Guild Wars 2

I’m sure there will be a better forum post sometime down the line, and I have no idea if this post will even survive in the forums in terms of popularity/usage, but here it is.

An unofficial “official” thread about OS 10.11 “El Capitan” and GW2.

The public beta is out as of yesterday (or the day before). I was wondering how stable it’s been for you guys and whether or not GW2 runs well/better on the new operating system compared to the current build of Yosemite.

Yes, I know it is in beta. I know there will be numerous OS-related issues to resolve for Apple, and probably at least a few compatibility issues for A-net to resolve. Just wondering if anyone had installed El Capitan and whether or not GW2 runs well. What bugs have you seen so far?

Very early for this considering how early El Capitan was released for the public beta, but still. Figured I’d ask now.

I too am curious about this. Lets hope apple’s focus on performance increase will effect guild wars 2 as well. We can always hope.

Sadly, unless A-net creates a full mac client and takes advantage of Metal, it won’t take full advantage of all the performance increases. However, if the mac will use less resources to run it’s OS by itself, that means there will be more resources to devote to the game. I don’t really force any big problems with compatibility, though. Not too many overhaul changes. Just a bunch of graphics/performance increases.

I’ve been running GW2 on the latest macbook pro with El Capitan a bit today and while I have noticed some improved loading speeds most likely due to kernel/system level changes I’ve seen some frame dropping that wasn’t there before sometimes the frame rate drop gets terrible and then is fine again after a few seconds it seems quite random when it was very consistent before.

Sometimes the game does not fully exit and hangs when quitting the game requiring me to manually kill the process. This happens when going to menu->exit to desktop. It seems to properly exit if I go to the character select screen before exiting.

It is still quite playable and mileage may vary depending on system and video.

I have a large number of other systems from 2011-to-current of all mac types I use for testing for work if you have a specific model you want this to be tested on let me know and I can try and get to it. Be forewarned there are a number of OS X applications that do not run well in El Capitan if at all. List of working & non-working applications for those that choose to try El Capitan.(community driven list constantly updated)

Sammael.2430:

Sadly, unless A-net creates a full mac client and takes advantage of Metal, it won’t take full advantage of all the performance increases.

This can still be done at the cider level for how their rendering is implemented not sure if we’re going to see any significant updates to cider any time soon now that Nvidia has purchased it from transgaming.

have the graphics issues that started with yosemite gone away in el capitan or are they worse?

Very interesting!

I have a 2013 imac. Base model; 4gb vram, 16gb ram, and a 3 TB fusion drive are the only things that are different about it from a regular base model. If you have something like that, please let me know how well it performs!

Interesting notes about the hanging times and frame drops. Could be background processes running that aren’t quite efficient yet for El Capitan, but we’ll see.

I have a brand new Mac with Yosemite. I can’t seem to get past the tutorials. Made three characters. Seemed to reinstall after crash before last (but I crashed the computer). Now and can’t figure how to get it to run at all. I use the Launcher but it just puts an Icon on the board at the bottom. The game doesn’t boot. Don’t know if I’m just not doing something needful on my Mac (total Mac noob here) or if the game is screwed up. Kinda frustrating.

Follow the MAC repair instructions here: https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/28148006-Repairing-the-Game-Client

Remember to follow the mac instructions, don’t try the windows instructions.

If that does not work, or it does not repair and/or just sits there on your dock (board at the bottom), drag GW2 from your application’s folder to the trash. Then click on the desktop so you have Finder active. Holding “option,” click on the “go” menu, go to library, then go to application support. Drag the GW2 folder to the trash. Redownload the game anew. This will delete any settings you once had for the game and returns it all to default values, but it can also resolve any other technical issues you may have had with the game. For me it has decreased crashing and significantly raised FPS to do so.

Hey NeuroMuse, have you gotten the chance to test out the imac system I talked about? Anything similar (even just the year of the imac) could probably work. Just wondering! I’m sure you’re quite busy.

Has anyone else tried out El Capitan? I’ll probably check back here with a new post whenever the beta gets another release (if I keep up to date in knowledge of releases).

Well, GW2 runs like poo under 10.11 on my MacBook Pro, but this computer about 7 years old and doesn’t even meet the minimum system requirements, so… yeah… Pretty much I can log on to get the daily chest. I mean, the game functions, but when the FPS hovers in the single digit range, there’s not much actual playing you can do. In theory I could do the world boss train and just auto-attack, but I think my computer might melt.

Now on my Mac Pro at home? Dunno. It’s still running 10.10.×. I think maybe I’ll put 10.11 on it in a couple weeks. Unlike this laptop, its video card supports Metal, so maybe they’ll be some benefits there.

NeuroMuse. Anything yet? Doubt we’ll hear back for a while from anyone really lol. Would like to get a good idea on stability of the game on El Capitan before I try downloading it.

Ok, has A-net been testing out el-capitan? Will transgaming include coding for metal in the cider wrapper?

Hello all,

I have recently bought Guild Wars 2. I have installed it on my 27" iMac (i5, 32GB RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX680M 2GB) and I have to say, the Mac version of Guild Wars 2 is rather poor. Lots of dropped frames even on low settings. What’s the most annoying part isn’t the graphics settings or the level of detail per se (on top settings, the game looks beautiful), but the fluidity of the FPS. It runs smoothly then stutters, then runs smoothly, then stutters etc etc. So when you are running, you are running smoothly, then you stutter and then you run smoothly. With Auto Detect settings, I get around 30-45 FPS, depending on where I am and the amounts of objects to draw.

Using the exact same machine, but using Windows 7.1 Profession under Boot Camp, I get a frame rate of 45-60 FPS. A dramatic increase in performance.

With El Capitan comes Metal. I hope ArenaNet spend some time and money and get a proper Mac developer in to make a native Mac Client of this amazing game. I can understand the business economics of building a native Mac Client, but it is in ArenaNet’s business interest to create a native Mac Client to keep the user base.

Fingers crossed.

One can only hope. Has anyone tried the game on OS 10.11 El Capitan? It is very near it’s last phases of the beta I believe.

After my game crashed and El Captain updated, I pretty much can’t play the game anymore, the client not even showing up even I tried to reinstall the game. Is it the Metal thing crashed it? Or Do I need to get Cider?

roXine.2413:

After my game crashed and El Captain updated, I pretty much can’t play the game anymore, the client not even showing up even I tried to reinstall the game. Is it the Metal thing crashed it? Or Do I need to get Cider?

Metal has nothing to do with GW2, and the game runs through a cider wrapper by default. You can’t do anything to change that and you don’t need to do anything additional. At the top of the tech support forum is a sticky thread called “FAQ and sticky threads” In there is a mac troubleshooting threat. Look in there, you’ll hopefully find something that works.