Guild Wars 2

After hanging out in the tech support forum the last few weeks ( while watching my monthly pass me by for my ‘non grinding’ attempt to get ascended gear ) and searching the net – I’m convinced what we are experiencing is a perfect storm of issues that is effecting gw.

first and foremost, I suspect microsoft – simply because adobe and nvidia are having serious issues – not minor ..but serious…adobe kept on crashing non stop – I finally downloaded a beta of the latest flakittens crashing much less but still crashing, then we have nvidia, with their drivers and code that was incompatible in some systems causing them to overheat and malfunction / shut down systems…

now Gw2 as I understand it uses flash in the game shop, it also uses microsoft /windows / and nvidia – add to this new content from the event on top.
it’s a perfect storm off issues that showed it’s ugly face in lions arch and wvw!

I suspect that the crashing issue people are experiencing is one or both of the following:

1. Failing, mis-configured or overheating hardware.

and/or

2. Software issues – conflicts, malware/viruses, damaged operating system/corrupted files, OS updates needed, etc.

Lol, I was just saying to my hubs “wow, after reading the forums the last couple weeks, I have to say, pc peeps are having more issues in gw2 than us maccies… We’ve got it good at the moment!”

And it’s true, we’ve hit a sweetspot performance wise, the first in a long time and then here are all the pc peeps suffering with crashes, graphics glitches, broken trading post due to caches, root certificates, uni networks, etc… And right after the Mac tp bug that occurred after a billing maintenance, then fixed several days later.

Hopefully things smooth out for everyone soon… And the Mac peeps don’t get lost in the dark again.

a virus would explain the disconnect issue many are talking about- it’s unusual for so many to have lag issues from a damaged operating system at the same time … the biggest issue seems to be low fps – the 2nd biggest issue is internet connections getting turned off the 3rd biggest issue seems to be hardware acting erratically. would so many people get a new strain of virus and it miss all their security ? not impossible, but not likely

now the failings and misconfigs – i can see possible with a bad update from microsoft.

Ricky -

It’s entirely possible that many people’s computers are infected and they don’t know it. I’ve seen it quite a bit.

The worst infections are rootkits that infect the MBR (master boot record) of the hard drive…bootkits. They take over the system before Windows is loaded. They hide. They mask their activity. They control the kernel.

They can be very hard to detect, very difficult to remove and you won’t even know it’s there.

I was working on one lady’s laptop that had one. The only indication was that Skype would crash on boot. Her antivirus didn’t find it and there were no other symptoms.

Fortunately, I was able to remove it with TDSS Killer:

http://support.kaspersky.com/5350?el=88446

Edited: Don’t need both links.

Edit 2: You will probably know if you ever get the “ZeroAccess” rootkit. It’s called that for a reason!

hrmm, thanks for the info, I’m going to run scans just to rule out any fps issues / viruses – I’ll add this to possible 3rd party fixes – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashruntimes/flashplayer/ the flash player beta I’m using that’s a little more stable then the current release. maybe that will help some people with the trading post.

i came clean on the TDSS killer – it wouldn’t hurt for people having disconnect issues to run it as well – as that is a strange error. this is also a good free program to do scanning for any other viruses – http://www.malwarebytes.org

with the spy wars we read about in the news these days, you can never be too sure!

also don’t forget to try the nvidia beta out now ..320.49 – it works for some …horrible for others – working relatively stable for me ( except when I put computer to sleep – waking back up is having issues because of it ) – if the beta doesn’t help, I believe version 316 or 310 was a good build for nvidia to go back to.

Ricky said: if the beta doesn’t help, I believe version 316 or 310 was a good build for nvidia to go back to.

Actually, the 314 NVidia drivers seem the most stable for most folks. But there is still an issue. And it is in GW2’s court.

thanks for that…i’ve been doing so much research about everything in life, it’s easy to get confizzled about version numbers – and yes, I agree that gw2 does need more work – but I’m ‘guessing’ that all the extra issues make it hard if not near impossible to find out the problem – it’s the difference between finding a fix …or figuring out a work around to bugs they are facing too. There are obvious issues and I wish there was some official post that simply said that they are still looking for the issues / solutions – this way people don’t have to spend money on new computers or wasting time fixing things that aren’t broken.

I was hoping this thread may help inspire a group troubleshooting effort.

The thing about expecting a fix, if you notice most threads, is typically issues are fixed by user means. Yes, some stuff ges fixed by Anet, but the majority of issues (tech related) are fixed with drivers or repairs or just as simple as reloading a small file. These kinds of things are typically on the user end, so finding a general fix for all computers is daunting at best.

Not to mention, windows machines go wonky if you so much as sneeze while downloading (exaggeration), so they are going to have minor issues and require constant upkeep to ensure things continue to run smoothly. Plus, many run antivirus/firewall programs (obviously a must today), and without even knowing it, sometimes these and other random apps prevent some files from being modified randomly also causing the occassional issue.

So I imagine, until Anet finds what works and what doesn’t, we just need to continue to do our part and understand that things will go wrong (despite being utterly frustrating). Besides, this game is a baby compared to some others, it needs time to grow and mature.

[woot, an overly positive post lol, just trying to keep perspective]

at the rate this is going there is going to be only 1 person running around in lions arch telling us we need better computers and isp’s and 15 million support tickets heh!

Keep in mind that those of us attempting to help are working blind here. We cannot see, nor do any testing on your computers. All we have to go by is what is typed here.

Quite often I’ve found that when people describe problems, they don’t A) describe the problem accurately and/or B ) provide enough information to correctly diagnose the problem (that isn’t to say that everyone does this).

Sometimes it’s as easy as checking out a computer for a few minutes and then spotting the problem easily. We can’t do that here.

i can certainly appreciate that – i try helping out with support on another forum and understand that point. My system is getting old to today’s standards but I done lived on it so long I know it well …very sensitive to any changes in it – imo from my observations – there is a domino effect of issues going on – microsoft – nvidia – adobe – gw2/events … in that order.