Guild Wars 2

Ever so often my (and other peoples’) sound crashes, omitting all ingame sound (effects, music, environmental, etc) and sounding a really unpleasant alarm.

This seems to happen in overly crowded areas exclusively, such as WvW castle sieges and large-scale group-events in PvE. It would also appear that this problem is not hardware specific; I play with a group of friends with different hardware set-ups and several of us encountered this issue. Soundcard or not didn’t seem to matter, however increasing the audio-buffer-size has made it occur less often for me and yielded “better” results for others (their game would crash, but since increasing buffer-size, only the sound crashes). It’s definitely not a heat-issue, I checked and re-checked several times.

If anyone has any solutions, please let me know.
Sorry if this is a known issue, search didn’t seem to be working.

try adjusting the voip filter ingame.

It has some strange effects.

Are you referring to VOIP ducking?
Changing its setting directly affects sound-volume, so that doesn’t appear to be an option…

Interesting. When you say an alarm, you mean that essentially the sound stops & stutters, like the sound hung in mid-play, or a totally new sound is played?

Normally this is associated with a hard crash of the graphics/sound system that can freeze your PC or at least crash the game, sometimes with a reset of the associated faulting driver.

I find it intriguing that the game itself doesn’t crash if you change the buffer size. I’d figure that if one of the drivers goes, it’d pretty much take the game with it.

Fluffy Meowington.5260:

Are you referring to VOIP ducking?
Changing its setting directly affects sound-volume, so that doesn’t appear to be an option…

…all it does for me is not make my soundcard crash out. I see no change in audio volume.

I believe I’ve had this problem too.
So far It’s only occurred in the Harathi Highlands when fighting the boss in the last Modir event.
It doesn’t always happen, but when it does my headset basically loses all volume
and all I hear is a loud “WOO, WOO” sound coming from the left speaker.
Even when I tab out, (yes I have the setting to mute game sound when tabbed) it still goes on until the
game crashes.

It’s pretty weird, is this somewhat like what you’re having an issue with?
(Also I have random sound spikes for certain sounds, but that’s another issue)

I had this problem perhaps 5 times in WvW . WooWoo. I have a Xonar DG if it matters. Really annoying to restart the game, since there is no way to “reset” the sound.

Found this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Annoying-Sound-Bug/page/2#post23219

I guess they’re aware of the issue.
For anyone too lazy to read that thread, this is the alarm sound:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNPC3Pm8y00

Hope they can fix it soon.

Remembrance.2639:

Fluffy Meowington.5260:

Are you referring to VOIP ducking?
Changing its setting directly affects sound-volume, so that doesn’t appear to be an option…

…all it does for me is not make my soundcard crash out. I see no change in audio volume.

If I turn it off, all audio goes with it. Dunno why it would, or why there’s VOIP ducking when there doesn’t seem to be built-in VOIP (yet?), but there you go.

Has this happened to anyone more recently? I turned my sound quality to lowest/fastest, wondering if it’s safe to go back yet. :p

Aye, still happens.

Still happening, makes WvW completely unplayable as it happens there after 5 minutes.

This is still happening today, I have this when it is bussy, or just when at one moment allot off sound effects need to be played.