 recently and they’re much better now.

On my old computer I not only had a regular HDD, I also only had 4 GB of RAM. With a browser running and some background programs like TS, Skype, Steam, a virus scanner, a torrent client, etc, starting up a game would easily use 80% of the 4GB of RAM. Once it reaches that 80% mark Windows starts swapping to the page file on your HDD, which makes the game and everything else incredibly slow. It’ll try loading the game off your HDD, back onto your HDD, just because the memory is nearly full.

So, make sure you don’t hit 80% by closing other programs, or if you can’t live with that and want to run everything at once like me, upgrade your computer.

I got a new mainboard, faster CPU and a faster video card, but most of all I got 16GB of RAM (often 46% use even without running a game, well over 50% when I start games, so 8GB wouldn’t even have done it for me) and an SSD of 256GB on which I installed Windows and GW2. Other games run off the old harddisk.

Now even though I have 20 tabs open in Chrome and run all programs I could possibly use on a daily basis, only rebooting my computer once every week, my games don’t seem to suffer from it. I get good framerates and loading times at max settings. I’m glad they finally make hardware that’s able to do that.

Your probaly not in the US or something because I have a medium quality PC (1 1/2 Yrs Old) and my loading is like 2 minutes max into LA. Either way, I just browse forums until loaded. This is only on original boot>>>char screen>>>LA.. If i Load into LA from Orr, its less.

i dun even know what you are talking about.

all loading times in guild wars 2 are 10 – 20 seconds for me.

i am not even using ssd hard disk.

and only 4mbps broad band.
also connecting to NA USA guild wars 2 servers from Malaysia.

if your loading time is 10 minutes then check your internet connection as well.

Surely you guys exaggerated. My 2yr old off the shelf PC only takes 1-2 mins to load into LA on the first loading in of the day. Subsequent times are even shorter. Sure sometimes it the game fails to load in at all but its more because of my crappy internet connection than anything else.

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

Well something is definitely wrong with your computer then because I play using a Macbook Pro, Win7 64bit, Radeon 6570M graphics card, i7 2.2 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and most maps load in less than 30 seconds with the exception of LA which can take up to 1 or 2 minutes depending on the time of day (server load combined with my internet being much quicker in the mornings).

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

Well something is definitely wrong with your computer then because I play using a Macbook Pro, Win7 64bit, Radeon 6570M graphics card, i7 2.2 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and most maps load in less than 30 seconds with the exception of LA which can take up to 1 or 2 minutes depending on the time of day (server load combined with my internet being much quicker in the mornings).

I guess so, it has been acting up a lot lately. in fact it blue screened for the first time ever today, not sure what causes that but I guess it’s time for an upgrade.

You could always try running gw2 with the – repair command. The instructions should be in the tech support forum in a pinned post I think.

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

Well something is definitely wrong with your computer then because I play using a Macbook Pro, Win7 64bit, Radeon 6570M graphics card, i7 2.2 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and most maps load in less than 30 seconds with the exception of LA which can take up to 1 or 2 minutes depending on the time of day (server load combined with my internet being much quicker in the mornings).

I guess so, it has been acting up a lot lately. in fact it blue screened for the first time ever today, not sure what causes that but I guess it’s time for an upgrade.

do you mind sharing your internet connection and location in which you are connecting to guild wars 2?

because, internet connection speed is one of the factors for the loading time in guild wars 2 as well.

and sometimes, location.

i have a dutch guild member with excellent internet speed, however, for unknown reasons, his loading speed is so bad, he often experience “hung” loading screens.

as in, he would just be stuck at the loading screen, which requires him to close the guild wars 2 application and try again.

no idea why this happens as he has a very fast internet connection at dutch.
his computer specs is decent as well.

the only other reason i can think of, must be the physical location.

Delryn.7235:

I used to have loading times of some 2-3 minutes in Lion’s Arch.

I then bought a better and pumped up PC, naturally since it’s a new PC I had to reinstall GW2.

I’ve noticed no difference, it still takes some 2-3 minutes to load Lion’s Arch.

Can you list your specs?

Honestly for me the longest load screen is 10 seconds (and I play in windowed mode, my browser in the background never has less than 12 open tabs and I’m often watching a video on the second screen) so I’m bewildered that it’s taking 2mins+ on newer machines.

and one important thing: turn of torrent

I’m using on-board graphics on a really cheap machine. It’s so bad that I can no longer run the Sanctum Sprint (which is a big deal, if you know me). My load times are rarely longer than a minute or two. And if it’s two minutes, it’s because I’m in overflow. Could it be a RAM issue? Or corrupted data? Maybe run a GW2 repair?

Stay out of LA.

And.. you can do WvW without ever visiting LA..

Start here:
http://www.piriform.com/
Learn how to use CCleaner and use it, you can schedule it to run as well. Check the Tools/Startup section too and uncheck anything you don’t need or use often, and set those stupid programs (in their settings) to stop loading with windows.
If you can’t or dont want to buy PerfectDisk( http://www.raxco.com ) then use Defraggler from Piriform, set it on a schedule and let it do it’s thing while you’re sleeping.

Enhance CCleaner with CCEnhancer here:
http://singularlabs.com/software/ccenhancer/
It is just a simple tool that downloads a small text file with instructions for CCleaner that will allow it to clean thousands of other programs (log, cache, temp files, etc.).
System Ninja from them is also useful!

Grab the Microsoft Security Essentials package, Windows Update probably has it as optional but you can download it here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

Get rid of the antivirus you use and pay for (your subscription is probably over anyway). You may have more than one since some programs like to install various other programs you don’t need. Anti-virus programs conflict with each other and will let bad things onto your computer if you use more than one at a time.

Download something like Spybot Search & Destroy and use it (use the inoculation feature as well).
http://www.safer-networking.org/

You can use Spyware Blaster as well for inoculation booster.
http://www.brightfort.com/spywareblaster.html

Clean your computer inside(software) and out(hardware). Literally, take it outside and blow the thing out, it’s probably got years of dust clogging up all the fans and cooling fins.

Once you’re nice and clean and your filesystem is smooth, make a new gw2 shortcut and add -image to it (see attached image). You can do as I do and name it update and add it to a schedule that runs once a week or daily while you’re sleeping.

If possible, just grab another hard drive and shove it in your computer (properly) and toss gw2 on it, it’ll run from ANYTHING (I use a usb3 64gb flash drive).

Everything in this post with the exception of PerfectDisk and a USB flash drive are free and nearly every gamer should use these or their equivalent to keep their system clean and operating smoothly. This is only the tip of the optimization iceberg but it’s a good start.

Additional improvements to system performance

System Cache:
Put it on its own hard drive different than your OS and your games, especially your games. Set it to a static number: under 4gb of ram you use 1.5 times the amount of ram you have, above 4gb of ram you use .75 times the amount of ram in your system, it’ll be close to the recommended values. See attached image.
Control Panel / System / Advanced System Settings (link) / Advanced (tab) / Performance Settings (button) / Advanced (tab) / Change (button). Don’t forget once you set it to a different drive to turn off the one on your system drive (it’ll increase the performance of your system too since it isn’t writing the cache to the same drive it’s reading from).
This will prevent significant fragmentation of your drive (restart will be necessary), do this after you have defragged your hard drive with the online options (means while your system is running) after restart your system cache will hopefully be in one piece, but do an Offline defrag and it will put your boot files in an appropriate location and put your system cache in a single file location.

The System cache gets used a lot and it is set to system managed on your boot drive by default. This causes the system to allocate new locations when the need to cache stuff exceeds what it already has allocated and there is a 100% chance that it will fragment to a new location.
Fragmentation is a gamers enemy! It slows down file access, increases the size of the MFT (master file table – it tells the OS where files are, each fragment means another address), and due to slow loading can cause your game to fail to load a texture at least and at most it can cause your game to crash because it can’t load the level data or something more critical.

Start with Windows programs:
The next biggest thing you can do to improve performance without swapping or adding hardware or Nuke&Pave (reformat & reinstall) is to shutdown all those crappy programs near your clock, there are probably very few that you really need.
Most of them should have options to disable loading with windows if you simply right click on them and select Options or Settings. If not then they really aren’t useful and you should just shut them down (ccleaner can help you do that). Do you print so much that you need your printer management software loaded? no, the answer is no.
Leave your IM, graphics, windows stuff, and things like dropbox, steam, and things you really do use, and shut all the other bloatware off.

OMG what crap systems do you run? I usually load LA in 30seconds the first time i log in and the rest loads in 3-5 seconds. I admit that GW2 seems to have problems due to a mediocre file system but if you want to play games buy some stuff (SSD, enough ram etc.).

If you can’t afford that go buy a console.

Loading used to be quick now with end of culling it takes 20 to 30 seconds to make LA.

FateOmega.9601:

Surely you guys exaggerated. My 2yr old off the shelf PC only takes 1-2 mins to load into LA on the first loading in of the day. Subsequent times are even shorter. Sure sometimes it the game fails to load in at all but its more because of my crappy internet connection than anything else.

Nope.

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard the .DAT file can become too beefy which can slow things down. I recall seeing that deleting the .DAT file can take care of some issues. I’d check with the tech forums before doing this, but it rings familiar.

VOLKON.1290:

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard the .DAT file can become too beefy which can slow things down. I recall seeing that deleting the .DAT file can take care of some issues. I’d check with the tech forums before doing this, but it rings familiar.

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

Well something is definitely wrong with your computer then because I play using a Macbook Pro, Win7 64bit, Radeon 6570M graphics card, i7 2.2 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM and most maps load in less than 30 seconds with the exception of LA which can take up to 1 or 2 minutes depending on the time of day (server load combined with my internet being much quicker in the mornings).

I guess so, it has been acting up a lot lately. in fact it blue screened for the first time ever today, not sure what causes that but I guess it’s time for an upgrade.

Aw….time to do some checking. Good luck, hope everything turns out well for you.

VOLKON.1290:

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard the .DAT file can become too beefy which can slow things down. I recall seeing that deleting the .DAT file can take care of some issues. I’d check with the tech forums before doing this, but it rings familiar.

the .dat file is everything there is to gw2, it contains EVERYTHING. Deleting it will force the updater to download the entire ~19gb again.
-repair is preferable to doing that.

Lil Puppy.5216:

VOLKON.1290:

Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard the .DAT file can become too beefy which can slow things down. I recall seeing that deleting the .DAT file can take care of some issues. I’d check with the tech forums before doing this, but it rings familiar.

the .dat file is everything there is to gw2, it contains EVERYTHING. Deleting it will force the updater to download the entire ~19gb again.
-repair is preferable to doing that.

Thank you for clearing that up.

OK… let’s call it a last resort.

10 minutes? Are you on dial up?

I have crap dsl (sharing my connection with my husband), and most of my system’s components are 4 to 5 years old, yet I think my longest load screen is roughly 60 seconds…

Nausiation.1469:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nausiation.1469:

O.K. It seems it’s probably something with my computer but I don’t know what. Like I said it is a pretty decent computer and should not be taking this long to load. I really am at a loss.

Do you have 32bit or 64bit windows installed?
It makes a MASSSIVE difference.

64 bit

I have a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor and a gtx 560 graphics card.

You have a really good graphics card, but a relatively weak processor, so that’s where you’re bottlenecked. Upgrade your CPU.

Unless you have the cash to upgrade to an Intel motherboard for an I5 or I7 processor, go with either the AMD 8320 or an AMD 8350. You can get an AMD 8320 for about $160 on Newegg or better if you find a good sale. Personally, I got mine for $130 a few weeks ago from TigerDirect.com.

i didn’t know loading screens could get this bad. i’ll have to give my SSD a kiss when i get home.

I do not have an SSD but most maps load fairly quickly. I do know that I am unable to keep up with frost gorge farmers and have to skip 1-2 bosses if I want to keep pace. I just can’t load as fast as many of them seem to be able to.

LA is usually the only other place that is problematic. Can take a good 2-3min sometimes. My computer isn’t old either and my HDD is 7200 not 5400 as some laptops or older HDDs are.