Guild Wars 2

It’s really frustrating to see that ANet has not posted anything on supporting the Mac client since October. We’re still here you know! I’ve tried sending PM’s to mods, I’ve posted in this thread, I’ve posted in other threads but no even once has someone from ANet taken the time to respond to a single thing for us. If you are not going to be supporting this client then come out and say it but I’m tired of dealing with all of these Mac client specific glitches and errors that have been reported for 4 months now without a single response from you guys.

ArenaNet is not responsible for anything in the mac client except the game files. The company that is responsible for how the mac client runs is Transgaming.

I have said this before, I will say it again: This is exactly what happened with City of Heroes. Transgaming updated the Cider emulation wrapper once and then went dark for three years.

We’re only but a small population, and in Anet’s eyes we’re not as important as the windows users. Which is overwhelming majority of the playerbase, I doubt we will ever see a employee respond to our questions, or see another update to the mac client. Once the Mac users spent 60$ it was over. Yes releasing a Mac client was great, it’s also a good way to attract more players from Mac, but since the game isn’t subscription based, all Anet has to do is to get some Mac users to buy the game, then they can leave us in the dark or do whatever. It’s business.

So what do you suggest? Contacting Transgaming?

You can. I’ve been doing so for years, but the most I get is a canned response. ANet needs to be the one that puts pressure on TG to make updates to the wrapper.

vince.5937:

ArenaNet is not responsible for anything in the mac client except the game files. The company that is responsible for how the mac client runs is Transgaming.

I have said this before, I will say it again: This is exactly what happened with City of Heroes. Transgaming updated the Cider emulation wrapper once and then went dark for three years.

Anet is offering the Mac client, and as such is responsible for it. Whatever happens in the background should not be of interest for us. If transgaming can not deliver a better port, it is Anets responsibility to explore different options (go native, use wine), or drop official support for OSX (hopefully not).

Lilsteele.4567:

vince.5937:

ArenaNet is not responsible for anything in the mac client except the game files. The company that is responsible for how the mac client runs is Transgaming.

I have said this before, I will say it again: This is exactly what happened with City of Heroes. Transgaming updated the Cider emulation wrapper once and then went dark for three years.

Anet is offering the Mac client, and as such is responsible for it. Whatever happens in the background should not be of interest for us. If transgaming can not deliver a better port, it is Anets responsibility to explore different options (go native, use wine), or drop official support for OSX (hopefully not).

They are not responsible for anything other the game files the Cider wrapper uses. Transgaming is the company they’ve worked with to produce the mac client. All edits to the Cider wrapper are done through Transgaming, so they are the company responsible. I’ve been explaining this for years. If you go through the files in the client you’ll see that there’s a regular PC install within the app. Everything else? Transgaming. Think of the Cider Wrapper as a CD player, and GW2 as a CD. If the CD is undamaged and plays well in another device but not in the CD player, what is at fault?

Try with Twitter, our last hope.

vince.5937:

They are not responsible for anything other the game files the Cider wrapper uses. Transgaming is the company they’ve worked with to produce the mac client. All edits to the Cider wrapper are done through Transgaming, so they are the company responsible. I’ve been explaining this for years. If you go through the files in the client you’ll see that there’s a regular PC install within the app. Everything else? Transgaming. Think of the Cider Wrapper as a CD player, and GW2 as a CD. If the CD is undamaged and plays well in another device but not in the CD player, what is at fault?

1. How do you know that Anet doesn’t modify the wrapper? I know that all the unofficial ports (e.g. portingteam.com) require heavy modifications of the basic cider wrapper.
2. Anet might have bought or licensed the cider wrapper from Transgaming. Still it is their responsibility to pressure Transgaming into improving the wrapper if they care about their customers.
3. Anet has the choice about what experience to provide. They could use other wrappers, or write a native client. There is no way you can just say “it’s all Transgaming.”

I understand how the wrapper looks on the inside, and partially how it works. But it’s not as simple as blaming Transgaming. If I buy an iPad, and the screen breaks, Apple has to fix it, although the screen is not produced by Apple…

Lilsteele.4567:

1. How do you know that Anet doesn’t modify the wrapper? I know that all the unofficial ports (e.g. portingteam.com) require heavy modifications of the basic cider wrapper.

By having been in contact with Transgaming (as much as I can be, given their response delays) for the past three years and alpha testing the City of Heroes mac client. All updates to the wrapper came from Transgaming. Any issues with the wrapper were given to Paragon Studios, whereupon they were given to Transgaming. We could see changelogs from TG to Paragon and request logs from Paragon to TG. After the mac port was complete, Transgaming stopped supplying updates for almost 2 years. The CoH mac forum had twenty four pages of the same issues being reposted.

Lilsteele.4567:

2. Anet might have bought or licensed the cider wrapper from Transgaming. Still it is their responsibility to pressure Transgaming into improving the wrapper if they care about their customers.

Which is what I have been saying. Unfortunately, Transgaming has a horrible track record of responsiveness and update frequency.

Lilsteele.4567:

3. Anet has the choice about what experience to provide. They could use other wrappers, or write a native client. There is no way you can just say “it’s all Transgaming.”

Except it is. When I can run the application on Bootcamped Windows using the exact same hardware as running it on OS X and experience none of the problems associated with the mac client, where do you think the problem is? Furthermore, read up on Transgaming’s website and take a look at their contracts. The wrapper is 100% theirs to edit, modify, and improve. It is on a per game basis, of course, since every game is different but this doesn’t change the fact that the emulation layer added by Transgaming causes increased system load, reduced framerates and system crashes.

Lilsteele.4567:

I understand how the wrapper looks on the inside, and partially how it works. But it’s not as simple as blaming Transgaming. If I buy an iPad, and the screen breaks, Apple has to fix it, although the screen is not produced by Apple…

Correct. But this is not a hardware issue. If the issue was with your GW2 install disc then maybe. But this is software, and the wrapper is third party. If you purchase an app that’s not written by Apple and it becomes unusable after an iOS update, it’s not Apple’s responsibility to fix the app’s incompatibility. It falls on the dev of the app. That’s what’s going on here. Since the game inside the mac client is an exact copy of a Windows install (which runs just fine on Bootcamp!) wrapped in an emulation layer, where do you think the problem is? I’ll tell you: It’s in the wrapper. That’s why native mac hardware doesn’t work as well; that’s why the client will crash with exponentially huge memory leaks; that’s why the Windows version is stable and the mac version is being bottlenecked through a buggy emulator skin.

Please, trust me on this, as I got to see the inner workings of NC-owned studios working with Transgaming in the form of the CoH mac client alpha. It took weeks of reporting showstopper-level bugs before the client ran as well as the Windows install. I could see everything back and forth between the two companies. It boiled down to Transgaming fixing memory leaks, crash problems, accidental debug dialog inclusions, driver read errors, and DirectX-to-OpenGL problems.

ikir.4923:

So what do you suggest? Contacting Transgaming?

I’ll tell you what I suggest… wait until ESO arrives. They’re giving us a native client. End of story.

Bistouri.6038:

ikir.4923:

So what do you suggest? Contacting Transgaming?

I’ll tell you what I suggest… wait until ESO arrives. They’re giving us a native client. End of story.

Still waiting in line for the Beta and hoping there’s no monthly fee.

I don’t know how anybody can’t see that this is arena net’s fault and only theirs.
This is their forum, with their customers. Not responding in this thread has nothing to do with transgaming. And the choice not to port the client but use transgaming instead was also arena net’s fault.
Also, there’s a contract between Arena Net and Transgaming. So one of the points in this contract will be the SLA, the service level agreements, for supporting the client. This would also be Arena Net’s fault if those SLA are weak or if they are unable to make transgaming response more quickly and releasing more updates.

I am the customer of Arena Net. And this kind of support is without any respect for their customers.

dag.1397:

I don’t know how anybody can’t see that this is arena net’s fault and only theirs.
This is their forum, with their customers. Not responding in this thread has nothing to do with transgaming. And the choice not to port the client but use transgaming instead was also arena net’s fault.
Also, there’s a contract between Arena Net and Transgaming. So one of the points in this contract will be the SLA, the service level agreements, for supporting the client. This would also be Arena Net’s fault if those SLA are weak or if they are unable to make transgaming response more quickly and releasing more updates.

I am the customer of Arena Net. And this kind of support is without any respect for their customers.

ArenaNet shares some of the blame. But please read my posts and understand that even if ANet steps it up and submits every problem we find to Transgaming, there’s a very real chance we’ll never see the problems fixed. I remember how excited I was to see ANet announce a mac client. I remember how disappointed I was when I saw they chose Transgaming as their medium rather than a native port.

@vince

Thanks for your detailed reply.

Of course the wrapper is responsible for any performance difference between OSX and Windows. I also understand when you say that maybe there is little hope for improvements, based on your past experience with Transgaming.

However for me as a customer, Anet is responsible for what they provide to me. I don’t care where they bought their wrapper, as much as I don’t care who runs their servers or which programming language they use.
Anet is not communicating at all about this, whether they are happy with the current (beta) client, whether they are working on improving it (probably not, since they can not), or whether they are looking into other options to provide a better experience.

Maybe the number of OSX users is so small that they don’t care. Minorities can be very loud on the internet, but maybe it’s just 500 of their 3 million sold copies that run the OSX client. In that case they might as well decide to not care about it anymore.

I agree that Anet is responsive for providing a good experience. I still would like to mention that it isn’t that bad atm. However as we Mac users are paying customers as well they can not ignore us. It would be better for their image to simple state that they haven’t given up on improving. But another thing to notice is that it non the less still says “Mac beta client” when you play. Also they seem to respond to certain bugs that get reported here and have a sticky for the common ones. I’m not losing hope but, now speaking to a possible Anet employee that reads this, it can’t harm to give some info about what is going on, even if you say that it is not a priority now. I will check this post regular from now on and would consider it rude if no reply is given here but will be on other unrelated posts.

My biggest problem is that they don’t communicate with us. We are paying customers and we deserve the same support and communication as everyone else.

Hey mods/devs!!! I DARE YOU to post something in this thread! lol

….if only it were that easy.

The only effect that spam usually has is getting a thread locked.

@Anet… we’re waiting

Aigisthos.3059:

Hey mods/devs!!! I DARE YOU to post something in this thread! lol

They’re too busy deleting /bumps in the ‘Guilds’ forum…

Robert Walter posted on a topic in Mac Beta forum. Its was about the audio issue so i think they do read them…. sometimes.