Guild Wars 2

Title is in reference to the notorious bug listed here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Annoying-Sound-Bug/first

Where the sound would die and you’d get this eerie whirring noise notifying you that your client is about to crash.

Now this bug is similar, but minus the whirring noise. What happens is, any sound quality above fastest can cause the sound to cut out, with only the background music playing, this is usually a cue to say your game will either crash outright, or crash but allow you to keep playing, as long as you do not click the error message. Once the message is clicked, the game closes.

This happens almost in the same way the old bug does, it is only noticable in large group fights like WvW or world boss events.

The bug also scales in severity the more you move up the sound quality slider, fastest, ie, lowest quality is the most stable. The audio crashes begin to start once you move one notch to the right, growing in severity until you reach highest quality, which is when the bug hits it’s peak and crashing is sometimes guaranteed depending on what you’re doing.

I am using a corsair vengeance 1500 headset with the latest drivers, set to 5.1 surround with dolby pro logic IIx enabled. I will note guild wars 2 is the ONLY game that crashes due to the audio, no other game on my system will ever crash due to audio bugs, so I am fairly certain the headset is not to blame as gw2 is notorious for having this audio bug since the beta.

Just as an extra bit of info, this issue seems to have grown in severity since the living world season 2 updates. During season 1 I was able to sit about half way on the sound quality setting without crashing, however, since season 2 it’s almost guaranteed to crash anywhere above lowest quality.

PC Specs:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
8GB G. Skill Ripjawz RAM
Installed on a 240GB Intel 520 SSD
Nvidia GTX 690 Graphics Card with the latest 340.43 BETA drivers.
Novatech Gold Edition 850w PSU
1920×1080 BenQ XL2420T Monitor

I avoided this issue entirely by setting sound quality to 1 tick right of “faster” and mixed buffer to “most stable”. Some sounds might be delayed or not be played at all, but at least the game won’t crash.