Guild Wars 2

If you’ve played guild wars 2 for even more than an hour, you’re most likely familiar with the annoying sound bug where random lines of dialogue and sound effects from NPCs and minions are played 10x louder than max volume every now and then.

I’ve recently found what causes it and how to fix it. I wish I had a video to prove it better, but the group of NPCs that I was filming stopped talking before I could record all of it. Basically what was happening was I would walk far enough away for their models to clip (stop being rendered) due to line of sight. As soon as this happened, the GW2 engine didn’t know where to ‘place’ their next line of dialoge (or sound effect), and so it defaulted to 0 meters away, inside my head.

I then walked close enough to peer over the ledge they were behind, their models were rendered in the game world once again, and their sounds were properly placed in the 3D world space. This is 100% repeatable.

Another theory I have is that they were experimenting with a line of sight ‘sound dampening’ audio effect to make sounds that come from behind a wall sound duller or softer, and since the code is incomplete, whenever an NPC is behind a hill of terrain or a wall or something, the code doesn’t know what they wanted it to do and simply plays at range 0 meters, making it very loud.

You know how it’s caused, you know how to fix it, let’s see if we can’t vanquish this annoying as hell bug once and for all.

Not sure on the policy of linking to reddit forums, but I posted this on reddit also.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/znctm/anet_i_found_the_cause_for_that_randomly_loud_npc/

TL;DR: the bug occurs when NPCs that hadn’t loaded their model (behind a wall etc) were in audible range of the player. The engine needs to play their sound file because you’re in audible range, but doesn’t know where to place the sound as there is no model to attach it to, so it defaults to inside your face. (very loud)

Good work on locating that. Very bothering.

I havent experienced these issues my self.

But good find for those that do have these problems.

I’d just like to confirm that yes, I get this bug too, it’s very annoying, and I’ve indeed never had it happen with characters within line of sight.

I have never had dialog do this but I often get a hyper sound bug with walking sounds.. usually this happens in big fights or in personal stories.. like all of a sudden me walking on ground that has a very light cover of water sounds like booming splashes through my speakers or on dry land like a heard of elephants are running right outside my window… although.. it is funny when this scares the cat

Nice catch. I’ve had this happen only with footsteps, but didn’t think to report it at the time.

I’ve had this happen only recently (noticed it over the weekend), but I didn’t have my sound turned up loud enough to deafen me. It usually just resulted in a confused search for an unseen speaker.

I don’t suppose there’s an unofficial work-around for this yet?

I’ve had this particular problem. Good job on confirming it.

I’ve also had an issue with summons/minions once in a while, even when seen, will make their flying or swimming sounds at full volume. They completely ignore all sound settings. This is not something I can duplicate at will, as it’s only a “sometimes” bug.

I don’t suppose there’s been any progress on this issue?

This was so annoying I set dialogue volume to 0 altogether which is a shame.

Amazing find! I have my volume up for TeamSpeak etc, and mid-combat sometimes I get some NPC yelling in my ear. I tried turning down certain audio settings with no effect.

Looks like it’s just a bug where the 3D sound appears right on your person. Great job and I hope they fix it soon.

Still no news on this? I know it’s not exactly “blocking progress” and would probably be a back-burner thing, but it would still be nice to know that it had been noticed by someone who can do something to fix it eventually.

I noticed this still happening after the update. Not that it was in the patch notes or anything…

Is the support team aware of this issue?