Guild Wars 2

Apologies if this has been asked, the search feature seems broken for me, turning up nothing all the time…

Anyway, as the title implies:
Has anyone had any success at running GW2 from a NAS, shared among computers on a local LAN?

My kids and I all game, so there are three (3) of us connected to my various servers, one of them being for Steam. This way, when one of us updates a game on steam, the next person to log in will see the updated version, etc. Update once, play among three.

Now some games need local installs (i.e. CS-GO), but most can be shared. I was curious if the following were possible:
1) Main game file (the 27gb one) resides on NAS, accessed by multiple clients at the same time.
2) Clients are installed locally, and point to NAS for game file using (if exists) an over-ride for the location. Something like “GW2-64.exe -L <mapped-location>”
3) Client is server-side (on the NAS) and can be shared/accessed by multiple users at once?

My network is a gigabit (obviously) and the gaming NAS is a dual-ethernet Synology DS1813+ (8×4TB drives, hybrid raid – like ZFS?), so performance may not be as good as local, but it’s usually pretty decent!

Anyone know if this has been done in the past?

I think your plan will significantly increase loading screen times and makes loading models/textures on the fly more intrusive. It is best to have a dat file locally on one computer with only one instance of gw2 accessing it. Personally I could not imagine playing this game without kitten, playing it from a NAS feels like an atrocious solution to me just to patch once instead of 3×. Just moving it from a 5 year old SSD to a high performance HDD increases loading times by a ton.

Since i only login for daily rewards now since last christmas, i finally moved my GW2
from my SSD to my HDD, and i also notice significant longer loading times.

Hoelbrak for example was 15s before now its 45-60s suddenly.

Currently, I have GW2 installed on my Samsung 850 Pro SSD and don’t notice much in the way of load times at all. As a comparison, I played Fallout 4 from there, and it still has some length to it’s loading screens. Wildstar and BDO (the other two MMO’s I have installed on that SSD) all load relatively quick (less than 5-10 seconds); GW2? I don’t really even notice. Maybe I’ll copy it to an HDD and see if I am being spoiled by the 850 pro… probably am.

It should work perfectly fine.
Instead of a NAS I use my “data grave desktop” and simply share the GW2 folder in the network (on an old SSD).

Each system will have it’s own “$\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2” folder (~10MB) which will be created first time you start the game.

However if you want to use that single install simultaniously for you whole family it should definitly be kitten – not because of the speed but because of the response times.

For GW2 on more than one PC from one source:

https://alessandrogar.io/multiwars2/

Put it inside your GW2 folder (NAS, w/e) and simply point to it via shortcut on your PC’s.

Without it I always had writing access issues (even with -sharedArchive command).

Loading times pretty much double,triple, etc. Really can’t recommend it if you want to use ordinary HDD’s.

LAN speed isn’t much of an issue but any additional local traffic will interfere with GW2. Faster connection types like Thunderbird can improve this by alot.

Side note: Things like SweetFX or ReShade also work with GW2 right off your NAS if you use something like that.

Edit: As for updates you only have to update GW2.dat once. Local.dat of each PC has to be updated after each GW2 update. ’Bout ~10MB each update per PC.