Guild Wars 2

Hiring on Luis to help with the Mac forums was a nice little gesture, one I’m assuming most people appreciate, but the issue is that he can’t really do much more than repost the posts Kyllaa has been posting for the last year.

(side note: why haven’t ANet offered Kyllaa a job yet? SERIOUSLY!!!)

With there being such an immense amount of dev/support traffic on all of the other forums and not even the slightest mention of us in the second half of the year update, I’ve lost all of my hope in there ever been a native client. They’ll probably bandage this wrapper up and pull off the “beta” sticker but for some reason or another they just do not appear to care about the Mac community at all. We have little to no customer support, one single forum moderator who, while we do greatly appreciate what he has tried so far, has been unsuccessful in gaining any more attention to this client, and a complete lack of existence from any and all State of the Game or developer updates. Even Colin hasn’t given any of us the time of day to respond to our requests for an update.

I’m just too tired to care at this point. We should not have to get down on our knees and beg to get simple, basic customer support or updates from a developer that we all support financially and most of us have supported emotionally over the years from GW1 to today. It is an incredibly unfortunate situation, one I do not plan on dealing with any longer. Thanks for all of the fun and all the memories. It’s a shame that what started out so strong had to end like this.

Thanks Aigisthos! I’m currently in need of a job… Obviously, considering how much time I spend on the forums lol! (Freebies & bonus bank space could help ;p)

I am grateful to have Luis here, despite the fact that we haven’t had much progress made yet, he’s still a good intermediary who can (and is willing to) gather and report the data we post here. I’m truly hoping this is a step in the right direction for the mac client. I’d be terribly disappointed if all Mac support ceased again.

It is rather dodgy that they haven’t made mention of the mac client in any of the “updates” or future of posts, I’d love to hear some progress as I’m sure every other maccie would too. One year anniversary (woohoo) and still no mention on our status. It does leave us feeling like the odd one out step child in the family.

But the mac client is still young (as is the rest of gw2), so I’m definitely willing to give it more time… However, things need to be fixed! It took 5 months to get our hawks fixed, it would be a crime to leave the iMac users (and others) experiencing massive crashes to hang until the next big update… Or longer… To fix whatever is causing them these issues.

~still positive~ Here’s to hoping!

P.s. sorry to see you leave, hopefully if you ever check back, we’ll have equality for all!!!!! (Mac & PC of course) Lolololol… Sorry, couldn’t resist!

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Except that if they did it in OpenGL it would be a massive pain for having the game on windows which is their primary market, not to mention most graphics cards are designed to be best utilised y directX. There is a reason it is still the most widely used format. Also directX is a Microsoft property I think, so of course if you want to develop a game for Windows then you’re going to be developing on directX

This is all actually false and rooted in FUD that was spread around, as Valve has shown that OpenGL performance, even on Windows, is highly competitive with DirectX. In that particular scenario, OpenGL was even faster because of overhead in DirectX not present in OpenGL.

Yeah it’s made by Microsoft, hence DirectXbox, and intended to be exclusive for MS products (read: vendor lock). That is why it is so significant and important to decide if you ever ever possibly want to port to other platforms beforehand. Now Anet would require much more work for porting and may be why they are silent on the subject of a native port.

Yes yes these arguments are great (RISC vs CISC is also fun). The most apparent issue right now is Anets complete lack of communication. We got an official forum support guy, finally. But the stickies are horribly out of date and giving false information still. And we still have no information on what is actually going on (I don’t blame any support person, they have no ability to change what is going on and I do take them at their word that they’re communicating our concerns). We should probably think of ways to help with rather have pointless arguments that won’t change anything.

Overall ANet seems to care less and less about communicating or listening to it’s users which is always a bad/foreboding sign in MMOs of any kind.

Disastro.4086:

Overall ANet seems to care less and less about communicating or listening to it’s users which is always a bad/foreboding sign in MMOs of any kind.

Especially scary seeing how young this game is and already a lack of communication to an entire community of players (Mac Players)

But they sure know how to sell those black lion chest keys don’t they?

If ANet had a department over here idd gladly quit my current position and join ANet to help them make an OSX client, if they would have me.

And for the DirectX stuff, I know, OpenGL is hardly a big problem with windows, just check out blizzards games

Depending on how they do the physical layer of their game engine it could translate to many different platforms not only DirectX.

Considering what they are doing to Maveric, this will be an upgrade to OSX which makes it a platform even to Windows for gaming, this is awsome news for us, I just hope ANet and others exploit this fact to the max, its a win win situation for all of us if it gets used

The biggest problem is recoding of The engine into opengl not direct x and direct x9 only at that’s that’s a lot of work and anet probally don’t even have staff who know a lot about open gl

Do we finally get some information about a native mac client or at least information on “the future of gw2 for mac”?

I wonder if they would do one. I mean I love GW2 even in this BETA mode. But if they make a native one… it would the ‘cherry on top’.

I joined in November and I haven’t really played since. Why? Because I was having trouble with the Gem Store working on my mac. I was troubleshooting with customer service for awhile before I gave up. Therefore Guildwars not only lost a player but lost making money off of me in the game store! Why? I believe it’s due to the Beta, how many others stopped playing due to bugs, etc? I think getting the Mac version out of Beta would bring more people into the game. I went back to playing WoW because it’s the only game that works well with my Mac (I have a Macbook Pro Mac OS X 10.7.5, 8gb). I loved what little I played of Guildwars. I decided to attempt once more (since it’s a holiday weekend). Hoping they’ve fixed some of the issues I had since it’s almost been a year.

Yes! I vote for native client for Mac! Please NcSoft/ArenaNet make it Real!

Yes please mac users need a native client is a win win idea …

is this happening?

As french player, i vote too for a native client of course!

One year of “Mac Béta” is so long !

Thx dev to do it, and you will found more players with officialese a mac client, on contrary if there are no more change at the first birthday i think you will be target by many troll on games sites for “Anet break a new record: the longest béta ever” !!

best regards

Rétina player.

Yes please!
I really want a Mac GW2 with better performance, my poor little Macbook air is struggling to run it with the minimum of 4gb ram

saithira.9037:

If ANet had a department over here idd gladly quit my current position and join ANet to help them make an OSX client, if they would have me.

And for the DirectX stuff, I know, OpenGL is hardly a big problem with windows, just check out blizzards games

Blizzard targets both Direct X and OpenGL with their game engines. Which is no small feat at all, as they can be remarkably different (and hair pulling) at times.

Many people in this thread severely underestimate the work required to build a native client, test it and then keep it in sync with upstream changes in the Windows client. This includes every hotfix and patch as well, without impacting their current turnaround times. None of that is free, and given the tiny Mac user-base—likely < 1%—hardly a sensible way to spend time, money and add complexity to development workflow.

At this point, I welcome a native app.

It’s been almost a year since buying this game for myself and 2 family members for our macs; and I have enjoyed almost every moment of it except the random crashes due to ‘LockedRect.pBits’, ‘DTSBITS’ and other off the cuff errors (such as: ‘m_interfaceThreadId == ThreadGetCurrentid()’) , all which have increase in frequency since the update where culling was changed.

The issue is not the poor performance of the computer since I get normally 30 FPS on max settings in a medium-dense population just sitting in Lion’s Arch and still have the crash after 5-15 minutes. On low/lowest settings, I get anywhere between 24fps on extremely populated maps (Killing Scarlet Event with hundreds of toons standing around) up to 300 fps watching the dredge play in the blowing snow from on top of a Dredgehaunt Cliff (60-90 FPS avg/normal gameplay with slightly above low settings) and the crashes still happen abet in lesser frequency dependent on the amount of characters/actions/effects in range over time.

It is clear the root issue is with the underlining technology of the VM to run the client for macs whether it struggles to keep up with the amount of data being passed or performing garbage collection routines.

elithrar.7143:

saithira.9037:

If ANet had a department over here idd gladly quit my current position and join ANet to help them make an OSX client, if they would have me.

And for the DirectX stuff, I know, OpenGL is hardly a big problem with windows, just check out blizzards games

Blizzard targets both Direct X and OpenGL with their game engines. Which is no small feat at all, as they can be remarkably different (and hair pulling) at times.

Many people in this thread severely underestimate the work required to build a native client, test it and then keep it in sync with upstream changes in the Windows client. This includes every hotfix and patch as well, without impacting their current turnaround times. None of that is free, and given the tiny Mac user-base—likely < 1%—hardly a sensible way to spend time, money and add complexity to development workflow.

Yet they released a beta and implied support. So far support is bare minimum and mostly focused on making sure the gem store works while the game isn’t crashing. I think the main request here is for some form of communication. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly apparent that ArenaNet higher ups believes that developers talking with customers in any sort of meaningful way is bad. Yes, you don’t want to be accidentally over promising. But they already released this “beta” (more like cash grab). They either need to come clean and say “sorry guys, you don’t help the bottom line enough to warrant anything beyond bare minimum support” or they say “yes we’re still working on the mac client, stay tuned”. Silence starts out as being interpreted as “we’re working on it but don’t want to over promise” but will eventually fall into “we have no respect for you at all what so ever now give us more of your money”.

Edit: Nevermind they apparently said option a in a PAX interview. Well, at least we know where we stand. Living story > mac crashes.

Irraia.3065:

The issue is not the poor performance of the computer since I get normally 30 FPS on max settings in a medium-dense population just sitting in Lion’s Arch and still have the crash after 5-15 minutes. On low/lowest settings, I get anywhere between 24fps on extremely populated maps (Killing Scarlet Event with hundreds of toons standing around) up to 300 fps watching the dredge play in the blowing snow from on top of a Dredgehaunt Cliff (60-90 FPS avg/normal gameplay with slightly above low settings) and the crashes still happen abet in lesser frequency dependent on the amount of characters/actions/effects in range over time.

It is clear the root issue is with the underlining technology of the VM to run the client for macs whether it struggles to keep up with the amount of data being passed or performing garbage collection routines.

HOW is everyone else on the Mac client getting such absolutely fantastic framerates? I’m on a rMBP with 16GB RAM, 2.6GHz i7 processors and I’m struggling to hit 18FPS – ever (even in the emptiest of maps) on the Lowest / None settings. It’s AWFUL. I’ve tried everything I’ve read / know how and am about to resign to the fact that I’m doomed to be playing a slideshow forever despite my high-end (ish) machine.

Hey guys! I was wondering if anyone plays guild wars 2 on the 1500$ late-2012 iMac and how well it runs with the mac beta client! I will be buying a new comp soon and gw2 is a top priority and the iMac is on the top of my list. Any input would be welcome thx!!

Hi SForward! Right now, it’s a toss between good and bad performance. But I’d feel bad for not giving you the most honest info, so here it is.

Those computers should give reasonable performance, however, one of the latest updates seems to be giving a sizeable portion of the iMac players a lot of trouble. I don’t personally have (or know anyone who has) an iMac and plays GW2, so I can’t tell you confidently that it will play well… But I do have a thread here that may tell you otherwise.

This is not a guarantee that it won’t run on your system, but there is a greater possibility that it may not depending on your specs. So I just want to give you all the info I can before you pay for the game. There are a few who have been having good results by fiddling with the various settings.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Game-crashes-every-5-min-am-I-the-only-one

Remember, this is NOT a guarantee that you will have problems on an iMac, but there is a reasonable possibility based on some of the accounts here.

Good luck to you and if you do end up buying both, let us know how you go.

Kyllaa.1385:

Those computers should give reasonable performance, however, one of the latest updates seems to be giving a sizeable portion of the iMac players a lot of trouble. I don’t personally have (or know anyone who has) an iMac and plays GW2, so I can’t tell you confidently that it will play well…

I’m playing on a late 2012 iMac:

Processor 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB

I can play at mostly medium settings and maintain frame rates around 40 in medium population areas and low 20s in larger zergs (and sometimes in the teens). I don’t have any serious problems aside from the normal Mac client glitches with TP bugs, gamma bug every now and then. The main issue I see right now came after the removal of culling update. In the options for character model quality the highest setting available is medium for some reason. This leads to characters that don’t have brighter colors appearing with bland, generic, flat colors. Bright colors look fine.

I’ve cranked up everything as high as it can go to see if this changed it but it doesn’t and I think it has to do with not having a high setting option for character model quality. I’m pretty sure this was available when it was the setting for WvW. I’m really not happy about this since I have no way to improve it no matter what settings I use. I’d rather have culling back as opposed to half the other players looking like they are all wearing light grey tones.

SForward.7681:

Hey guys! I was wondering if anyone plays guild wars 2 on the 1500$ late-2012 iMac and how well it runs with the mac beta client! I will be buying a new comp soon and gw2 is a top priority and the iMac is on the top of my list. Any input would be welcome thx!!

To be honest if GW2 is a top priority for you I would suggest, gasp, buying a Windows machine. You will get more gaming power for the money you have in your budget and the game is Windows based which of course will give better performance on a Windows machine. If gaming was less of a priority for you then I would certainly suggest an iMac.

Thank you so much. You are a big help! Last night I spent hours sifting through all the mac forum posts. It’s really disappointing to hear that the mac client isn’t even native. I won’t be able to get an iMac for about a month or so, but I’m going to keep doing some research. Hopefully I will be able to help you guys out anyway that I can. If I find anything that will potentially be helpful I post it on the forums somewhere.

A windows comp was an option at one point but I only play guild wars as far as comp gaming goes and mainly need a comp for school. Iv also had lists of issues with Windows in that past and it’s time to move on to mac. Medium settings at 40 frames sounds great to me coming from playing guild wars on a 4 year old laptop. :p graphics and frame rates aren’t huge for me I just want smooth and fun gameplay(medium settings 25-40 fps would be good I think) and thx for the help Trogdor!

Yes please.

My fiancee just bought the mac version of this game, after seeing how much fun I was having.

She is severely disappointed, because it is unplayable. She has tried nearly all of the suggestions for fixing it, and nothing has helped.

She plays on a relatively new Power Mac laptop (about a year old).

It drops her between every 5 minutes, to every 30 seconds.

I told her how awesome Anet was, and she bought the game on that premise.

Don’t let us down, Anet.

I too would like to see a native Mac client.

Adding my name to the petition for a native Mac client as well.

+1 for a native Mac client !!

I would LOVE a native client for GW2! (and GW).

I think it is insane that there is not one, I understand it is another job for ANET, but come on! The market for Mac users and gaming is growing massively!

Why should we have to depend on wrappers and conversions on the fly which slow system resources for a worldwide game!!

Anet, the game is amazing, I prefer running it on OSX, Mac beta is a step in the right direction, but it needs a stage further!

I don’t care if it’s native or not, just stop the game from crashing every 30 minutes in WvW

For anyone who is subscribed to it, there is a great article in this month’s Game Informer talking about why they think it is wrong for companies to advertise MMO’s as a “beta” when the cash shop is active. They’ve got some really good points in there talking about how having a steady stream of income coming in while a game is not actually finished gives developers a false sense that customers are enjoying the game enough as is and removes any sense of urgency to finish the game and debug/optimize it. Sound familiar to anyone? lol. Wish I could post a link but it is not available without a digital subscription.

Anet, you are cool company atm! please don’t become into bad guys! There are a lot of guys who want to play your wonderful game without crashes and glitches. It’s very rude that devs do instant answers on gem store issues and no response for a monthes of games crashing every 30 sec topics.

+1 for a native Mac client !!

+1 for native Mac client, just having a beta client won’t shut us up! ^^

I support this idea very much! But you must understand that this will probably not happen, since porting takes a lot of resources that must be justified by white collars.

Found the article I was referencing earlier in the week!

https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/09/09/opinion-when-a-beta-isn-t-a-beta.aspx

elithrar.7143:

saithira.9037:

If ANet had a department over here idd gladly quit my current position and join ANet to help them make an OSX client, if they would have me.

And for the DirectX stuff, I know, OpenGL is hardly a big problem with windows, just check out blizzards games

Blizzard targets both Direct X and OpenGL with their game engines. Which is no small feat at all, as they can be remarkably different (and hair pulling) at times.

Many people in this thread severely underestimate the work required to build a native client, test it and then keep it in sync with upstream changes in the Windows client. This includes every hotfix and patch as well, without impacting their current turnaround times. None of that is free, and given the tiny Mac user-base—likely < 1%—hardly a sensible way to spend time, money and add complexity to development workflow.

Agh forum split message, see answer message under

forum fubar end my message so my quoted message is above
No I don’t. I been working on multi platform development for 20ish years now (professionally). However if you have a win only dev you’re in trouble because most of them don’t know about these awsome techniques and what’s available before you design a hardware abstraction layer for the game internals. In general this means a modern design do not need multi platform specific patches outside platform specific bugs. FYI open gl is available on most gfx cards through driver support, and gl is vastly easier to work with then direct 3d. Performance is more or less equal in the latest incarnation, directs 11 vs gl4+, before gl had an advantage, not that it matters. What matters is that macs can’t be competitive with windows when you play, which idd like them to be. Game industry sits in the same boxed container as web designers did a few years back, not using the open standards but sitting on closed Apis so users was punished. Sooner or later they will be forced out of this, and idd rather see this happen to gw2 because idd like to get a more awsome experience on the game I play

I have played GW1 for 5 years and now GW2, I love this game so much! As a Mac user I +1 for a native Mac client.

I read the whole Topic and no ANet Tech or whatever answered to anything….. I find it ""unfair""!! I have late 2011 iMac and i play in LOW settings! I have a 4Gb RAm and when i am playing GW2 i can’t do much as long as 4Gb is what Anet asks for Mac client as minimum requirements. Also iMac becomes hot. (Is there any solution/suggestion to that fellow Mac users? ) I really enjoy this game and i really want to see ANet understand that has a Mac community too. So… Absolutely YES for the native client.

I want Native Client plz, cant stand all the crashes if i raise my settings an inch.

I am happy with the fact that they made it possible for mac users to play gw2, still it would be pretty nice to have a native client!

Warriors Of The World.4192:

I am happy with the fact that they made it possible for mac users to play gw2, still it would be pretty nice to have a native client!

Mac Gamer here too. I definitely don’t get the same performance on my Mac machines as my wife’s older PC. Not sure if that is hardware based of something that can be improved with a full Mac client, but I agree, I am pleased that Arena made the Mac effort at all.

I think it’s just not worth it anymore. They don’t fraking care about mac users. My pm to the community manager got no response. But my thread about the message got deleted, so at least it seems they look into the topics from time to time.

For me – gw2 is just dead. As dead as their support for the mac community.

Yes! Definitely. Would be nice to get native Mac client for even better performance.

Even… I have to say that I’m positively surprised about how well the Mac Beta runs even in this state. But native client for Mac would be epic.

The last year has been up and down with my mac beta client. I had myself those recbits errors quite a bit, but since last update, the game is definitely dead, I am not able to run it at all. I have tried everything to try solve it but the game doesn’t lunch at all.

Hopefully, the upcoming Maverick update will help… If not, I will uninstall the game and download it again for the 3rd time… crossing my finger… or… no, I think I will finally give up and install Windows 8.1 on my iMac… If I knew I would love this game so much… kitten I would have bought a PC.

avatin.3851:

The last year has been up and down with my mac beta client. I had myself those recbits errors quite a bit, but since last update, the game is definitely dead, I am not able to run it at all. I have tried everything to try solve it but the game doesn’t lunch at all.

Hopefully, the upcoming Maverick update will help… If not, I will uninstall the game and download it again for the 3rd time… crossing my finger… or… no, I think I will finally give up and install Windows 8.1 on my iMac… If I knew I would love this game so much… kitten I would have bought a PC.

Install windows 7 – 8 is a nightmare, 8.1 is still a nightmare >.>
Uninstalling and reinstalling GW2 will accomplish very little, except that it forces you to redownload all 18GB of the .dat file. But seriously, GW2 is made up of very few files, most everything is stored in the .dat and the chance of that file being corrupted is very low. Reinstalling won’t resolve problems that you experience since the problems aren’t with the client files themselves but rather with the way Cider is trying to run the game.

Luis Machado.4256:

Nothing yet :\ still waiting to hear, Don’t worry I’m not letting this one slip either, I’ll post as soon as I have information for you guys.

So, about not letting this one slip….

I should not buy Guildwars 2 for Mac! what I got? I got game on an emulator which eats resources! ill buy Guildwars 3 only if the client is a native!!

liars!