Guild Wars 2

After the May 19, 2015 update the lion arch times load times have increased significantly from ~10 seconds to 2 mins. Other maps seem to be unaffected (or the effect is unnoticeable). Since it’s a location, that is loaded multiply times each day the bug is annoying.
Should my system specification or any additional info be needed, leave a reply please.

*new topic as I seem not to see any pinned on first pages + this one is specific to one location

I haven’t noticed any increase in loading times. Try scanning your hard drive for bad blocks, or running gw2’s repair command.

I didn’t notice any significant load times for Lion’s Arch.
I tested loading time several times through Asura gates between main cities. The results were in seconds:
Lion’s Arch: 15, 8, 9, 8, 9, 5, 9, 10, 8, 8, 8
Divinity’s Reach: 10, 20, 14, 13
Black Citadel: 3, 3
Grove: 5, 4
Hoelbrak: 7, 6
Rata Sum: 4, 4

Number of models loaded on each city was:
Lion’s Arch: 8,000
Divinity’s Reach: 11,000
Black Citadel: 8,000
Grove: 6,000
Hoelbrak: 3,000
Rata Sum: 4,000

All numbers are approximate since the info disappears as soon as the map finishes loading so I couldn’t record exact values. Lion’s Arch was loaded several times since I hopped through it between other cities. For me it seemed Divinity’s Reach was slower than Lion’s Arch.

Unless you are running the game from SSD, you could try defragmenting the drive, or even reinstalling the game – Lion’s Arch has seen some changes over time, so perhaps it’s data has fragmented over time in the data file.. and just doing a defrag on the drive doesn’t necessarily fix that.

That said I’m not really sure how GW2 maintains it’s internal structure in the data file (Gw2.dat) so I’m not sure if it gets internal fragmentation issues or not. Chances are it keeps them in particular sequence (for various reasons this seems likely), in which case regular drive defrag should be sufficient.

If you do that, let us know if it helped – I’m kind of curious. Not to mention it might help someone else in case they have the same issue and stumble on this thread.

Rainmaker.7594:

I haven’t noticed any increase in loading times. Try scanning your hard drive for bad blocks, or running gw2’s repair command.

Bad blocks are a little bit of a relic, since the drives generally have a cache of spare sectors that they reallocate on the fly (transparently to the OS, so user never sees the bad blocks happening) when original sectors show signs of wear. By the time you get actual bad blocks (the spares are exhausted) the drive is pretty much toast.. and you should get S.M.A.R.T. reports from the drive long before that. I was thinking about the repair command too, but if the data file was actually corrupt, you should see different effects – like missing textures or models, and the like.. so it seems unlikely as a cause. Still couldn’t hurt to do the repair either – but if you have sufficiently fast internet connection I’d rather just reinstall the game.

I checked that before starting a topic. HDD is fine, gw2 repair was done twice – on initial slow notice and today. Also checked the overheat possibilities.
Hasn’t helped.

Mortou.3251:

I checked that before starting a topic. HDD is fine, gw2 repair was done twice – on initial slow notice and today. Also checked the overheat possibilities.
Hasn’t helped.

Did you try doing defragmenting too? If that doesn’t/didn’t help, then I’d try reinstalling the whole game as a sort of last resort.

Finished defragging and the load times were still the same (~2mins).

But managed to fix it (see below):
Before doing a full reinstall I decided to try force-cleaning and restoring all game configs as it was advised by people around 1-2 years ago to fix some loading-related issues (did some net searching). Found and manually deleted GW2-related subfolders in these folders (Win7):
C:\Users\<User_Name>\AppData\Local\Temp
C:\Users\<User_Name>\AppData\Roaming
On game initialize it re-downloaded some files, presented me with empty login/password strings, that I had to re-fill, upon which the game loaded and LA came to life in 11, 7, 9 seconds (did 3 tries to test it).

Comparing the deleted files and the newly created there’s a huge difference in the C:\Users\<User_Name>\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2\Local.dat
The old one is 49,893,888 bytes, whilst the new one is 8,504,852 bytes.
So I guess it was somewhat corrupted and caused me the problems.

Thanks for the heads up, folks. Hope this might help others someday.

Interesting, thanks for sharing this. I have almost the same size Local.dat (47,201,920). I’m running on SSD drive so it might be less of an issue since seek times and fragmentation basically don’t exist on it, but it’s good to know this.