Guild Wars 2

Thought about returning to the game and after digging through and finding my account details, downloaded the .exe and set it going.

After letting it run all night I expected to see the game ready to play (the launcher indicated as such), however the PLAY button was greyed out. No problem, I’ll restart the launcher.

Bad move.

Now the launcher is re-downloading the whole multi-tens-of-gb installation – AGAIN!! – and I’m left wondering whether another multi-tens-of-gb hit to my cap is worth it.

I’m guessing probably not.

May try again next month – though the thought of going through all of this again is making me think not. Add to that the complaints on the forums about the performance of the game, and I’m starting to remember why I left in the first place.

If you have a friend with the game within travel distance, you can copy the game files from them and plonk them directly into your game folder. The dat file is what you want… It’s the only 20+ gb file there so you can’t miss it

The progress on the launcher is based on the files remaining to download, rather than what you’ve downloaded compared to the total. Because of this, your progress will always start at 0%. Thinking it’s starting over is a common mistake. For comparison, a fresh install is around 300k files.

If you’re sure it’s installing all over again however, ensure that you’re running Gw2.exe rather than Gw2Setup.exe. Also ensure that Gw2.exe was installed to the location of your choosing. If you ran Gw2Setup.exe and were never asked where to install it, it would have selected your %temp% folder by default, which is not a safe spot. You can search that folder for Gw2.dat to try to recover it, but it would have been overwritten when you ran Gw2Setup.exe again. Instead of running Gw2Setup.exe, rename it to Gw2.exe and place it wherever you’d like, such as C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe.