Guild Wars 2

…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.

Did they never get you to reset your settings? Delete the folder %appdata%/Guild Wars 2/ and the file Documents/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat (if it exists).

Have you tried updating your video drivers? If you have an integrated and dedicated GPU, have you tried disabling the integrated one? It may be a BIOS option.

Have you tried running the game under Windows 7/8 compatibility mode and as an administrator (right click Gw2.exe > properties > compatibility)?

Is there any related errors under the Event Viewer (application logs), found under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel?

Is System Restore an option to go back prior to the updates?

As a last resort, you could re-install Windows. Laptops generally have a special partition for restoring the system back to the way you originally received it. Alternatively, using an external storage device, you could temporarily install Windows 7 as a trial, simply to rule out any hardware problems.

I have the same problem as you have. I’ve also got windows 8.1. I made a post about this aswell and have tried several things myself. Here’s the post I made:

BEGIN OF POST
Ok so here’s the problem I am facing:
When I boot up gw2 the launcher pops up, I log in and click on start. After that it just poofs away and nothing happens.
However when I select to use my “integrated video card” I am able to boot it up but in a waaaaay worse performance.
Btw I use a windows 8 operating system
How can I fix this so I can boot the game correctly?
Things I’ve tried:
- delete .dat file and repair client
- reinstall game
- updating video card drivers
- running in administrator mode
- setting compatibility on windows 8 and windows 7
END OF POST

I am able to boot up the game with my integrated videocard (my laptop has a gt755m and intel videocard or something). So when I right click the launcher to “run with graphics processor: integrated graphics” then it will work but with a fps that is not playable. So with my good videocard it poofs like you described.

@OP could you test running the game with your integrated videocard to check if we have the exact same situation?

I would try to either uninstall all the windows updates that you did, or do a system restore to a point before the updates were installed. More than likely it’s one of those updates that isn’t playing nicely with GW2.

After you’ve either rolled back your system or uninstalled all the updates, install each update one at a time, then running GW2 after each update, making a system restore point before you install the next update. It can be tedious, but it will help find out which update is causing the problem, so you can skip that one, and install the rest.

Let us know how it works out.

Humm…I tried running with integrated and I got barely further than before in a sense; black screen as if loading to char select, then crash with big log…

Pastebin because 5001 char limit on posts… http://pastebin.com/cs070pdv

Will try once more to see if it happens again.

Did they never get you to reset your settings? Delete the folder appdata/Guild Wars 2/ and the file Documents/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat (if it exists).

They never asked but I did and told them as much at one point in the exchange. Well actually tho Local.dat was in the appdata location as well.

Is there any related errors under the Event Viewer (application logs), found under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel?

I don’t see anything Gw2 related.

Is System Restore an option to go back prior to the updates?

I’ll have a look now

The Ice Mage, from your log:

ProcessCount: 134

Really? 134 processes running? That’s a new record so far. If you tried disabling unneeded start-up programs something went wrong.

Please try again. More info here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/162446/how-to-manage-startup-applications-in-windows-8/

Make sure to reboot after.

With Alienware, you have the option of purchasing Windows 7 Pro instead of Windows 8.1 as the base OS. It costs a lot more, but in terms of less problems, it’s priceless.

Make sure you’re virus software isn’t killing the process – either disable it (just long enough to try running GW2) or ensure there is an exception for it.

wanted to tell you guys that I managed to solve my problem.

I did a windows reinstall and it seems to have fixed my problem, let’s hope it doesn’t return

Been a bit busy so forgot about this thread, but I’d like to post now that I remembered again. After further discussion with support I finally resolved the issue…according to the log generated by Speccy (I didn’t post it here) my Intel and Nvdia drivers were a bit out of date and when I updated it started working fine again.

What I still think was really kitten weird though was this:
So, as people suggested here I did a system restore to before the installation of the big amount of windows updates that seemed to break the game. Indeed the game started working again at that point but I decided I might as well go along with support and still update the drivers anyway. So I went with updating Intel one first and it wanted a restart to finish doing things but out of curiosity before restarting again I decided to test the game again (also after restart). Really, really weirdly at this point the game would not work again, on the Nvidia card which it of course defaults to running on but would run somewhat subparly on the integrated Intel. Thankfully everything worked as expected after doing the Nvidia update too, but that’s still kitten weird that it seems like updating the Intel broke support for Nvidia or somethin :/