To be clear, this has been an ongoing problem with GW2 pretty much since this game launched. GW2 was release on the 28th of August 2012. I started playing about a week after launch and started having this problem in the December/January range shortly after buying a new computer. It’s not a new problem and not going away any time soon.
Symptoms of the problem include:
- First and foremost, it ONLY happens when GW2 is running. Other games work fine as do benchmark and stress test applications.
- Random freezing, usually with a blank screen. The color of the blank screen can change. I’ve seen green, red, white, blue, yellow, black. When this happens the sound begins looping and the keyboard/mouse become unresponsive. The reset button does not work and the machine requires a hard boot (Holding in power for 5 seconds).
- Randomly shutting down the computer to an off state as if there was a power outage. Sometimes this puts the machine in to a state where it needs to be started twice. After the crash, it starts and immediately shuts back down before even loading the BIOS screen, then will start normally the second try.
- Randomly and spontaneously rebooting…pretty self explanatory.
- In rare occasions the client MAY crash to the desktop and Windows recover, but this is not the norm.
- Sometimes it will work for several hours, others it will crash multiple times within minutes.
- Reinstalling Windows does NOT fix the problem nor does a clean install of the video driver.
First try changing the power management profile from balanced to high performance.
Control panel > Hardware and Sound > Power options > and choose the High performance preferred plan.
If that doesn’t work, continue reading.
BEFORE REPLACING ANY HARDWARE, TRY THIS: Most people I’ve seen complain about this issue are using nVidia. Get nVidia Inspector and try downclocking your video card. Inspector makes it VERY easy to do so with just an icon on the desktop. Make two Inspector links. One to reduce the clock speed and another to set it back to normal, then you never have to think about it again. GW2 is VERY sensitive to overclocking, to say the least. The problem can improve or worsen depending on the game build and version of video driver. I did a 15% reduction on my card which was an eVGA 670gtx Superclocked using the factory set clock speeds. After reducing the clock speed I have never had a crash…not one. If I forget to change the clock speed, it WILL crash in one of the ways listed above. If you’re not using nVidia then, use whatever is available for your card.
http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/nvidia-inspector-download.html
Now, I fought this for nearly 3 years, REFUSING to give in to downclocking, because I shouldn’t have had to, and even brought the machine in to the techs 3 times where I bought it. I did change the memory, but nothing else, because EVERY test the techs or I ran said the machine was working fine and the problem was unique to GW2. We
tested the memory, PCU, GPU, PSU, MB…anything we could get an app or physical tool for.
I know…it all sounds like a hardware issue, but again, it ONLY happens in GW2…so we were at a loss. The shop wouldn’t warranty anything because they couldn’t reproduce any faults and I refused to randomly buy new hardware for the sake of a single game in the “hopes” it helped. I was defeated, so downclocking was my LAST resort…and it fixed it and made me feel like a stubborn 1d10t. I missed A LOT of grouping due to this problem since I didn’t want to party up only to have the game crash.
I make no guarantee that downclocking will fix the problem, but it fixed it on my machine and in the near 5 years I’ve been playing, I know it’s fixed it for others over the years. What can it hurt to try?
Enough people have had this problem over the years, that this should be stickied…
(edited by Leamas.5803)