Guild Wars 2

I’ve spent months spending a good amount of time trying to fix things on my end. I am not anywhere close to being an expert and depend on forums and trial/error. My specific problem was that my characters run smoothly for a few seconds and then run as if trodding through mud. There is no specific number of seconds for each; there is no pattern. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a dead zone or LA during peak hours. Time of day. The weather outside doesn’t matter. What I ate for breakfast might matter but I haven’t fully tested that.

For a long time, I thought that it was fps because I would jump from 12 to 8 to 2 and back up. Obviously, that’s a bit low, but I think that went away when I turned off ipv6 and use only ipv4. Now, I can hit fps of 30 but it still jumps around reaching lows of 18. But even a low of 18 shouldn’t cause this smooth/mud random speed behavior.

None of the forum suggestions about -repair, fan speed, etc. have made a difference. I thought it might be the use of multiple on the trace route specifically in TX but then learned that this is normal for all games these days.

Ok, so here’s the potential solution, what I can do about it, and what Anet might be able to do about it. First, when I defrag, I notice that GW2 is using about 30 clusters connected to each other but very far from all other clusters on my drive. When I defrag AND optimize, the problem is solved. I didn’t believe that this was the source of the problem until the most recent update followed by an update the next day when they addressed the karma issue. I had defragged and optimized the night in between the two and was surprised to see that the problem has returned so soon. So, now I know. To make matters worse, after playing for an hour or two, a few clusters will be found far from the big set and crammed in between the ones that my computer is using without the game. So, my computer is bouncing from clusters far from everything else back and forth to these other ones. And THAT, I believe, is causing the shifts in movement speed (or rather computer operation speed).

Suggestion for Anet? Don’t provide updates. No, I’m kidding. But don’t put the clusters on some area of my drive so far from the others. Every time that you do, I have to defrag and compress everything. Defragging doesn’t take long but optimizing and compressing means my computer has to work while I’m sleeping. It takes a few hours. No other program has ever required this.

I could still be way off-base but this seems to be fixing the problem until another update.

They don’t really have much control over the fragmentation. GW2 calls some library code to write the data then the underlying OS handles where to put the data being written. The best they could do is reserve extra space.

You can also defrag just the Gw2.dat file if you use something like http://www.piriform.com/defraggler.

In the screenshot the bright red squares is my Gw2.dat file. The reason it got fragmented(it was in a single piece just the other day) is the two squares pointed to by the arrow. I moved the files occupying those two squares(luckily it only one two very big files, one is part of the D3 installer) to another drive and then had defraggler defrag just Gw2.dat. This only took a couple of minutes including the time it took to move the files around(about 5GB).

The reason I moved the files in those two squares to a different drive is because it’s obvious that if those weren’t there the Gw2.dat can just grow without being fragmented since there is empty space after it(the white squares). Moving to a different drive is important in that step since moving in the same drive won’t make any difference. It is not required but in a situation like that it helps to speed things up.

Thanks for the constructive reply. I was expecting something else that I already knew about such as how combat slows you down and how that is particular problematic for rangers due to pets….or my favorite…it’s an optical illusion. :P

I just checked defrag after playing for an hour or so. (I’m using Auslogics. Is Defraggler better?) Anyway, I have some fragmentation but none are gw2 files. So, the big problem is how there are several rows of white clusters before all of the gw2.dat clusters, and this happens after updates. Problem solved when I compress. I will definitely keep an eye out for files interrupting the clusters. I see your logic there.

If it’s my OS, I wonder why it wants to put gw.dat so far away from all other files. It doesn’t do that with any other program (except for reserved clusters, of course) and the occasional Avast straggler.

Fragmentation should not be occurring as you play. GW2 doesn’t download as you play(unlike GW1). However it is possible the defrag earlier was not able to fully defragment the file. For example in my example one of those red buggers in the way contained a system file that couldn’t be moved so my GW2.dat is still split in two fragments.

If it IS fragmenting without any GW2 updates then something or some setting in your system might be doing that. Maybe some sort of FS optimizer that is trying to move more frequently accessed data.

As for not having this issue with other apps. Most apps are not as big. In addition to that even if they are the same size most apps do not store their data as a single file.

Have you ever looked into your swap file? Where is it stored and how is it configured? Have you ever attempted to play GW2 with it disabled (whether you want to do this or not, depends on how much main memory you have and if you are running a 64 bit OS)? Also, if you are letting determine the swap file size, that is a bad idea….especially if your HD is quite full.

If you need help doing that, PM me and I’ll assist as I can.