Guild Wars 2

my internet is currently very poor, so this has happened to me twice just within the last 3-4 game updates. i looked all over for a solution, but got very little that was helpful to me. most of it was aimed at people having trouble downloading the game during beta. the first time restoring to a previous version worked, but it was a long time re-downloading all the files, and it didn’t work the second time. i floundered around for quite a while and finally stumbled across the answer.

yesterday my internet went down with 2 files left to download in the smaller afternoon update after the main patch from the morning. when the internet came back, the game did not attempt to download those files and tried to load straight into the game. the game window would come up as a blank white screen, then a long pause, and then before the character select appeared i would get a box pop up saying “A serious error has occurred preventing Gw2 from running. please send a report yadda yadda.” none of the fixes i found while searching for my error worked – run as administrator? nope. turn off antivirus and see if it loads? nope. move the .exe out of the folder? oh god no, that tried to make me redownload ALL the files. that would take me a week with my connection! i only need 2 files!

what did work for me, i lucked out in finding. it’s the -repair function from the command line arguments list on the wiki to use it, simply right click on your gw2 shortcut (or, if you have a bad internet connection like i do, make a new shortcut so you can keep it for later, you may have to do this again!) and select properties. in the target line… keep it as it is, just add " -repair" (without quotes) to the end of the line so it reads something like “C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -repair. run it. grab yourself a soda/coffee/beer/whatever. it takes about 10 minutes or so to examine all the files, then it downloads the ones that’re missing/corrupt (my 2 missing files! yay!) and you should be able to log in. if this is a “it only happened once!” kinda deal for you… go back into your shortcut and erase the -repair at the end to revert it to what it was. if you have bad internet like i do.. have that second shortcut (name it different.. gw2 repair or something) so you can use it any time you have a problem, but use the regular shortcut just for standard playtime.