Guild Wars 2

The problem: Load times taking very long after patch Oct. 7.

As stated in another post on this forum after the last patch the load times have greatly extended, it’s incredibly noticeable. So either the coding is deficient (most likely the cause) or files are being fragmented with the updates. Since no one in Tech Support can help if it’s issue is caused by #1, I will move on to #2.

Is there any particular file or group of files that may be getting fragmented and extending load times? I would like to run Contig and straighten them out if that could be the cause.

It doesn’t have anything to do with fragmentation. Just look at your disk light, it isn’t pegged. Whatever they did it’s about the communication between client and server.

It’s not just zone loading either, whatever it is I think has to do with the ‘culling’ of characters and the preview for your character when you go into the dye screen.

The only file that could be getting fragmented and causing this (if it’s a file fragmentation issue), would be the GW2.DAT file – and it would most likely be internal fragmentation.

GW2.DAT is one huge file that contains all of GW2’s many data files, and it is updated and rewritten every time the game is patched. Depending on how the updating works, the file could be getting internally fragmented every time some the files data is changed, especially if the size of the new data won’t fit where the old data was and has to be added at the end of the file. Of course, this is all just hypothetical guessing.

If the problem is that GW2.DAT is getting fragmented, then the solution would be to rewrite it in order to get all the data back into contiguous form. I haven’t tried to do that, but there are some commandline arguments that might help out. They’re explained on the WIKI page. Some of the arguments that look promising to me are -copydat and maybe -image (though it may not rewrite the file, which wouldn’t fix any fragmentation).

Cotillion.7435:

It doesn’t have anything to do with fragmentation. Just look at your disk light, it isn’t pegged. Whatever they did it’s about the communication between client and server.

It’s not just zone loading either, whatever it is I think has to do with the ‘culling’ of characters and the preview for your character when you go into the dye screen.

Files get fragmented across the drive, even single files. This is the entire point to apps like Contig, to defragment single, usually large, files.

its not a fragmentation issue.

I’ve also noticed an incredible wait time on loading screens and also when previewing any armor, weapons, or dyes. I’ll copy the gw2.exe to a new folder and download a new gw2.dat overnight to see if that helps. We really shouldn’t be expected to download the whole game every month, though…

What worked for me was removing the Local file. It went up to 42 mb where it is back to 1.5 mb now Here’s how: http://guildwars2.technopsisblog.com/pve/guild-wars-2-how-to-reduce-loading-time/