Guild Wars 2

I’m in the market for a new laptop (my HP is awful and broken). My husband is really pushing for a Mac but I’m reluctant simply because of their poor game support. I know the official GW2 Mac beta no longer has official support and has all kinds of problems, so is there another way to play it that’s reliable? I’d rather not partition the drive. TIA

It’s either suffer through any problems you may have with the cider port and hope that fixes come, or partition the hard drive. This is what I’ve done on many of my macs and never had issues with it. You could try to run the game in a virtual machine but you’d likely not get anywhere near the performance you’d want.

Brima.8961:

I’m in the market for a new laptop (my HP is awful and broken). My husband is really pushing for a Mac but I’m reluctant simply because of their poor game support. I know the official GW2 Mac beta no longer has official support and has all kinds of problems, so is there another way to play it that’s reliable? I’d rather not partition the drive. TIA

MAC and PC are using the same intel processor now so you only get the look and the great software.

So if you want to play games without troubles buy a good PC.

the mac client is currently shaky. a year ago it was nearly perfect. 2 days ago it was pretty good. Hopefully they will fix the current fps tank soon. I only use it because pretty good is good enough for me (I just have to play at medium settings instead of max so it won’t crash).
bootcamp is a very easy way to get around the entire mac client.
I recommend getting whichever computer you prefer using. Like: do you prefer working on Windows or Mac OS?
also: GW2 is a very computer-intense game. the bottom-of-the-line mac has trouble running it. My friend got a mid-range MBP just before GW2 came out, and she has to run it on low settings. I suppose it’s the same for PCs, but very few people get bottom-of-the-line PCs because it’s cheap as dirt to get a decent one.
Personally, I’ve had 3 computers in my life. I started with an iBook (which I still have and works great; just won’t play anything made in the last 7 years), then I upgraded to a G4 tower for 8 years, now I have a 2010 Mac Pro which I expect will last me until 2020. I prefer to buy good things that last a while than cheap things that require constant replacing.

It plays rather well, is quite stable and has higher frame rates playing it in parallels desktop 9 than via the mac cider port(for me). However that’ll still require you to have Parallels 9 and Windows to install in the VM. Other than that I wouldn’t rely on the mac version if it’s that important as to influence the type of laptop you purchase for maximum game performance running it natively in windows is your best bet.

The beta was actually probably near a shippable state before the latest patch killed performance around people (which kills the entire concept of an MMO). Basically, if they actually hired some mac QA people or gave the ones they have more coffee or listen to them or whatever the problem is we’d probably be fine. At the moment the mac client is in a perpetual state of triage and we don’t have any clue what the devs are doing.

I can live with this for the most part because there are no real alternatives to this game for Mac at the moment (and the latest bug I can live with for the time being because I’m generally not around zergs and I’ve been avoiding Lions Arch for half a year due to the crash bug that existed back then). Obviously if something good came around for Mac I’d likely switch if they had any amount of Mac support (and no, that certain game on the horizon with a Mac client somehow has much much worse support…I’m really baffled by this it is pretty funny when you think about it).

But yeah, I wouldn’t recommend buying this game until ArenaNet decides they want the Mac community to truly be part of this gaming community by actually talking to us and treating us with some level of respect. At the moment it feels more like they think even inviting us to the party was a mistake and wish we’d just leave but don’t want to look like jerks. Sad but true. I knew that a native Mac port was very unlikely but I was hoping for a Cider port at least on par with the EVE Online client (which is actually quite good). Oh well.

As an addendum to my previous post. Since this most recent patch performance in P9 also dropped significantly too. Wouldn’t surprise me if some windows users are having issues as well but haven’t looked into that yet.

The performance tweaks they made improved framerate for many users unfortunately. I can confirm that my fps is better in windows now than it used to be while the mac client took a huge hit.

Ive had problems with the mac client. It disconnects after about 20 minutes of playing, and the Black Lion Trade market might work or it might never load. It’s hard to play due to technical issues.

I’ve asked around many windows users experience issues too. I’m on a MBP myself got this april last year for a good price, overall it’s been good but the game’s suffered as a whole regardless of OS since after Scarlet appeared. The invisible UI bugs crept in then for me and is very apparent during the Marionette, Tequatl, wvw etc… The game is still playable though so I’ve been lucky it sounds. My MBP isn’t the most current, is 8.1 (late 2011) 13" 2.4ghz with 4g ram.

I do have bootcamp set up, was far easier than I expected but I’d rather stick to mac clients now since I started this, I tolerated using windows 7 for swtor but this game is (or was) far superior, last time I checked swtor it’s sadly become more stable than this game!

Well I’d love to have macs with the specs many of the users here have. I run the game currently in mixed settings, some stuff on high others low others mid though I’ve had to tweak it accordingly (Not that it makes a difference now seems the client’s just not up to par last few weeks) I need low settings for the fast paced jumping puzzles but zerging and most other activities I live and die like other windows users.

Haven’t had too many disconnection problems this week but the trading post has always been volatile for me, it did go down for maintenance last week for some hours…