Guild Wars 2

I started playing GW2 again after being away from the game for a lengthy period and I have been thoroughly enjoying it. I have been having some issues though. My client often crashes during some world bosses bringing up the send error report, which then doesn’t allow me to send the error. This is extremely frustrating as I end up not being able to kill the boss, because the map is full when trying to join again, or I miss the kill.

Doing world bosses is great fun. It is not however when you fight the entire fight almost but don’t get the satisfaction of killing the boss, and getting that sweet loot, because the game keeps crashing.

Most of the time it happens when fighting Tequatl or Claw of Jormag. I have missed out on boss kills too many times now because of this.. The latest crash happened when accidentally taking a screen capture.

Why is no prevision made for people dc’n or crashing? I don’t understand why there is not a grace period for someone to log back into the game, and continue the fight on the same map.

I would first look at my graphics options, and also see what is running in the background besides GW2. Sounds like your PC is getting overloaded and dumps on you.

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

Linfang.1087:

I would first look at my graphics options, and also see what is running in the background besides GW2. Sounds like your PC is getting overloaded and dumps on you.

Agreed… you either need to update your graphics card and ram or turn your graphics down… You are trying to render too much at once and it’s crashing due to being overwhelmed

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

That’s odd bc my machine is a beast and I run highest graphics settings in every game mode and never crash…

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

Sounds like a really great way to play the game lol

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

Linfang.1087:

I would first look at my graphics options, and also see what is running in the background besides GW2. Sounds like your PC is getting overloaded and dumps on you.

Agreed… you either need to update your graphics card and ram or turn your graphics down… You are trying to render too much at once and it’s crashing due to being overwhelmed

Strange I don’t get any frame rate issues but I will try playing around with the settings. I still feel they should make some kind of provision for people who dc/crash during fights. A grace period or something would be nice where you have a certain amount of time to log back into the map, instead of being dumped into an empty one on relog.

I tried joining parties but even then when you try to join the player at [example] it returns an error until someone leaves or dc’s so you just have to spam and hope.

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

That’s odd bc my machine is a beast and I run highest graphics settings in every game mode and never crash…

In gw2, having too good a graphics card can make you crash. basically, if your graphics routine will ever try to address more than 4 gig of memory, the game will crash due to trying to use more memory than a 32bit process can utilize (the infamous MemoryOutOfBound error).
The only solution in such a case is to cut down on graphics details, to lower memory requirements.

It’s Gw2.

I just built a I7 4790k machine and it still happens just like my last AMD machine.

The one trick Ive learned to do to avoid it is if you start at 4:30 on Teq then restart the game half way through the WB farm. I usually do a restart on Centaur or Shadow behemoth that way avoiding a crash at KQ.

Yeah, it’s something in the code. Been there since launch.

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

Since you built it yourself, I would look into some programs to monitor your gpu heat. Sounds like it is overheating which is causing the crash. I built my own and like the other poster I have had 0 issues, and run everything on max settings even during Teq and other large battles. Really though it most likely is your computer, yes GW2 contributes in parts but your crashing issue is most likely a driver/over heating issue.

On my current computer, the game has only crashed for me once. I had an old laptop where it didn’t ever crash on world bosses, but would always crash if I did that event in the bottom corner of Snowden Drifts for some reason. But that computer was seriously on it’s last leg.

My husband, however, who just uses his work computer (Apple, laptop), crashes all of the time on world bosses. Every single time, he crashes. In fact, one time he crashed just from standing too close to the Mystic Forge. Hehe.

That’s what they get for making a 32-bit API in a game they knew would be released in the 10’s when everyone has 64-bit systems for obvious reasons.

Zypher.7609:

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

Since you built it yourself, I would look into some programs to monitor your gpu heat. Sounds like it is overheating which is causing the crash. I built my own and like the other poster I have had 0 issues, and run everything on max settings even during Teq and other large battles. Really though it most likely is your computer, yes GW2 contributes in parts but your crashing issue is most likely a driver/over heating issue.

I have a hard time believing a 980 GTX SC is overheating on GW2, which it isn’t. Exact same thing would happen on my old rig, and this one was a 100% hardware change. High player population boss fights commonly cause this issue, specially right after reset.

Yes I could lower my settings for the battles and yes that would solve it, but that is a pretty kittenty resolution to fix an issue that has happened to people across the spectrum of hardware for 3 years.

It is grand that many people have played without issue, but many have not and it’s not always user error.

EDIT: and here’s a further laugh, just did a fairly low population Karka Queen and GPU ran cooler during the fight than it did before and after. So yeah not a hardware issue.

Carbon Footprint.3421:

Zypher.7609:

Carbon Footprint.3421:

It’s a GW2 thing. Built a brand new screaming machine last year and got it to crash to desktop fighting Karka Queen on the first day. It happens frequently on world bosses. Best advice is to simply play a ranged toon and auto attack facing away from the boss.

Since you built it yourself, I would look into some programs to monitor your gpu heat. Sounds like it is overheating which is causing the crash. I built my own and like the other poster I have had 0 issues, and run everything on max settings even during Teq and other large battles. Really though it most likely is your computer, yes GW2 contributes in parts but your crashing issue is most likely a driver/over heating issue.

I have a hard time believing a 980 GTX SC is overheating on GW2, which it isn’t. Exact same thing would happen on my old rig, and this one was a 100% hardware change. High player population boss fights commonly cause this issue, specially right after reset.

Yes I could lower my settings for the battles and yes that would solve it, but that is a pretty kittenty resolution to fix an issue that has happened to people across the spectrum of hardware for 3 years.

It is grand that many people have played without issue, but many have not and it’s not always user error.

Ummm what’s the rest of your cooling system like?

See I have zero crashes with GW2. I built an AMD setup with a 270X 4G. I’ve never had a memory crash or crashes during WB battles. So saying that, “It’s GW2” is a cop out. My previous system with 2 Crossfired 5770s and a Phenom II never had crashing issues either. There is something else going on.

Lots of people have this issue and this is the only real response from last year. Sounds like it’s a GW2 being 32 bit on 64 bit system problem. So yeah you can say it’s my fault for having a ‘modern’ OS…And it’s great an all you guys coming in to say you have no issues, but that really doesn’t help. The only solution is to turn down settings because the software can’t handle it on some 64 bit systems. But what ever, you win, I’ve been white knighted out of the thread. Good luck.

Chad Taylor.3487:

Thanks for submitting your log files. I’ve found your corresponding crash reports and we will look into the issue immediately.

The skinny is that it looks like we’ve allowed you to shoot yourselves in the foot with maxed out graphics settings combined with crazy boss zergs. The GW2 client is a 32bit process which has access to just 4gb of RAM, even less in practice due to fragmentation in high churn environments like a zerg fest. I can see from your log files that you are hitting an upper limit of about 3.5 gb of allocated memory before crashing on a failed allocation(i.e. running out of memory).

In the meantime here are some things you can turn down that will free up some memory in zergs without compromising graphics too much:

-Disable “High-Res character textures”
-Ease back on “Character Model Limit” and “Character Model Quality”
-Ease back on “Lod Distance”

The memory use for characters can roughly be described as = character count * character quality * 4 (if high-res is enabled).

Report back if those changes don’t help and I will do the same when we have a fix in-bound.

Carbon Footprint.3421:

Lots of people have this issue and this is the only real response from last year. Sounds like it’s a GW2 being 32 bit on 64 bit system problem. So yeah you can say it’s my fault for having a ‘modern’ OS…And it’s great an all you guys coming in to say you have no issues, but that really doesn’t help. The only solution is to turn down settings because the software can’t handle it on some 64 bit systems. But what ever, you win, I’ve been white knighted out of the thread. Good luck.

What? People have given you info how to fix your crashes. This is not a thread about beefy computer specs that struggle with the game, there is not fix for that, sadly.

Carbon Footprint.3421:

Lots of people have this issue and this is the only real response from last year. Sounds like it’s a GW2 being 32 bit on 64 bit system problem. So yeah you can say it’s my fault for having a ‘modern’ OS…And it’s great an all you guys coming in to say you have no issues, but that really doesn’t help. The only solution is to turn down settings because the software can’t handle it on some 64 bit systems. But what ever, you win, I’ve been white knighted out of the thread. Good luck.

White knighted from what, you come across as someone who is out to start an argument. All we have said is we have top end machines and run the game on max settings with no issues. Just lower your max players by a notch and you should be fine, if not well then just continue to blame the game. We are stuck with the technologies that we have, the amount of work that would go in to re-engine the game would be too much. Also the percentage of people playing with top end gaming machines is most likely a lot lower than you think.

Try set your graphic option to the lowest setting before boss fight , this always work for me.
Good luck.

Set character modell limit to medium .. that helps mostly to avoid hitting
the magical 3.5 gb margin where the game crashes.

Else .. if you don’t want to do that .. ask ANet to bring back “culling” .. that was
a mechanism that automatically had hidden character models if there were
too much around you, to avoid the problem .. however it was removed because
people complained about it.

Beldin.5498:

Set character modell limit to medium .. that helps mostly to avoid hitting
the magical 3.5 gb margin where the game crashes.

Else .. if you don’t want to do that .. ask ANet to bring back “culling” .. that was
a mechanism that automatically had hidden character models if there were
too much around you, to avoid the problem .. however it was removed because
people complained about it.

I agree, If you have a decent machine do this. Set character model limit to medium or low so your not loading every high res armor set people have. instead it’ll load like 20 nearby people. High graphics can remain.

Culling was terrible in wvw. Invisible blobs would mow you down before seeing them.

Trinnitty.8256:

Beldin.5498:

Set character modell limit to medium .. that helps mostly to avoid hitting
the magical 3.5 gb margin where the game crashes.

Else .. if you don’t want to do that .. ask ANet to bring back “culling” .. that was
a mechanism that automatically had hidden character models if there were
too much around you, to avoid the problem .. however it was removed because
people complained about it.

I agree, If you have a decent machine do this. Set character model limit to medium or low so your not loading every high res armor set people have. instead it’ll load like 20 nearby people. High graphics can remain.

Culling was terrible in wvw. Invisible blobs would mow you down before seeing them.

I know culling was bad .. but in case people complain that ANet is to whatever to
fix this problem .. culling was the fix actually .. beside creating a 64-bit client ofc.

For folks that have this happen, does it occur if you have been playing for less than an hour or so?ive only had this occur when I’ve been playing for an extended period then do a boss encounter.

Misguided.5139:

For folks that have this happen, does it occur if you have been playing for less than an hour or so?ive only had this occur when I’ve been playing for an extended period then do a boss encounter.

Sometimes, yeah. I’ve also had it happen a lot in the Silverwastes and, strangely, during Arcana Obscura. GW2 is the only game I have this problem with and I’m positive it’s not an overheating issue; my computer doesn’t run any hotter with it than any other modern game, and it doesn’t matter how many other programs I have open.

Misguided.5139:

For folks that have this happen, does it occur if you have been playing for less than an hour or so?ive only had this occur when I’ve been playing for an extended period then do a boss encounter.

Thats mostly because of “memory fragmentation” .. so yes .. restarting the client
before events like Teq is also a good idea if you have crashes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3770457/what-is-memory-fragmentation

The two settings that most greatly effect wether you will crash or not are:

1. Character Model Limit
2. Textures.

Turning both to thier lowest settings will remedy 90% of crashing.

Also, if you don’t already have it, get process explorer and watch the memory (on a 2nd monitor is handy). For many if it hits 3.5gb the game will crash. It’s a known issue.

I ONLY crash on Karka Queen They really need to look into it… every once in a blue moon I may crash somewhere else but Karka is every single time.. and sometimes its at the very beginning ..

Simmons.5081:

I ONLY crash on Karka Queen They really need to look into it… every once in a blue moon I may crash somewhere else but Karka is every single time.. and sometimes its at the very beginning ..

Let me guess : and your rig is so great that it can handle all settings on max ..

.. and of course you haven’t read anything in this thread ?

To the OP – yes, I’ve been having this problem for several months. I can’t remember when it began, but nothing has changed on my PC, ergo, it’s something that is a result of an Anet change. It’s highly frustrating, particularly when it happens near the end of a boss fight.

There are variations in how it happens (and it’s not always in boss fights), but at least 9 times out of 10, it seems to happen to me in areas heavily populated with other players. I keep reporting it when it does happen, but Anet’s QC is just the same as every other game company’s – rubbish – so, so far, whatever it is has not been fixed.

Sephas.8793:

See I have zero crashes with GW2. I built an AMD setup with a 270X 4G. I’ve never had a memory crash or crashes during WB battles. So saying that, “It’s GW2” is a cop out. My previous system with 2 Crossfired 5770s and a Phenom II never had crashing issues either. There is something else going on.

same here. I never crash in this game. It lags like hell sometimes but never crash.

there are a lot of factors involved in why. People should use there event viewer more and try and analyze why they are crashing rather than speculate. Check you logs and see what it says then come with that info and let us discuss it and see if we can find specific reasons other than guessing.

Well today I just disconnected now to character select from Inquest Golem for no reason. My net didn’t drop or spike, the game just threw me out to the select screen, and of course when logging back in I get a different map where the boss is already dead. Starting to get over the game.

jbrother.1340:

Sephas.8793:

See I have zero crashes with GW2. I built an AMD setup with a 270X 4G. I’ve never had a memory crash or crashes during WB battles. So saying that, “It’s GW2” is a cop out. My previous system with 2 Crossfired 5770s and a Phenom II never had crashing issues either. There is something else going on.

same here. I never crash in this game. It lags like hell sometimes but never crash.

there are a lot of factors involved in why. People should use there event viewer more and try and analyze why they are crashing rather than speculate. Check you logs and see what it says then come with that info and let us discuss it and see if we can find specific reasons other than guessing.

I never had this problem at launch either, only now when returning back to the game after over a year of not playing.

Nyrrad.9052:

I never had this problem at launch either, only now when returning back to the game after over a year of not playing.

…sigh.
As has been mentioned in this very thread several times already it is most likely a memory problem caused by gw2.exe trying to get past 3.5 gb. It happens only for graphics-related causes, because graphics subroutines are partially running on 64bit drivers that do not know they were called by a 32bit process (and thus see no problem in getting over addressable memory limit).

It didn’t happen originally, because a culling mechanics existed, that stopped rendering models after a certain threshold has been hit. That mechanic has been removed some time ago, because it had some really troublesome consequences (and players were rightly annoyed with it).

Until GW2 goes 64bit, these problems will persist, and only known workarounds currently is lowering graphics quality settings (to cut down on memory usage) during encounters that include lot of models (world bosses, massive zergfights etc).

jbrother.1340:

Sephas.8793:

See I have zero crashes with GW2. I built an AMD setup with a 270X 4G. I’ve never had a memory crash or crashes during WB battles. So saying that, “It’s GW2” is a cop out. My previous system with 2 Crossfired 5770s and a Phenom II never had crashing issues either. There is something else going on.

same here. I never crash in this game. It lags like hell sometimes but never crash.

there are a lot of factors involved in why. People should use there event viewer more and try and analyze why they are crashing rather than speculate. Check you logs and see what it says then come with that info and let us discuss it and see if we can find specific reasons other than guessing.

People aren’t speculating; crashes in zergs is 99.9% of the time caused by the memory limit. GW2 has its own crash log. If you check it and it says “OOM” at the top of each crash log, then that means “Out Of Memory.” As others have stated, this is because GW2 is 32-bit, and 32-bit programs are limited to a maximum of 4GB minus space taken by drivers (so this effectively limits it to 3.6GB).

idk why ArenaNet won’t make a 64-bit client. Most of the work can be done by find a replace commands. All I know is that I’m not spending another cent in the gem store unless they do release a 64-bit client. I’ll continue converting gold to gems when I want something (yes, I’ve previously bought gems with money before, but not in over a year).

Anyway, as others have stated, you need to lower settings as a workaround. I usually lower character model limit and character texture quality to medium when I (rarely) do world bosses, and haven’t had problems that way. You just gotta remember to increase it again after you’re done in the zergfest.

At least the mac ‘client’ (really the PC client in a cider wrapper) has a memory problem and it becomes noticeable during world bosses. I would expect similar problems with the actual PC client.

The crashing problem happens most often during world bosses. The solution is to turn your graphics down to as low as they will go. You might be able to raise them but do it slowly so you can make sure each raise does not crash things, You can look with a monitoring tool to make sure nothing else is pulling a lot of resources but odds are this is the solution.

(edit: I changed ‘memory leak’ to ‘memory issue’ as I have ram to spare on this box)

Trinnitty.8256:

Beldin.5498:

Set character modell limit to medium .. that helps mostly to avoid hitting
the magical 3.5 gb margin where the game crashes.

Else .. if you don’t want to do that .. ask ANet to bring back “culling” .. that was
a mechanism that automatically had hidden character models if there were
too much around you, to avoid the problem .. however it was removed because
people complained about it.

I agree, If you have a decent machine do this. Set character model limit to medium or low so your not loading every high res armor set people have. instead it’ll load like 20 nearby people. High graphics can remain.

Culling was terrible in wvw. Invisible blobs would mow you down before seeing them.

That is frustrating in Teq. Too high a model limit and I crash. Too low and the champs attacking me (I usually do S hill defense) do not rez.

guys, I know you’re proud that you actually know the 32-bit memory limit, but this happens on the 64-bit client too… so what’s the memory limit there? and this still happens to this date of this post.