Can't play on Windows 8.1 (more inside..)
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: The Ice Mage.4879
…so I’ve been back and forth with some support agents now but I’m not giving up on them, I just thought I could post here in the hopes that someone savvier than myself, not from Anet, might be able to help while I’m in limbo waiting for the next ticket reply.
So here goes, I’ll try to explain the issue and everything I have tried without or without CS’s instructions…this could get long.
Something I would like to stress to keep in mind if you have any suggestions is that this problem comes only after playing GW2 on the laptop for a few months without issue.
My OS: Windows 8.1
The problem: Suddenly about maybe 5 days ago on this Alienware laptop of mine I let a bunch of updates for Windows install. It was pretty big as far as Windows updates go as I guess there was something of a backlog since I hadn’t used the laptop in a while. So that finished up I needed to restart to finish completely but I just thought to myself I’d go play GW2 and shut it down when going to bed or something, but then the issue first reared its head. I can load up the launcher just fine and log in, but when I hit the play button the game does not load to character select and instead in a matter of seconds (gleaned from looking at task manager) the process dies.
After trying a few times in frustration and realising it was not a weird one-off issue I decided to trying repairing the client with the standard procedure of shortcut with -repair option on it. Tried again when it finished, no progress. I then decided to try deleting the .dat file and redownload…still not fixed. Tried -repair again because idkwtfelsecanido :|
After some time, I sent a ticket in explaining as above and the first agent to respond asked me (somewhat routinely I imagine) to run the NCSoft GameAdvisor and send them the test result. Later another agent came back and asked me to try using msconfig to disable (non-essential) services and also to disable programs that would be said to run on startup and then restart. I wasn’t that optimistic about this but I tried and way and sure enough it did no good..
Next, they suggested to run MS System FIle Checker to check for corrupted/missing system files…but don’tcha know that reported no problems.
Then, at their request, I sent a logfile generated by HijackThis. The next time they got back to me they suggested I tried to force the game to run in windowed mode (-windowed), suggesting that if it did work in that mode it could indicate “[…] either a configuration issue in the games .ini files or perhaps an issue with the video card driver or even monitor configuration” but it still did not worked in windowed mode.
In the next reply they asked me to give details of my system hardware via the tool Speccy, and afterwards suggested my Windows User account could be corrupted and that I should test running the game on a brand new user account. So I did, and guess what? The game still doesn’t work, as previously mentioned. yayyyy..
Finally, they suggested to open IE (y’know, the browser) and turn on or off SmartScreen filter and said that “Should this not resolve the issue for you, please simply delete the Guild Wars 2 setup file, and try redownloading as the original installer may have been corrupted.” So since messing with that IE junk did no good, as much as I didn’t want to (since it didn’t sound like it would help) I uninstalled the game, downloaded a new Gw2setup.exe and let it redownload again. Thank the gods the broadband my family’s got has no horribad low usage limit :|
So that bring this up to date to now, where I am still waiting for the next reply on the ticket. As I said I am no giving up on the support agents but I want to keep my options open; given the oddness of this issue I guess it’s a little unlikely someone outside of Anet will manage to help resolve it…but it can’t hurt to try. If any players are going to make suggestions here feel free to ask whatever you need.