Guild Wars 2

Currently, neither Mac client is playable; both have serious issues that mean the experience is horrific. The latest updates to the new client have done absolutely nothing to address the choppy graphics and gamebreaking issues with the mouse. Its still not even worth trying.

As for the old client, which is what I keep reverting to upon finding the new client is still unplayable, there are constant crashes and the performance is poor. In fact, these crashes are getting worse, along with the spectacular return of the heap bytes issue from a couple of years ago. It’s pretty disappointing (this is a euphemism, so feel free to insert expletives of your choice here) to have to queue for a meta map and then wait for half an hour plus, which is a complete waste of time, only for the game to crash halfway through with no chance of getting back into the same map as its full.

The crashes are extremely frustrating, but in fairness the test client has only been available for a month, and the fact that they’ve done all the effort to develop a native client and are continuing to work on it is a huge turn-around from previous years of the 32 bit wrapper client. It means things can now improve where there was no chance of it before.

I heard the latest update apparently fixes the Mistlock Sanctuary problem – good to see a quick fix for that for Mac users if that’s true.

Today i had the keyboard-not-working-bug two time in the row in the new fractal.
Working keys: Backspace, F11, F12 (idk about other F-keys), Arrowkeys
Not working: Enter, 1, 2, 3, …., WASD or other normal Characterkeys
Only Logging out and restarting the client solves the issue…

Edit: CMD+q to quit didn’t work either. Had to use normal menu.

Get a consistent crash in the Sylvari starting tutorial on the boss fight. Submitted details via the game generated crash dialogue. Just making note of here.

I got stuck in the loading screen to Mistlock Sanctuary, the text is missing and the settings window is broken too.

The 64-bit client doesn’t seem to have the config file that we used to reconfigure to get rid of the vram bottleneck. Is there a way to do it on the 64-bit one? The fps is significantly lower for me and I can’t seem to have it outperform the 32-bit one.

There is also a new kind of crash, where it freezes, the CPU usage is minimal (2%) and I am only able to quit it via a force quit.

EchoPadder.7546:

There is also a new kind of crash, where it freezes, the CPU usage is minimal (2%) and I am only able to quit it via a force quit.

I had that one just now as well. After a couple of crashes during Frozen Maw, I then had it freeze with some background audio playing but everything was frozen and unresponsive and a force quit was required to stop the game. And when I got back in, of course there was no loot awarded.

Hopefully the crash report dialog is providing useful info to the devs (the one that drops down from the top with the “include email” option). It takes so long to submit the report and then relaunch the game, log in, etc that it’s almost guaranteed that the event I was in the middle of will be over (if I get back to the same map), so hopefully that info is useful or I’ve been wasting a heck of a lot of time for nothing.

I just got hit with the keyboard bug and noticed something interesting. I use a non-US keyboard layout and the hotkeys displayed in the skillbar normally reflect my keyboard layout, but when the keyboard bug occurred the hotkeys changed to display what the keys would be if I was using a US layout.

I also have the keyboard not working bug. I noticed my key bindings go from lowercase to uppercase.

I attached some screenshots

Hi, I cant write ^ (Zirkumflex) into the chat on german keyboard ;(. But binding works now.
I also get some missing AOE fields (screenshot). Sometime they are missing completely…

Spirit Watch spvp crashes before loading after multiple tests. It’s not playable on this client.

In general the new client is great, but the main problem is that it crashes too often too be usable since the ep6 patch. I haven’t figured out any link between the crashes, they can happen 10 seconds after starting, or 1 hour in.
Another problem since the ep6 patch is that all keyboard keys suddenly completely stop responding and the only fix is restarting. (Command-Q doesn’t work in this case either, but Command-Tab does)

Here’s what I think of the 64 bit version after I just downloaded it. My MAC is a Mid-2014 MBP with 16Gb of Ram, 512Gb SSD and Nvidia 750M with 2Go GDDR.

→ Overall, the performances don’t seem better than on the 32 bit version. (maybe even worst)

→ I run at 15/25 FPS on lower/med setting at 1400×900, not enough to play

→ The thing that makes this version unplayable, is that there are always these annoying freezes/stutterings while playing (every 2-3 seconds). The freezes where the reason I stopped playing GW2 on my Mac. (with the 32 bit version)

I don’t get it, this is a native client right ? I can easily play at GTA V, BF4 @40 fps med setting with bootcamp (or even at WoW). These games are much more graphic-consuming that GW2, so why is these native version so badly optimized ???

Don’t get offended guys, but there’s still a lot of work to produce to optimize the whole thing and make it playable. Good luck !

Question for the devs:

I’m interested in pre-ordering the new expansion, but at the current state of the Mac client I don’t think I would be willing to invest any more into the game. All of the cosmetic and graphic issues are easily ignored. The only real game breaking issue with the client right now is the crashing that happens every 10-15 mins, it makes any form of content where you’re required to be a reliable team member unplayable. That eliminates a lot of content from the game including fractals, all forms of pvp, raiding, dungeons, and almost all group events.

Will this crashing thing be fixed soon? Or at least reduced so that we can participate? I don’t feel comfortable playing with other people knowing that i’ll probably keep crashing over and over ruining the experience for everyone involved.

Jeion.1045:

Question for the devs:

I’m interested in pre-ordering the new expansion, but at the current state of the Mac client I don’t think I would be willing to invest any more into the game.

I’m kind of here as well, although in my case I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing bugs as blatant as universal crashes (eventually). I’m less sanguine about the prospects of a client that’s actually well optimized.

Right now performance for me is slightly worse than the 32-bit client and far, far behind bootcamp. I could pretty easily imagine a scenario where they fix most bugs but otherwise leave the client alone, similar to what they did for the earlier client when it was being maintained.

Running a maxed-out 2017 MBP, the game still stutters horribly on low everything. Meanwhile bootcamp gets a solid 40fps with most settings on high.

Jon Olson.8439:

We are actively investigating the crashing. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to reproduce internally.

Might we be able to reproduce it externally? For us it happens all the time. Might we be able to upload system logs or something? I know that can be a lot of data to sift through, but its definitely worse than its ever been on both clients.

And the keyboard issue on the 64-Bit client is annoying.

Ouros.5694:

Jon Olson.8439:

We are actively investigating the crashing. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to reproduce internally.

Might we be able to reproduce it externally? For us it happens all the time. Might we be able to upload system logs or something? I know that can be a lot of data to sift through, but its definitely worse than its ever been on both clients.

And the keyboard issue on the 64-Bit client is annoying.

There’s a prompt that automatically sends them all relevant system info that you can use when you encounter crashing. I don’t know how useful that information is but that’s probably the best way right now to report any fatal errors you encounter.

Mostly fantastic, thanks for the efforts!

I have a few bugs:

- sometimes the keyboard stops working while I’m playing. I can still manually click on all buttons in the game, but no key entry until I restart the client.
- flickering white patches on the ground, especially in HoT maps, for example (transparent overlays on the ground?)
- often seems like enemies only get the red targeted circle about half of the time.
- same “chugging” performance on rotating the camera to look around, especially when I first come into a new area.
- I’m maybe an edge case, as I’m using an eGPU with a MacBook Pro and a GTX 1080, but I guess my type of setup will become more common.

Generally awesome to have a native client though.

Jon Olson.8439:

We are actively investigating the crashing. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to reproduce internally.

Jon, does that mean all those crash reports we’ve been sending in don’t help?

I definitely crash when certain particle effects fire, but not from any consistent one. Sometimes it’s a few minutes after loading, sometimes it doesn’t happen for hours.

There’s also a weird crash that happens sometimes where the CPU load will drop to near 0 and the game will hang, but no crash report will come up. I’m not sure what to do in these cases to get you folks data.

Thanks again, though, for your efforts!

I got an error where my keyboard stopped working. I couldn’t move or exit out of game. The mouse keypad on on side of mouse still have the issue where the numbers stop working even though my keybinds are mapped correctly for that. Please fix these bugs because the graphics are pretty and hope the client is fix by the time the Expansion 2 comes out because I would like to experience that content with the 64bit clients and have nice graphics and explore that map. Please fix bugs.

Booting into Windows I get more then double the fps. Same settings, same computer, using a Radeon Pro 580 8192 MB.

So I decided to try this out because of a very nasty crash I had just now after playing the game for the first time in a while.

I think the game is…. stable. But NPC/enemy models and sometimes even the environment takes a long time to load.

…A VERY long time. Can’t even move a significant distance in the same zone without somehow ending up walking on air because there’s no visible environment.

My character’s model also looks off on the character select sceen.

Since you are ditching 32-bit Support with PoF (which means we will no longer be able to use the 32-bit Client which is far more stable and better-performing as the current-state 64-bit client), I really hope you guys are going to fix not only crashes but bringing performance at least to the same level as the old 32-bit client…

Are we going to see fixes for both performance and crashes before the release please? (I think fixes before beta weekends aren‘t to be expected, right?)

Wait wait, did they say they’re ditching 32-bit support? When did they say this? That would be terrible news. I mean the 64-bit client has been a horrible experience for me thus far.

I mean I did get that nasty crash earlier, but at least I could actually play the actual game without having to wait a few minutes every time I move somewhere.

They updated the minimum system requirements for windows to drop 64-bit support and only list the 64-bit Client + Requirements for Mac. Have a check yourself on the buy page of PoF, somewhere on the bottom of the page.

That’s peculiar, the system requirements mentioned on that page puts my iMac well over the required hardware.

…. So why on earth does it take so long to load everything?

I have not read the entire thread, has this problem been mentioned before? Is there something I can do on my end?

I don’t know if it’s related, but I did some quick skimming and found something about the client reading HUGE amounts of data. Could it have something to do with that?

Just a quick question. I watched the Path of Fire announcement yesterday and did like it. I am interested in pre-ordering but I am not sure whether it will work with my setup.
I have an iMac late 2012 and the 32-bit client works “satisfactory”. It crashes during massive teamplay but I have learned to accept that. I am getting about 40-50 fps.
I did try the 64-bit again just now. It works; but I do not like the colors and I am getting an fps of 20-30. It is “hesitating/stalling” during play. So, for the time being I will avoid 64-bit.
Question: Will PoF play in 32-bit macOS beta environment?

Overall my experience with the new client has been the same as Hawken’s. Some graphical glitches with flickering and an occasional crash but it has been way more stable for me than the 32-bit client was. There is some hitching, and the first time everything loaded it did take forever. I think the fact I have a fusion drive in this iMac mitigates a lot of the loading times. (I haven’t run into this keyboard glitch people are mentioning.)

I don’t know if the keyboard layout changes on me, how can I tell?.

What happens to mine is the letter and number keys just stop working, but the arrow keys continue to work. I just started having this problem a few days after the living story was released.

Jon Olson.8439:

For those having the keyboard problem, is it keyboard layout related.. i.e. is the game switching layouts on your or some other behavior?

In my own experiences, it is not a keyboard layout issue. More like key input does not work at all, kind of issue, like as the keyboard is not connected. Oddly, in most cases, the mouse cursor works, and you are able to click on things to do most of what you want. Problem here is that even if the crash report window pops up, you cannot type anything into it.

But, in some rare and severe crashes, you might hear the game sound, but no input what so ever is possible, not even the mouse, only to force-quite the GW2 64-bit app.

In any case, I am very thankful for bringing the native GW2 app to life, and understand the ‘growing pain’ on both sides that have to go through to make this the ‘real deal’. Very much look forward to the time this becoming ‘full grown’. Hopefully soon.
Please keep up to good work, yet also keep us posted!

Jon Olson.8439:

For those having the keyboard problem, is it keyboard layout related.. i.e. is the game switching layouts on your or some other behavior?

No. Many keys simply stop working altogether.

For me, I was midway through typing a message while standing at the bank, and suddenly all my character keys wouldn’t type! I could, strangely, backspace just fine, but I couldn’t press enter, nor type any letters.

It’s not all keys, which is weird as heck, but I also don’t see a pattern to it. The next time it happens (please don’t be during a pvp match next time!), I will try all the keys to get a list.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ZlO3uJE.png[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/2GsPgLU.png[/img]
This light effect(?) always show around objects and characters with ambient occlusion option checked. Is this normal?

[img]http://i.imgur.com/0RTmaiu.png[/img]
This happens while gliding with ambient occlusion option checked.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/KDWgbfp.png[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/XNVSVgI.png[/img]
Don’t know how to describe this, it happens while diving and the dark circle only move map up and down.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/LCEhDBp.png[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/xPErxxV.png[/img]
Don’t know how but this happens all the time and when this happens I can’t use keyboard to use F1~F4 skills at first the all key won’t respond expect backspace and up/down/right/left arrow.

Jon Olson.8439:

For those having the keyboard problem, is it keyboard layout related.. i.e. is the game switching layouts on your or some other behavior?

It seems to be only the 0-9a-z keys. Function keys, delete, etc still work when this happens.

i still have the problem where old frame stay on the screen for like 5-10s

Aphelion.7546:

Jon Olson.8439:

We are actively investigating the crashing. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to reproduce internally.

Jon, does that mean all those crash reports we’ve been sending in don’t help?

I would LOVE to know the answer to this as well, because if sending those crash reports doesn’t help I could save a lot of time by not submitting them. If they help, I’ll keep putting up with the delay, but I’d really like confirmation that they do actually help.

Jon Olson.8439:

We are actively investigating the crashing. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to reproduce internally.

Jon, just go into WvW and play for a bit. You will definately crash within the first half hour or so. Sometimes much sooner. I have given up commanding until this 64-Bit client is stable. Also, the Gamma Slider does not work at all and should be a pretty high priority. The graphics are so dark that it’s very hard to play. I’ve gone back to the 32-Bit client (which is also crash prone) until the 64-Bit client is much more stable and playable.

Since last updates the 64-bit client is crashing way more often (27-inch Late 2013 iMac here, with GeForce GTX 775M 2 GB and macOS Sierra 10.12.6).

The situation now is actually worst than with the 32-bit client. With it, I knew how to somewhat deal with crashes: lower the settings, crash is delayed. Raise the settings, crash is anticipated. Higher settings for exploration, lower settings for events, and with a bit of luck I could complete a Dragon’s Stand. Now with the 64-bit it’s just plain random, it happens after 5 minutes or after 1 hour, with settings untouched. Oh, and I’ve had the no-more-responding keyboard bug too (Italian layout here).

To be sincere, I don’t understand why after all these years of dealing with Mac client crashes you haven’t set up some mitigation strategies yet. E.g.: on sudden disconnection, please reserve the player’s spot in the map for 1 or 2 minutes. It would be enough to re-enter and find your event where you left it. Most of the times, after a crash I find myself on an empty map (with my previous map full) and all the work done is lost. Can you guess the frustration as it happens every time you play?

Cheers.

Jon Olson.8439:

For those having the keyboard problem, is it keyboard layout related.. i.e. is the game switching layouts on your or some other behavior?

I have the not-working bug right now, while I type this. All other programs behave correctly and the layout is correct (double checked in system preferences). There is this behaviour, that while moving the camera with right-click and additionally press ‘w’ to move forward, the mouse cursor becomes visible again, but i can still move the camera.

I tried the on-screem keyboard and it has the exact same behaviour as the physical keyboard. I recorded a video where you can see, that the layout should be correct and nothing changed, but the client interprets the key wrong, idk.

https://youtu.be/2jK9kFY5bVc

Thanks for the info Jon!

Will we be told when these fixes will go live? I’m not using the client right now but I do want to test it again.

Is there anybody here with a 2016 Macbook Pro with Radeon 2Gb 455 that can tell us how much FPS he gets and with which settings ? Thanks

MacBook Pro 13" 2016, Intel 540 1536mb user here. Just got into GW2, have only ever used the 64-bit client as the 32-bit wouldn’t install/load on install for me.

Been playing for 3-ish days pretty consistently, and while there have been a few graphical glitches (tree textures flicker white, parts of character textures don’t load in), for the most part the game runs fine.

Until it freezes and crashes.

There’s no real warning or clue as to when it will happen, sometimes it’s during a fight, sometimes I’m just running in a straight line. But it freezes on a frame, most of the time the music is still going, I can move the cursor around on screen but nothing is responsive, and then I get a “fatal error” box from the client itself. Only way to “fix” it is close down, restart, re-log, and continue. I’ve sent in a number of error reports when it happens, so ANet has the full details, but looking at the error log the common error that pops up is something about “failed to load AimIK bone indices” along with referencing an item that doesn’t exist and no more room for lightning bolts. I’ll leave it up to ANet to figure that out.

The other thing I should mention: the freezing and crashing is random, but manageable with my main character, a norn warrior. My second character, a sylvari mesmer, however… I can’t finish the “Fighting the Nightmare” story.
Yes, that’s literally the opening story for a sylvari character.
Without fail the game will freeze and crash out before I can finish the final fight. Sometimes it freezes and crashes just from loading into the area. One of these things is not like the other, methinks.

I also second the replies about the keyboard lock-ups. A-Z, 0-9 just don’t work in-game. I checked that my keyboard itself still works when this happens in another program, and it does, but GW2 just doesn’t recognize any keystrokes for those keys.

I’m not too off-put by all the issues, mostly because I know it’s an early Mac client and it’s a good sight better than the last MMO I tried to play on a Mac (cough Star Trek Online cough), so I’ll putter around with my norn and give the programmers time to keep working on the client.

So I mapped my F1, F2, and F3 to Shift+1, Shift+2, Shift+3 for my F abilities. Well sometimes the when pressing 2 it gets stuck on F1 and won’t go back to 2. It is very frustrating in the middle of battle because I will die because I can’t get back to 2. Please fix the Keyboard Input or for the game to recognize what inputs are being pressing. Thanks.

I have some more information about the keyboard bug.

I’m the developer of BGDM dps meter (which has a mac client for a while now), at first I suspected that my mod was part of the problem but reading this thread seems like this is a pretty common issue.

Anyways, I’m using the open source glfw library with OpenGL, when the keyboard bug happens I keep getting this message in my glfw error callback:
“glfw3 error 65544: Cocoa: Failed to retrieve keyboard layout Unicode data”

The call that fails is apparently this one:
glfw.ns.unicodeData = TISGetInputSourceProperty(glfw.ns.inputSource,
kTISPropertyUnicodeKeyLayoutData);

Code can be found here:
https://github.com/glfw/glfw/blob/master/src/cocoa_init.m (line 218).

Hope this helps!

Hi again!

Something I have been experiencing lately, but not totally sure when I noticed this to happen.

After logging in, and clicking ‘Ready’, playing in ‘windowed’ mode, I get the “Untitled” window, BUT the window is blank/black, nothing happens, and I cannot do anything from there, except for move my mouse cursor around although unable to click anything. I am totally locked out from the system: even cannot bring up the ‘Force quit’ dialogue with the key combo, just frozen, only to long-press the power button to restart the Mac. This has happened randomly, as in most cases, the Untitled window will properly display the characters to play. Most times it’s okay, but the lock-out/semi-freeze occasionally occurs. After restarting the system, I do not get any ‘crash report’ window, so I do not know if there is any log to check what has caused this lock-out/freeze after clicking ‘Ready’.

BTW, although I know I am way under-spec, my Mac is MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011), 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5,16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB, El Capitan 10.11.6?15G1611). I have been running the wrapped 32-bit client on this for quite a long while now. Not great, but okay to play. Yes, definitely want it to be better, and very much look forward to having the native 64-bit Mac app, which ‘should’ make things better, even for my under-spec Mac.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2011)
Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1024 MB
Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB

I’m having the keyboard not responding issue that a lot of people seem to be having. In my case I have the F1, F2, etc keys binded as Shift+1, Shift+2, etc. These work as well as any keys I have binded to letters. Unfortunately nothing I have binded to numbers work. It seems the client thinks I have the shift key pressed all the time? The weird part here is that I DON’T have Caps Lock on (there’s a little green light that indicates when it’s on. It’s definitely not on). If I do put it on though everything acts like it should.