Guild Wars 2

Sound effects and music loading times are extremely slow, especially when i’m struck in big mobs of people, WvW and group events. I really don’t know what to do since it’s a very strange problem and i’ve never had a similar problem in any other game i played.

For example, i went for behemot this morning, after teleporting to it i started hearing my attacks sound effects after 20 seconds, after 1 minute the music appeared, after other 2 minutes i slowly started hearing other players’ attacks and when the boss was 20% hp i heard the sound effect that he does when he first appear, with a delay of several minutes.

This always happen anyway, after teleporting to a zone, sound effects slowly activates during a 30-60 seconds range of time.

What can i do to solve this?

My connection is good, i never have lag issues.
My processor is a dual core 3.9 ghz
I play with standard high graphic options, and if i reduce them to lowest the audio problem isn’t solved, it just helps to load sounds a bit faster but still after some seconds.

I’ve started experiencing the same problem as of about 2 weeks ago. My sound is completely muted the first few seconds after I load into a new area and then all the audio slowly loads in bit by bit, usually starting with the music, then the ambient sound and finally things like footsteps, voices and combat sounds.

The audio delay is not as severe for me as you describe (I’ve never had to wait more than 30 minutes total for all the sound to appear and usually it’s less than 15 seconds), but it’s most definitely noticeable and I can’t remember ever having this issue until about 2 weeks ago.

I have a few theories as to what could be causing these problems:

1. one of the game patches inadvertently broke something to do with the audio loading
2. repeated patching has left the GW2.dat file so heavily fragmented that it’s taking really long to load the audio files from the harddrive
3. my harddrive is starting to go bad

Obviously I really hope it’s not no. 3, as that would be most annoying. I’m very doubtful it is, given that I haven’t noticed any problems in other games or applications, I haven’t had any disk read errors or game crashes and my disk check tool reports that the harddrive is in good health. Still, it’s a possibility as it’s a 4 1/2 year old drive (Samsung Spinpoint F1).

Since I can’t do anything about no. 1 I’m currently focusing on option no. 2. I’m waiting on Defraggler to finish defragging the gw2.dat file so all the GW2 files are once again neatly arranged together on the harddrive. Once that’s done I’ll start the game see if the audio load time is any better.

Update: Nope, defragging had no effect. Guess it’s time to submit a bug report.

I´ve had that since the game was released.
Not every time but very, very often, whenever
I have to load a new area.

Considering the terrible performance this game has
for many of us, I´d say it´s the game´s fault
and not defective hardware.

It’s just the game taking time to load things into memory. It puts a priority on loading textures and players over sound/music. The problem is more with the engine than your computer. If you turn down all your graphic setting to the lowest, you will notice faster load times for sound because there is less things taking priority over sound.

All true, however I’ve been playing this game since the beta weekends and aside from the usual problems with performance in WvW/events the game has always run pretty well for me and I’ve never had issues with the sound until 2 weeks ago.

I haven’t made any significant driver or hardware changes and am still running the same game settings as before, so that means either something on my end has recently gotten a lot worse or their client has.

Anyway I’m touch with support and hopefully it’ll lead somewhere, preferably to a bug report.

It’s sad that their client performance seems to be getting worse instead of better.