Guild Wars 2

I’m gonna start by directing you to the attached file, because it demonstrates a common form of the bug I’m encountering. The Dust Mite Twister appears normal, but upon its death, the Dust Mites it spawns appear without their textures, reverting to a default blue-and-green checkerboard.

This problem actually affects the entire environment, if I try to do something like auto-detect my game settings during regular gameplay.

But even that comes with a caveat- I can’t load anything in the game without hitting ctrl+alt+delete to escape the game client, and then opening it back up from the taskbar. Loading maps for the first time, loading within a map such as waypoint respawns, changes to my graphical settings and more all result in these hard freezes which don’t actually crash the game, but leave it frozen until I escape from the window and reopen it from the taskbar.

I am using a laptop, but it is a brand new ASUS, designed for games, and here are its specs:

265GB Solid State Hard Drive
8GB RAM
Intel i7-6500U 2.50GHz CPU
2GB Nvidia GeForce 950M Graphics Card

A small and likely(?) irrelevant detail is that this laptop has a 15.6" display, and is running at 1920×1080 resolution. I play mostly MMOs, including Wildstar and World of Warcraft, and have not experienced any texture loading or freezing problems like this in any of my other games. Given that GW2 runs on a different engine, that’s of course to be expected, but I felt it important to point out that this is the only game in which I’m experiencing these problems, and I only started experiencing these problems following the latest update to the game.

To the best of my knowledge, my graphics driver is up to date. Because I’ve looked at my graphics driver, compared the performance of other games, and done my best to eliminate the usual obvious user-end problems, I decided to bring the issue here in the hopes of finding an answer. I can achieve perfectly normal gameplay within a map as long as I don’t have to load it, and as long as I’m content with weird texture bugs- but I’m not content with weird texture bugs, and I don’t like having to disengage the entire game client every time a loading screen comes up.

If you’re aware of a fix for this problem, please help.

I am currently running the -repair argument at this exact moment to see if that improves my game’s performance, and will report back to this thread with results. In the meantime, I’m curious to see if this bug is affecting other users, or if a workaround currently exists to return the game to normal performance.

After running -repair I can confirm that I’m still experiencing the error. Getting through a loading screen only takes a few seconds thanks to my SSD, but it freezes once it’s “complete” and requires exiting the client window and opening it from the taskbar to begin normal play.

In addition, certain textures on spell effects- combo field rings, for example, and the blinding spell that Dust Mites (which I continue to test against for consistency) use feature the green and blue default texture.

As you can see in the picture, my machine actually has two display adapters- both are up to date, I’ve just made sure of that.

The 520 is one of those super energy efficient adapters that can just kind of be relied on for low-strain games, while the 950M is supposed to do the real work for games like GW2- and it tends to! Once I’m actually in the game, I get consistently great framerates, in the 40-60 range, under virtually all circumstances.

This leads me to believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the problem is to do with the client (and perhaps the newest patch) rather than my own machine, which is as updated as it can be, and has managed the game with generally flawless performance thus far. It sure got me through SAB without a hitch, not an error in sight anywhere I went. This load-freezing is totally new, and the texture glitches with it.

I apologize for frequently updating my own thread, by the way. I thought it would be best to get a really comprehensive image of the problem I’m facing and eliminate as many user-end issues as possible before anything else took off.

One final update: Using the 64-bit client has eliminated my graphical errors, it seems, but not my loading error. The game continues to freeze at the end of a load. The music kicks in, but no progress can be made beyond a frozen loading screen without ctrl+alt+deleting away from the client and then reopening it from the taskbar, just like before.

I’ll leave the thread like this, with all the information I have. I don’t think I can do much more on my end anyway.

EDIT: Putting the game in Windowed Fullscreen mode froze the client, causing me to have to crtl+alt+delete as usual. However, once I returned to the game, now in Windowed Fullscreen, I loaded my character and… the client didn’t freeze upon loading!

I don’t know what impact this will have on my game’s performance moving forward, but for the time being, it’s well and truly behaving itself. I do not, however, consider these circumstances a true “fix,” because they don’t directly address the problem, they just work around it.