Guild Wars 2

In the last few days since the patch after halloween, after I log in and press play, the screens been going black with a cursor and thats all. One attempt I had the character select music playing the other 6-7 attempts had nothing but the curser. I couldn’t alt-tab, alt-ctrl-delete, nothing, just a hard reboot would do.

I’ve tried updating the GPU drivers(nvidia 9600gt) as the old ones were probably a year old, it worked the first time, but the next time i tried to log in, was the same problem, i’ve only managed to get in once out of about 9-10 attempts since, dont really like having to hard reboot system all the time either.

I search forums to see if others have had this problem and couldn’t find anything that match the same problems. I’ve read and done the things on the sticky threads, but to no avail.

Also just discovered that DirectX files had some problems and was causing other games to not load. I’ve reinstalled DirectX which has stopped the black screens, but not fixed the problem. Now i’m just getting the bug report tab instead of black screen

Well I do have the same issue. A friend of mine does too. There’s apparently nothing that caused this. I was playing last night, launched the game this morning and instant crash.

For whatever reason it would occasionally allow me to ctrl-esc and close it manually, after that everything played up – directx stuffed up and i couldnt open any other games(which worked perfectly if i run it before gw2 crashes), norton internet security packed up on me, and if i tried to shut down or restart computer normally, it did absolutely nothing but beep at me….

So i figured maybe there was something gone wrong in system files, either that or a virus, which managed to get through norton. So spent yesterday arvo reinstalling windows xp. I didnt reinstall the game since its on a seperate HD. Anyway the short of the matter is, last night it worked first time without an issue. This morning however, its just black screen after black screen everytime i try start the game….

I did notice in the Arenanet notepad file in the game directory, is a list of all the crashes, and all of them are basically saying disk read error of gw2.dat

Tainden.1640:

For whatever reason it would occasionally allow me to ctrl-esc and close it manually, after that everything played up – directx stuffed up and i couldnt open any other games(which worked perfectly if i run it before gw2 crashes), norton internet security packed up on me, and if i tried to shut down or restart computer normally, it did absolutely nothing but beep at me….

So i figured maybe there was something gone wrong in system files, either that or a virus, which managed to get through norton. So spent yesterday arvo reinstalling windows xp. I didnt reinstall the game since its on a seperate HD. Anyway the short of the matter is, last night it worked first time without an issue. This morning however, its just black screen after black screen everytime i try start the game….

I did notice in the Arenanet notepad file in the game directory, is a list of all the crashes, and all of them are basically saying disk read error of gw2.dat

I am suddenly having this EXACT same issue. Even the beep when it won’t let me restart the computer unless I manually shut it down on the tower. =(

{edit: nvidia geforce gtx 260 – drivers up to date. And to clarify, this happens when I click the Play button. I can’t reach character select.}

{edit: adding the NCsoft Game Advisor test results.}

I’m having the exact same issue. I login after being locked out of my account for 4-5 days due to a authenticator issue and now I come back to a black screen of death.

Here are my computer specs if that helps at all.

Computer Specs:

Motherboard: EVGA X58 Classified LGA 1366 1st Generation Core I7

CPU: Core I7 920 (2.8ghz overclocked to 4.2ghz)

CPU Cooler: Corsair H70 Liquid Cooling System.

Memory: Corsair Dominator Series DDR 3 12gigs at 1600mhz overclocked to 1900mhz

Video Card: GTX 295 CO-OP Dual GPU Card 1gig of DDR5 Memory

PSU: 1200 Watt BFG Power Supply, Module version.

Optical Drive: Pioneer Blu-Ray and DvD R+W

Sound Card: Creative SB X-Fi Gamer Pro

I also have up to date drivers for everything. Especially the video card.

I would like a dev to look into this, since I have this issue as well. It is very frustrating to go from the game running perfectly fine, to only getting it to load once out of ten attempts. I have tried re-installing, updating my drivers, underclocking, etc. This seems to have started after the initial halloween update, so whatever you changed then might be causing this.

I managed to get into the game this evening and I filled out a bug report in the support tab so hopefully they’ll look into it soon.

I am having the same problems as well…Black screen after login, but only after the recent halloween updates. It is very annoying. I know this isn’t a CPU issue because I was running all graphics on max settings before and doing just fine. Please get this fixed ASAP

Currently with my ticket I submitted, and from what I can see with most people with this issue (until today), they seem to heavily blame our 32-bit OS and want us to upgrade to 64-bit. I plan on doing that someday but I don’t have a spare harddrive for it yet.

I just got booted and tried 10x in a row to log in and can’t. I get their send an error report message every time. I have a 64 bit system, so that is bullkitten what they are telling you. This is an issue that has being going on for months because the game is poorly written (according to others who know more about it than I do). This happens to me daily. It is completely random, nothing in common about any of the crashes. Sometimes it freezes, sometimes bsod, sometimes I get error report, sometimes it just closes through windows. Regardless, it sucks and they have offered no eplanation other than passing the blame onto the users. There are literally hundreds of different setups from these users though, so I have yet to see how it is a user problem. Good luck on getting anything fixed by what they tell you. After hours and hours of testing and exhaustive research on the fourms to fix this, nothing has changed for me or the hundreds or thousands of others with the same issue. Welcome to our world. I keep hoping one day they address this, but not in the last 90.

This is getting ridiculous. Four reboots in a row and counting this morning. Last night there was no issue at all. All other graphic intense games I play at max settings have no issues.

I’m getting this error after updating my NVIDIA driver.

Worked fine again late last night and this morning, but literally 6 reboots so far while trying to start it up this afternoon. sigh

Has anet given any input on your ticket yet, Yasashiku?

They had me change some options around for my NVIDIA card and also in game (when it loaded), as well as disabling all startup programs to see if it helped things. None of it helped, so they said sorry and that I really should upgrade to a 64-bit OS because he says that would get rid of my issue for sure.

I’m debating just installing windows 7 on this harddrive but then I would lose everything I have. I’d rather back up my stuff somewhere first ya know?

Yasashiku.8275:

They had me change some options around for my NVIDIA card and also in game (when it loaded), as well as disabling all startup programs to see if it helped things. None of it helped, so they said sorry and that I really should upgrade to a 64-bit OS because he says that would get rid of my issue for sure.

I’m debating just installing windows 7 on this harddrive but then I would lose everything I have. I’d rather back up my stuff somewhere first ya know?

Sorry but upgrading to a 64bit Os will not help you with the issue. I have windows 7 ultimate 64 bit and i still get frequent black screens.
Whoever you were talking to was lying.

its more common than you may think
its on anets end for sure, no way its a coincidence that so many people have the same issue without involving driver update crossover

sincerely
black screen victim

This went from a once a week occurance around the halloween events to now not being able to log in at all for two days. I missed my story mode group and am getting pretty fed up. The only advice offered in my ticket was to do a fresh video card driver install.. which changed nothing. This is the only game I own having an issue.

ANet, please post something.. anything that lets us know you are at least looking into getting a fix for this.

Love the game, but I’m about to the point of moving on.

Ok, so this problem has gotten worse, I started off getting black screens maybe 3 out of every 4 attempts to play the game, after a day or 2 of that, it worked its way up to about 9 or 10 attempts before getting in. Now for the last 3 days i havent gotten in at all and have tried at least 40-50 times.

On the plus side i’ve found out why my comp wouldn’t shut down after the game black screened on me. Some of the processes running in the background were also crashing after the game crashed and were hanging up the shutdown process, closing these at least allowed me to shut down normally rather than hard rebooting.

Has anyone found anything useful out relating to this issue? So far all I’ve had from support, is to open up the ports required for the game. Which has achieved nothing. Although i cant help but feel it is a bug with the patch after halloween (which i’m sure many others will agree), so far support have said nothing about it being a problem on their end and I’ve heard nothing about them intending on a fix. It would be at least nice to know they’re on the case, to acknowledge that they know about the problem by posting on the forums.

Having all the same issues, though the game was working just fine for me as early as yesterday. Was random questing around 2pm pacific and received a message that there was a new build available. I had a few other things to do that day, so I logged out and didn’t get back until about 4 hours ago. Now, all I get after clicking “play” from the login is a black screen that has a flickering blue bar running along the top (as if the game is in windows fullscreen setting). The hand shaped cursor works, but there is no sound. After a few minutes the screen goes completely black and the cursor disappears, a few moments later the flickering returns. Opening up the taskmanager indicates that the program has stopped responding.

After I close the program from the task manager I encounter lag, visual artifacts and random crashes when I run OTHER programs, as if GW2 has claimed system resources and cannot release them. After a reboot my computer is restored to “normal”, there are no artifacts, lag or crashes even when I use other graphic intensive programs or games.

Cael.3960 after you kill prcess gw2.exe in task menager you graph is down all and you need restart computer to do what computer can do.
I have same problem like you and thousend other ppl.
ANet back to relase after 2012-11-13 upg

No black screen here but BLUE screen of death instead. Happened twice in a row tonight. I could play fine last night. Going to check my nvidia drivers next. I too have the 9600gt.

Bel Geode.8129 this is programers problem not you system

Zgroza Czarnych.6190:

Bel Geode.8129 this is programers problem not you system

eehm blue screen is more likely to be an issue with failing memory or possibly other hardware problems. Where are you getting all this wisdom?? It seems that you’re pissed at ANet but not everything is their doing mate, just saying. Now for the black screen… that could be something on Anet’s side but who knows ey. I would like people to check something. you probably did this already but just to eliminate that possibility: Check your windows update, especially if its set to automatic. I had same issue a while back and it was because a NET framework update failed on me (NET framework 3.5. sumthing). Crazy stuff happened, black screens and then a redownload of entire program wich failed again and again. Complete lockups and that message about damaged files…. After redoing that one update everything was back to normal. And it still is. I am in no way a PC techboy, just a fairly decent troubleshooter… ( you learn alot when trying to run games on a low end laptop, maybe dead end even ) I do not understand how important this framework is and havent had time to read up on it, but again this just me trying to help…. The only blue screens i ever saw was when i was messing about with Nvidia tools to buff up my t4400 2.2 Ghz. Got it running at 2.53 for a day but one day later it became quite unstable loool

@ bel geode: i hear alot of people talking about running Memtest when facing blue screens. Might be worth a try. Have no experience with it myself but Google is your best mate here….

I have only just started having this issue after todays patch.
- Can’t alt tab out
- Have to ctrl alt dlt and task manager out of the black screen
- Ending process doesn’t seem to immediately kill the process (seems to hang around for about 5 mins)
- The issue after right after I click play and the game goes full screen.

Specs: i7 2600k, GTX 670, 8gb ram, 2 × 120gb SSD’s.

All drivers are up to date and I’m running a single monitor setup on 120hz. Seems to be this latest patch that has caused it for me.

Well the bluescreens stopped, now I have where it either goes past password, then crashes on launch (with the crash window), or it does not go past the first download screen at all (pre password).

Either way, it is not letting me play :-(

Cancel my last post… now for some reason it is working properly! I guess it just wanted a night off?

robber.4613:

I found a fix for me… Deleted the local.DAT file in my gw2 root folder. This resets your settings to default. Got in right away after.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Can-t-Open-GW2/first#post750644

This worked for me as well. anet please look into this issue!

So Anet has nothing to say? Can you guys at least say you are working on a fix? I get 10 plus black screens a day sometimes. Gets annoying when you’re trying to do a dungeon or anything.

Bumping for reference.

I get blackscreens on character select and randomly while playing. Im sick of this, im done with this game.