Guild Wars 2

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.

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.

Go into your Catalyst Control Center settings and make sure that the Mipmap detail is set to the highest quality and that there are no game-specific profiles overriding that setting. When people report blurry low rez texture problems with certain games that setting is often the culprit.

Whilst you’re in the CCC also check that any other graphics quality settings are set to prefer maximum quality instead of max performance.

If all the settings are on max quality and the problem still persists, I would recommend uninstalling your drivers completely and then running a driver cleaning tool (like driver sweeper / fusion) before reinstalling them.

Needless to say if it works for a brief period after you upgrade / reinstall the drivers, but not after a computer reboot, something’s not working right. It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s causing it.

From your specs it sounds like you’re running a laptop. So when you’re talking about a 2nd monitor I assume you mean the primary is your laptop’s built-in screen and the secondary monitor is the external screen?

If so, how do you have your screens set up? Are you cloning the view (both screens show exactly the same), are you replacing the view (screen 1 is black/off while screen 2 is on) or are you extending the view (both screens are displaying seperate things)?

If you’re cloning the view, have you tried one of the other 2 settings?

The other thing that springs to mind is screen resolution. Do both monitors support the same resolutions? Are they currently running the same resolution?

Memphis.3274:

(I think this was the same party as were i was part of)

We had a player who disconnected at the start of the ‘rescue the 10 prisoners’ We continued form here with the 4 of us. When we got to the end bosses, both Rox and Braham did their dialog and the hole in the wall also appeared (where the bosses jump out)

We tried to fix it by jumping off the edge, die and wp to the start of the instance. This however did not reset the ‘fight’. Our only option left was to kick the offline member, but since he created the instance we all got kicked <— weird system imo

Same problem here. Party leader had to go so he logged off about halfway through the instance. When we got to the round platform the cutscene didn’t start and the boss didn’t spawn.

We also got kicked out of the dungeon shortly after. I thought that that was a part of the bug, but it sounds like the other players may have been vote-kicking the disconnected player while I wasn’t looking (I was busy scrolling through Dulfy trying to figure out if we’d missed something or not).

My group had the same problem. When we all got onto that platform some dialogue started playing, but there was no cutscene and no enemies spawned. Just as we were starting to wonder if the instance was broken somehow, we all got kicked out and the dungeon reset. :/

That picture looks perfectly fine to me on my screen. At least I don’t see any blurring like what you’re describing. That means that the output from your graphics card is just fine (and therefor the graphical quality settings within GW2 are fine).

So my question to you would be, when you look at the screenshot yourself, it still looks blurry like it does ingame?

If so it has to be something to do with either your monitor, your resolution, or the settings in your graphics card control panel. My bet would be you’ve got a scaling option turned on somewhere that’s stretching or distorting the image. Which GPU do you have – is it an Nvidia, AMD or Intel?

awesomium_process.exe itself is a legit file that’s normally used by GW2 to display the gem store / trading post window. A new copy of this file is created when you start GW2 and it’s automatically deleted when you close the game.

Since I have Malwarebytes installed myself (though I only use it for on demand scans) I told it to scan the file and found that the latest version indeed labels awesomium_process.exe as a trojan.

I’m fairly certain it’s just a false positive, since the other malware scans label it as clean and it’s not even a persistent game file.

Most of the time when you get a false positive like this, it’s because either the file has a duplicate somewhere out there that does contain malware or the way the file operates just makes it look really similar to a known bit of malware – malware and virus scanners can’t always distinguish between the two, or they may simply adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach.

PS: if you do a scan you should be able to add the file to the ignore list by r-clicking on it and it will exempt it from future scans.

My advice would be to clean out your laptop as good as you can and when you’re playing always have the laptop on a hard level surface (desk, table, etc) and not on something that will trap heat and hamper airflow.

If that’s not enough then you might want to look at getting a cooling pad.

Any computer, even a laptop, should be able to handle 100% load of its components without shutting down. If it can’t then there is a flaw in the cooling system somewhere and that’s the first place to look before resorting to any methods to artificially reduce the useage of your components.

In regards to the jump in CPU useage jump: One thing you should know about your processor is that it’s a hyperthreaded i5, which means you have 2 physical cores but 4 threads.

Any CPU useage display will be showing the % of your threads being used, not the % of your physical cores. Since most (parts of) games don’t take advantage of hyperthreading, a lot of the time you’ll only be seeing upto 50% useage because only 2 of your threads are used to their fullest, while the other 2 will be largely untouched.

When an application does make use of hyperthreading you’ll often see a quick jump in CPU useage from 50% upto 100%. What this means is that the game is still using the same amount CPU power, but it’s now shared between 4 threads instead of 2. This adds to the pressure on the CPU and can lead to increase heat output, which in your case might be just enough to push it over the edge.

As said before, my advice would be to look at removing dust first and improving the cooling (externally) second.
If that fails the laptop model must have a very weak internal cooling design and there’s not much you can do besides trying to prevent both the CPU and GPU (graphics chip) from hitting 100% simultaneously for long periods. You could try reducing your GW2 graphics settings and limiting the framerate to reduce load on the GPU and you can also try setting the 2 newly added culling options to the minimum to try and reduce pressure on the CPU.

If you just reformatted, then make sure you’ve installed all the latest necessary drivers for your system (graphics card, sound card, motherboard, etc).

Also make sure you have the latest version of DirectX 9 since that doesn’t come installed by default on Windows 7 and GW2 doesn’t come with a DX9 installer either (unlike most other games that need it). You can install/update DX9 using the Microsoft Websetup:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35

If that doesn’t fix the problem, it would help if we knew a bit more about your system. The easiest way is if you run the NCsoft game advisor and attach the text result to your post:
https://help.ncsoft.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7386/~/game-advisor-diagnostic-report

wefal.8426:

Ok I Did It.2854:

Im not a dev, but reading that crash report it looks like you are getting hit with the out of memory error, which occurs on people who run windows 32 bit OS, which im guessing you do,

I used to get the same error before I upgraded, only I got the crash everytime id zone into a new area for the first time.

So only by upgrading my computer will solve this issue :| ?

The issue is that 32-bit was never designed to handle large amounts of memory, as there is both a 4gb cap on physical RAM and a 2gb limit on virtual memory per application. It’s the latter that causes most of the problems in games. While GW2 tries to limit these problems by restricting the use of the “high res character textures” on 32-bit systems, that’s often not enough to prevent the client from still hitting the 2gb cap in certain situations.

Since the game will crash if it hits the memory cap, there are basically 2 ways to try and stop GW2 from crashing:

• you raise the cap by upgrading to a 64-bit OS -> new virtual memory cap for GW2 will be 4gb, which is high enough that GW2 will never reach it = no more memory crashes

• you lower the ingame settings and hope the reduction in memory useage is enough to stay under the 2gb cap = reduced frequency of crashes, maybe even zero crashes

Ofcourse the 2nd options mean the game will look terrible and that’s why people tend to recommend just upgrading to 64-bit. You might be able to use your existing license with a 64-bit install of Vista, but I can’t verify if that’s true or not. If it isn’t, then I’d highly recommend getting a copy of Windows 7 64-bit as your next upgrade – think of it as an essential component for your system and not just a fix for GW2. You’ll benefit greatly from having a 64-bit OS in the long run.

I’ve seen this problem quite a lot, both in GW2 and some other games. Usually it’s caused by one of the settings in the Catalyst Control Center – either something is set to override the game settings (for example Anti-Aliasing) or one of the quality/detail settings is set too low and it’s forcing the game textures to downsample despite the texture settings being maxed out ingame.

So open your CCC and make sure that:
- all graphical settings are set to use the program defaults (especially Anti-Aliasing / Anisotropic Filtering)
- mipmap detail is set to the highest level
- all other general quality related settings are set to prefer High Quality over Performance

If it turns out to be none of these things, the only thing I can think of is trying to repair and reinstall the game + reinstalling your graphics drivers.

Btw I assume with 6 gigs of RAM you are running a 64-bit version of windows?

CYRI is not a good website to go on. It does only a very basic comparison of system specs, it frequently gets things completely wrong and their green bar is very misleading in cases where the game only has minimum requirements and no recommended ones, which is the case with GW2 (essentially you’ll always get a full green bar if you pass the minimum requirements, but because there are no higher requirements to balance against the bar is meaningless).

A GT440 is actually a fair weak card. It’s sat just in between the really cheap low-end cards (the 420 and 430) and below the medium end card (the 450) in terms of performance. The higher end cards start at the 460, which is indicated by its prefix being GTX instead of merely GT.

Your performance and settings will also depend a lot on your screen resolution, because the higher your resolution the more pixels the graphics card has to render in each frame, which reduces the amount of frames per second it can output.

A GT440 might be able to handle high or medium-high settings on a much lower resolution, but for the average resolution it’s very much a low-medium settings card. This goes for intensive games in general, not just GW2.

Your best bet for improving the graphics while still maintaining decent performance is to ignore the presets and tweak the settings by hand. Since texture quality has a big impact on how the game looks I would recommend high textures, high character textures, medium shaders, and turn down most of the other settings, especially big performance hogs like shadows and reflections. Also if your screen is 1920×1080, you could consider running a lower res ingame such as 1600×900, as this will greatly boost performance (but may make things a tiny bit blurry).

kirito.4138:

Sounds like an unstable power supply unit.

I was about to say the same thing.

Those temperatures generally aren’t high enough to cause shutdowns, so the PSU is the next most likely candidate. GW2 pushes both the CPU and GPU very hard at the same time, which puts a high power draw on the PSU. If the PSU is too weak or unstable that can be a problem and GW2 is the type of game where you would start to see the symptoms of that problem, even if you don’t in any other games.

In this type of situation I always suggest running the system through a rigorous stress test where you run both a CPU benchmark and a graphics benchmark at the same time to put maximum load on the system. If you get the same symptoms in the stresstest then there is an instability in your system.

As said before, the most likely candidate here is the PSU. If you don’t know which one you’ve got, check the brand and model (either through booklets/order info) or by looking inside the case.

edit:
It just resolved itself for me.

Location: UK
Server: Desolation (EU)

Are you on an EU server?

The EU datacenter seems to have gone to kitten. A lot of people can’t log in and I was getting random errors a few minutes ago when I tried logging into the forums. Anet are apparently looking into it.

A 7750 will actually be fine for medium-high at most resolutions and it’s an absolutely huge improvement over the integrated 4200. The FPS will still be bottlenecked by the Athlon processor even with the upgrade in clockspeed and the extra core, but if you were ok with the performance before on low graphics, then with the new parts it should run just as well on high graphics (just don’t max out reflections and render sampling), if not better.

The only thing I would recommend is keeping an eye on your power supply. While you haven’t chosen particularly power-hungry parts, you’ve still installed a discrete graphics card into a PC that was designed to run an onboard graphics card, so the new parts will be demanding more power from your power supply.

If you experience any sudden computer freezes, shutdowns or reboots, then be aware that those could be an indication that the power supply isn’t able to provide enough stable power to all the parts at peak useage (and GW2 is good at pushing everything to 100% useage xD). Such symptoms could also indicate something is overheating or the system is unstable due to a part not being seated properly. If you have none of these symptoms then you should be all good.

maniolnba.2678:

Maybe change Windows back to XP would help?
_______________________________________________________
so what exactly u propose to change in my PC?
lets say that i have 300 Euro/400$.
is it possible to make my computer better for gw2 for this?
Graphic card can stay right?
I have to change CPU, mother board, and RAM?

as i see Intel® Core™ i5-650 Procesor (4M Cache, 3.20 GHz)is about 108 Euro/138$
what else i should buy if i would buy this i5? because i5 is right as u said

You don’t have to go back to Windows XP – in fact I would go so far as to say you never should. XP was great, but it’s been surpassed in every way by Windows 7 and (if you can get past the interface problems) Windows 8.

Yes, keep the graphics card.

The CPU is your big problem, and the motherboard and RAM will have to be upgraded because all of the better CPU’s won’t work with the motherboard and RAM you’ve got now.

That i5 you listed isn’t quite the kind I meant. It’s actually the worst type of Core i5 processor you can get, because it’s from the first generation and it only has 2 cores. If you wondered why it seemed cheap, well, that’s why…

What I would suggest is ignoring the first generation of core i5 processors completely and aiming for one of the 2 newest generations, because they are quite a bit faster and all of the i5 from the 2nd and 3rd generation are true quad cores (meaning they have 4 physical cores) and are known to run GW2 and other games very well.

It’s pretty easy to recognize which processor generation you’re dealing with, because all of the 1st generation i5’s have 3 numbers (example: i5 650), whereas the 2nd and 3rd generation all have 4 numbers. Also the 2nd generation start with a 2 (example: i5 2500) and the 3rd generation start with a 3 (example: i5 3450).

With a 400 dollar / 300 euro budget one of those i5’s with a basic socket 1155 motherboard and 8gb of RAM is entirely doable.

With the motherboard you need to make sure that it’s the right socket – the 2nd and 3rd generation i5 CPU’s need a motherboard with socket 1155 (not 1156!) and as for choosing one, if you go for a basic non-overclockable CPU then you don’t need a very expensive or complicated motherboard. I usually look up some reviews and look at the user reviews on stores like Newegg to see which motherboards worked out best for people. When you find a motherboard that looks good you can look it up on the manufacturer’s website and they usually have a list of “supported CPU’s”, if the CPU you want to fit is in there, then it should work with no problems.

The RAM by comparison is easy – the i5 CPU’s need DDR3 RAM, and for speed you’re best off getting either 1333mhz or 1600mhz, depending on the maximum your motherboard supports. If you want to leave some room open to add extra RAM in the future, then make sure to grab 2 sticks of 4gb each – that way you will have 8gb now and can add another 8gb in the future if needed without having to replace your existing RAM.

For a 2.6ghz Core2Duo those figures sound about right unfortunately.

GW2 is very CPU hungry, even more so than most other MMO’s, and your CPU has neither the amount of cores, nor the high clockspeed and efficient architecture to provide GW2 with the processing power it needs to run at a 40-60fps (or more). So instead what happens is that the game only runs at the max fps that your CPU can keep up with, regardless of how powerful your graphics card is. This is why lowering the graphics settings doesn’t help much, because most of those settings only apply to the graphics card, which isn’t the limiting factor of your performance.

Your graphics card is in fact pretty good and can run GW2 on higher settings with good performance if backed up by a fast enough CPU.

So my advice would be to look at your upgrade options. To upgrade the CPU, you will need a new motherboard and RAM as well, since anything compatible with your current board isn’t worth buying anymore. The ideal upgrade would be something in the range of an intel ivy/sandy bridge quad core (i5 for best bang for buck gaming performance), but if budgetwise you must go AMD, I’d suggest skipping the budget FX4000 series and getting at least an FX6000.

Hmm, there are a few things I can think of trying:

First of all set the Render Sampling to “Native” if it isn’t already and leave it on that, because Subsample is specifically intended to make the graphics extremely blurry to improve performance. If for some reason it was previously set to Subsample but the textures were not blurry at all, then it sounds to me like it was bugged and you were actually seeing Native textures even though you didn’t realize it. So in order to make sure that the other troubleshooting steps can work, you need to make sure that you have the setting on Native even if it currently doesn’t appear to improve things.

1. Change the Resolution setting to Fullscreen Windowed mode and then exit and restart the game – does this make any difference as opposed to running in Fullscreen mode?

2. This is going to sound a bit weird, but bear with me… Exit the game, then start your web browser and go to youtube. Select a random 10+ minute video and set it to play (you might want to mute the video’s sound). Now, with the video still playing in the background, start Guild Wars 2 and see if your graphics are any better.

If the graphics are now displaying as they should be, then your problem is most likely caused by the graphics card not switching to 3d graphics mode when starting GW2. The reason why running youtube helps in this case is because Flash player forces the graphics card to switch to 3d mode, which then makes GW2 work better as well (whereas normally without youtube it would have stayed in 2d mode).

Obviously running Youtube everytime is a poor workaround – the best ways to fix this permanently are to first update your graphics driver (or if they are already the latest non-beta version try uninstalling and then reinstalling them) and if that doesn’t work to tweak your Nvidia Control Panel or AMD Catalyst Control Center settings so that running GW2 will always force your card into 3d mode (use google if you don’t know how to add/change a profile for GW2.exe).

3. Check the temperatures of your hardware with a program like HWmonitor (there is a free non-installation version that you can just unzip and run). If you leave the program running while you play GW2 it will record the min/max temperatures and you can then check back later to see how hot things got. The 2 most important items to check are the processor and graphics card, because those parts might be downclocking themselves if they are getting too hot and they could cause GW2 to override your graphics settings and simply stick you with “superduper low mode” because it thinks your hardware is severely underspecced (it would be at half clockspeeds).

Syncourt.5906:

This was my hunch exactly. I completed the dungeon with a group and then went for the achievement after grabbing the chest. The group dispersed and at least 2 went offline while still in the party. Spent over an hour and a half looking for the last destructible to no avail, doing clean sweeps of the area with cyclone axe, following the tips for most hidden objects in this thread.

Figured it had to be bugged due to the players that left so I exited and re-entered solo, went straight for the smash achieve and got it in around 10 minutes.

Same thing here. I was unable to complete the achievement after yesterday’s group run and then failed again after today’s run. So I tried the advice to do it solo and completed it with no trouble whatsoever.

I think there is just something very buggy about this achievement, either related to being in a group or related to finishing the dungeon before attempting the achievement. Whichever it is, I know for a fact I didn’t simply miss something. On my solo attempt I didn’t smash anything that wasn’t already completely destroyed on both group attempts and I went around the map long enough to memorize all of the wreckage. xD

Your problem is that you’re running a 32-bit OS, which can be a real pain for modern games due to the restrictions 32-bit imposes on memory allocation. I’ve noticed in the past 2-3 years more and more games are starting to have problems as a result, which at best leads to one or two restricted graphical options (for example GW2 prevents the useage of high rez character textures on a 32-bit OS) and at worst leads to out of memory / memory allocation crashes like the ones you’re experiencing.

The best way to fix these crashes is to switch to a 64-bit OS (PS: your X4 960T is a 64-bit processor and thus fully capable of running a 64-bit version of Windows).

While I know that’s not the answer some people want to hear, it is the only good longterm solution if you want to get the most out of your system. 32-bit stems from a time when it was hard to imagine we’d ever have more than 4gb of physical memory in our systems or that we’d want a single application to be able to allocate more than 2gb of virtual memory. And yet that is the point we’re at right now, with a lot of games easily being able to use up more than 2gb virtual memory with the graphics settings on high and with most gaming systems incorporating at least 4gb of system memory (which when combined with any amount of VRAM on the graphics card instantly exceeds the 32-bit limit of 4gb useable physical RAM).

Now it’s usually the 2gb virtual memory limit that’s the culprit with memory crashes like these on a 32-bit OS. In some cases though the crash may be the result of the entire system running out of memory. Normally speaking this shouldn’t happen, because if windows is running low on memory it off-loads less important stuff to the pagefile, however if you have a large amount of stuff running in the background (especially memory-hogging applications) or if your pagefile isn’t very big, you could run into problems here while running GW2.

This is why if you aren’t able to upgrade to 64-bit (or not immediately) you should check what is running in the background on your system and possibly give it a good clean, uninstall any unnecessary or leftover programs, etc. Also check the size of your pagefile by going to Start -> Control Panel -> Advanced System Settings (top left) -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced. By default your pagefile should be between 1 and 2 times the size of your system memory (so 4-8gb). If this is not the case, increase the size manually – in fact since you’re on a memory-limited system due to 32-bit I would recommend at least 8gb on the pagefile. Since your pagefile is written to the harddrive also make sure you have enough free space on your system drive (I recommend keeping 10-15% of the total size free at all times).

If you’ve checked all of the above and you’re still getting crashes then short of upgrading to 64-bit your only option is keeping the graphics settings turned down to reduce the memory the game uses.

Computers turning themselves off or rebooting like this are usually a sign of either a heat-problem or a power-problem.

Since you say it’s happening within only a few seconds of getting ingame, I think it’s less likely to be overheating – it’s still possible, but then the graphics card must have a serious cooling problem or else it wouldn’t get to the critical temperature (the point at which the PC will shut down to prevent damage to the hardware) so quickly. It’s a good idea regardless to install some temperature monitoring software (like HWmonitor) to check the temps of all your components and make sure none of them are approaching the failsafe limits when you run GW2. If you don’t have 2 monitors, you should run GW2 in windowed mode so it continues to run at full speed while you alt-tab out to check the temperatures in HWmonitor.

The other possibility is that you’ve got a power problem, more specifically that your power supply either doesn’t have enough juice or isn’t stable enough to properly power the entire system at the higher CPU/GPU loads you get when you run GW2. Since this started happening after you upgraded the GPU (which is a component with a high power draw) your existing power supply might be insufficient to support the new card, especially if the graphics card you upgraded from was significantly less powerful and your system was originally a prebuilt setup.

To really determine if power could be an issue I’d need to know what power supply you have, both the wattage and the brand + model. If you look inside the case most of the time these things should be listed on the side of the power supply. If that’s not the case then you might be dealing with a cheap PSU. If your computer is a prebuilt system from Dell or HP or someone else, does the computer itself have a model number that I could look up?

For a GTX 660 ti the minimum requirement for the PSU is 450W and 24 amps on the +12V rail and the PSU should be at least halfway decent quality (because the cheaper PSU’s often list specs they can’t actually meet).

If your PSU fails those specs, that is most likely the source of your problem. Even if it seem to meet the specs though, the PSU might still be the source of your problem (it could be wear and tear, it could be a cheaper unit that’s highly unstable). The best way to completely rule the PSU out is to run a stresstest on your hardware (google OCCT – install that and run it).

What to do next hinges on whether the stresstest fails or passes. If it fails and you get the same reboot you get in GW2, it’s almost certainly a hardware-related issue – if it passes it’s probably a software issue, though outside of an auto-restart BSOD I can’t think of many situations where the PC would reboot.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65714

From the specs you posted I’m guessing this is your processor?

If so, your low performance in GW2 isn’t that surprising. The processor model number is i7-3517U and that U at the end indicates it’s a cut-down version that will yield much lower performance than a regular i7 desktop chip. This is because U chips are not just heavily downclocked, but usually have about half their cores disabled as well, so most of them are pretty poor compared to their high end counterparts.

Looking at the bare specs, the 3517U has 2 physical cores, 4 threads and a base speed of 1.9ghz with turbo upto 2.8 or 3.0 ghz (with respectively 1 or 2 cores in use).

Hyperthreading has very little impact on game performance, so the 4 threads are irrelevant in GW2 and the performance of the 3517U will be at the level of a dual core CPU. Since GW2 is very CPU heavy it will easily max out the 2 physical cores or near enough, which means the CPU will be maxed at 2.8ghz on turbo.

This means under ideal circumstances it should be able to perform similar to the cheaper Sandy Bridge i3’s or at worst somewhere in between the SB Pentiums and i3’s, which means you should be able to get around 20-30fps I would have thought, but from the FPS numbers you quoted it seems you’re a bit on the low side of that. One explanation for that might be that your processor isn’t able to get upto 2.8ghz with turbo (which is usually heat-related, since turbo will only overclock the CPU if the temperature allows it) or that turbo isn’t kicking in at all (could be heat-related, but could also be a defect of some sort or a misconfiguration in the BIOS). It certainly sounds like you’re getting performance closer to a 2.0-2.4ghz dual core rather than a 2.8ghz one.

One thing I would suggest doing to find out more is to install a program (or 2 seperate programs) that allow you to check your CPU clockspeeds (to see if the turbo boost is working and how high it’s going while playing GW2) and your CPU temperature (to make sure your CPU isn’t getting too hot for turbo to work). I personally like Realtemp, since it’s a nice and simply utility, it’s free and it shows both of these things in one window, but other seperate alternatives (which I used in the past) are CPU-Z (for clockspeeds) and HWmonitor (for temps).

Bel Geode.8129:

It is part of the “Commando” medium armor set. I found it in BWE 1 as well, but have not been able to find it on live.

This link below shows what the full set looks like, and judging from where they placed it, sounds like it is a loot drop. I could be wrong though.

http://www.gw2armorgallery.com/human-medium.htm

edit: Oops, I was mixing up the looks of 2 different sets.

The Commando set I’ve definitely seen pieces of, but I think they were rewards from the personal storyline. However they might be a Karma vendor somewhere that sells items with the same looks.

There’s a spreadsheet of all karma vendors and the names of the items they sell here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asw6geixye5HdFItQ0pWRUhyVExNbGY2MWZkMkIxS3c#gid=0
It might be useful going over some of the more out of the way / higher level zones and cross-referencing the names of the items with the pictures / item links on GW2DB.

edit 2: Hmm, nvm. It does seem the karma sets in other zones don’t vary at all, except for the Orrian non-temple vendor, which has a different look than Commando. I feel stupid now for deleting my Commando set bits from the storyline. :/

milkcoma.5102:

i think what people need to start doing that have these issues post there internet router brand and model. and see if there is a common issue. it might be a particular brand my be causing issues or needs a firmware update.

i forgot what router i owned in the past i was having issues with a certain game. i got a new router and it fixed all my issues. now im not saying go buy a new router but lets see if there are firmware updates that might help you or a certain brand that might be causing the problem.

I also had issues like these in the past and for me it was also caused by the router – I had to buy a better quality one. Old and low quality modems and routers cause more problems than most people realize and especially the ones you get from ISP’s can be very hit-and-miss.

So I second the suggestion for people with these issues to start posting some more details about their connection (brand + model of modem / router, ISP, wireless vs. wired) and seeing if there are any common denominators.

Also it might not be a bad idea to try connecting one PC directly to the internet and bypass the router/modem altogether (or at least as much of this as possible) and then run GW2 on that PC and see if it still causes disconnections. If your disconnections go away then the problem was caused by one of the bits of hardware you just removed from the connection. This is exactly what I did when I had these issues in LOTRO and it’s how I knew I needed a better router.

The fact that the person withdrawing the items shows up as Unknown User means whichever character looted the guild bank got deleted after the theft occurred.

Most of the time this kind of behaviour is consistent with accounts taken over by account thieves, since they will often delete characters to obfuscate the ‘money trail’.

The other option is that it’s just a spiteful or predatory guild member who plundered the guild bank with a disposable alt which they deleted afterwards. In this case they might still be in your guild and simply feigning innocence!

The question you should be asking yourself right now:
- who had direct access to the guild bank
AND
- who was able to promote other accounts to have access to the guild bank

If any of the players who fall into those categories have left / disappeared from your guild or you haven’t spoken to them directly since the guild bank looting, then they may be victims of account theft, perhaps even without their knowledge.

If you have any way of contacting these people out of game, you should, as the most likely option is that someone has been compromised and there may be more than just your guild bank at stake here. You may also want to submit a ticket with GW2 support (click the support button a the top of the page) and list all of the information, as they may be able to look into the logs and identify the account that took the items (even if the character got deleted).

Try Desolation – it was the biggest unofficial UK/EN server at launch and still seems to have a large amount okitten players, as well as other nationality players who exclusively communicate in english ingame.

I originally rolled on Underworld, but moved to Desolation in search of a more english-oriented community and so far I haven’t been disappointed. Pretty much every person I’ve run into so far spoke good english and I’ve seen little to no foreign discussions in chat outside of overflow.

You didn’t list what resolution you’re running at, or what ingame graphics settings you have set, but generally 50-60fps is pretty good going on GW2.

60fps is generally considered the desirable point of reference for PC games, because to most people 60fps already feels very smooth – but also most players have screens that only support upto 60Hz, which means they don’t actually see any visual improvement from going over 60fps. Unless you have a monitor that supports more than 60Hz, you don’t really have to worry about not being able to go over 60fps, since you wouldn’t see any visual improvement from it anyway.

I’m guessing you probably have a 60Hz screen and have Vsync enabled, which means you might actually be able to go higher than 60fps at times, but you’re not seeing it because Vsync is capping your FPS to your monitor’s refresh rate.

If you are interested, purely from a technical standpoint, to see what your new rig is capable of, then you can turn Vsync off and see how high FPS goes. Just keep in mind that for general gameplay purposes it’s better to leave Vsync ON (unless it causes you specific issues like low fps or mouse lag), since it’ll limit your fps to what your monitor can display and greatly reduces the strain on your graphics card, which lowers noise / temperatures / wear and tear, etc.

I run the same card as you, admittedly only at 1680×1050, but still at max settings (incl. supersampling) GW2 can really give even a 680 a run for its money, making it work harder than in most other games currently out there. This means your problem might not be directly related to GW2, but rather just to high stress on your graphics card in general with GW2 currently being the only game on your PC to push the card to those limits.

One thing I would recommend doing is installing some graphics card monitoring software like MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision and checking the following values: GPU useage, % fanspeed, temperature. If you can monitor these values as you play it will tell you a lot about what your graphics card is doing. GPU useage is meant to go as high as it needs to to keep the FPS as high as possible, so don’t be alarmed if it goes upto 90-100% at times, it’s designed to do that.

The fanspeed and temperature however are limited and shouldn’t be going too high (at least on my card the fanspeed is capped at a value below 100%, probably due to the wear and tear being too high at max speeds) – if they do, then that could indicate a problem with the cooling or a flaw in the design of the card.

Beyond that though, I can’t say I’ve had any problems with whirring sounds myself even at 100% GPU useage (obviously there IS an increase in fan noise, but I wouldn’t describe that as an electrical whirring sound), so it may be you’ve simply got a card from a bad batch. If you can establish it only happens at, for example, higher loads or fanspeeds and it’s a recent purchase, then I’d definitely recommend getting it RMA’d as it might cause you worse problems down the road.

-removed content due to duplicate post-

I liked the concept of this event, but the execution felt really sloppy, not just because of the lag and the bugs, but also because the design of the Karka and the Lost Shores zone hit all the same bad marks for me that Orr did.

The biggest problem that I had with the Lost Shores content overall was that throughout 90% of it I wasn’t having any fun – most of it just felt tedious and repetative, especially the Final Event, which dragged on far too long (reinforcement waves? more like infinity waves) and ended up being so boring that during the 2nd reinforcement stage I just parked my character in a safe location and watched TV while occasionally hitting auto-attack on a champ or veteran.

That’s not to say I didn’t have any fun at all, but the parts I did have fun with were mostly side-stuff, like the jumping puzzle in LS, the investigation chains, just watching the cinematics and the last 10 minutes of the final event. The Lost Shores zone itself felt like a huge turn-off and aside from going there to do the jumping puzzle I’ll probably avoid it just like I’ve avoided the Orrian zones. I still find lower level content and events vastly more fun – even the dragon fights for the umpteenth time are more exciting and fun for me than these Lost Shores events were the first time around.

It really pains me to say this after having such a blast with the Halloween stuff, but Lost Shores actually hurt my overall enjoyment of and desire to play this game more than it has added to it…

PS: I know that this is a free content update and that I still have exactly what I paid for at launch and as such I’m merely giving my feedback on this event, I’m not expecting anything to be changed because of it. What I do very much hope however is, if these free content updates are setting the tone for larger paid expansion packs down the road, that the feedback on these free updates will be taken into account to improve the content in those expansion packs. In its current format I don’t find content like Lost Shores fun enough to pay for and simply presenting it in larger quantities wouldn’t solve that problem.

mercury ranique.2170:

first off all, your asking for the best pc specs for GW2. Sorry to dissapoint you but with your budget you have no change to get the best specs.

So: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2#System_requirements
Everything above this will play the game nicely. Given your currency I suspect your from the states. So I checked amazon what you could expect and I am looking at something like this: http://www.amazon.com/iBuyPower-Gamer-Power-Desktop-AM911D3/dp/B008RRAZ1W/ref=sr_1_20?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1353234883&sr=1-20#productDetails

That’s a very poor recommendation for a gaming system, especially since the OP was asking to play the game on high settings, which that low end GT610 will never manage with any good framerate. When shopping for a gaming system you should always avoid anything with a budget graphics card like a 610, 620 or 630 (I’d argue even the 640 isn’t worth bothering with).

Furthermore for $600-700 he can get something that’s much better even as a prebuilt. It won’t be the best computer by any stretch, but high settings should be completely doable within his budget, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look and which systems to avoid.

@the OP:

I would recommend skipping Amazon and looking on dedicated computer hardware sites like Newegg and Tigerdirect instead.

Just quickly looking at some good picks on newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227444
This one has a 7850, which is right around where you want to be for the higher settings with good performance paired with an AMD FX-6100 (bulldozer hexacore) processor. It’s a pretty good deal for the price and on the graphical side it will give you the best performance, but the FX-6100 may lag behind a bit in some places.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229317
This one also caught my eye because it has an i5 3570k, paired with a not quite as high end, but still decent graphics card, a 7750. The 7750 is more midrange than the 7850 (it’s 2 models lower, with the 7770 being the in-between step), so it won’t be quite as fast, but at resolutions below 1080p it should still be able to handle some of the more important high settings quite well. The advantage this system has is that the i5 is a very powerful processor that does really well in gaming (and has fewer low FPS drops in GW2 than most other processors), which provides a good base for future upgrading as well. If in a year or two you decide you want to upgrade to a better graphics card, you very easily could – the i5 would still be solid.

There are probably other good or even better deals out there. The important things to look for are a graphics card that is high end or at least a midrange model that’s bordering on high end. It should be at least 550 / 650 with Nvidia or 6770 / 7750 with AMD. The processor is important in that it needs to be able to keep up with the graphics card, but there will always be situations where the FPS will be CPU-limited regardless – AMD processors have that a bit more often than the i5 sandy/ivy bridges do. If you’re not trying to min-max performance though, then it may be better to settle for a decent AMD processor with the best graphics card that’s in your budget.

Azjenco.9425:

Amarinth.8534:

This is what happens when you combine the launch of a new content update, a series of one-time only events AND a free trial period.

slow clap

Well done, Arenanet. Well done.

Yeah, worst thing is, this isn’t going to look good to people giving the game a go for the first time. I think ANet shot themselves in the foot with this one, which is sad, because the game is really good.

I think they’ve gotten a bit too overconfident tbh. They probably figured their server tech could handle the high peak concurrency and getting as many people into the game as possible to make it feel full and lively would be the best approach to draw in loads of new buyers (rather than showing off the game to free trialists at a quieter time).

But as you said, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot, because clearly their servers are getting severely overloaded as a result of too many players and too many requests (both with logging in, as well as with the combat/skill-handing), which is leading to lag issues that aren’t just pissing off their existing customers, but also giving one of the worst possible impressions to prospective customers who might now be forever put off from buying the game (and I wouldn’t blame them).

This is what happens when you combine the launch of a new content update, a series of one-time only events AND a free trial period.

-slow clap-

Well done, Arenanet. Well done.

loseridoit.2756:

I am just here to troll a link
http://www.microcenter.com/product/354589/Core_i5_2500K_33GHz_LGA_1155_Boxed_Processor
i5 2500k $100
I wonder if I should make a thread

Wow, that’s a great deal. If I lived in the US and didn’t already have one I’d be on my way to a microcenter right now.

A Phenom II 555 is a dual core model if I remember correctly. This means it’s pretty much expected that you’ll be heavily CPU bottlenecked and your CPU will be pushing 100% load a lot (or even all) of the time – a max of 30fps sounds about right to me, since that’s very similar to what most core2duo users cap out at (unless they’re running high overclocks).

Your options to improve performance basically come down to:
1. overclocking, provided your cooling is sufficient or you are able to replace it
2. upgrading to a Phenom II X4 or a Phenom II X6, provided your motherboard supports any of these
3. going the whole nine yards and upgrading to an i5 sandy/ivy bridge with a new motherboard (and possibly RAM)

With these choices 1 is the cheapest and 3 the most expensive (although getting a hold of an X4/X6 processor may not be cheap either since they’re out of production), but the amount of improvement you’d see in terms of minimum framerates would also be the best with 3 and the least with option 1.

If you don’t want to spend too much money, but at least get above 30 fps most of the time then the Phenom X4 might be the best compromise, especially if you can get one cheaply somewhere. You might also want to get a decent aftermarket cooler with it so that you can overclock it to squeeze out some extra performance.

Just bear in mind when deciding what to go for that this game doesn’t perform flawlessly in WvW or really busy dynamic event even with an overclocked i5 like I have (I get as low as 15-25fps at worst) – a better processor does reduce the severity of those FPS drops, but it doesn’t eliminate them completely. The Phenom X4 or X6 will net you decent performance for the most part and should give far better results than your current X2, but for the best results when it comes to absolute minimum fps an i5/i7 sandy/ivy bridge is recommended.

Same problem here on Desolation. I wasn’t far behind the first people in the server and he bugged out right as I entered the house. This has to be a new record for all-time fastest bugging out event. =_=

Same problem here.

Have you tried repairing or reinstalling the game client?

To repair the client go to the GW2 install folder, r-click on GW2.exe and create a new shortcut. Then r-click on that shortcut, go to Properties, select the Shortcut tab and add -repair to the end of the Target: line with a space in between -repair and the install path of GW2. The end result should look something like this (ofcourse your install path may be slightly different depending on the install location):

“C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -repair

Now press Apply and OK and then run the shortcut. GW2 should start to check the dat file and repair any errors.

If the repair doesn’t fix the problem try to delete your GW2 temp/caching files. These are Gw2.tmp found in the GW2 install folder (the same one with Gw2.exe and Gw2.dat) and the 2nd file is local.dat which is normally located in your Documents/Guild Wars 2 folder (at least on Win 7 – I don’t know where it would be on Win 8, but on Win 7 you could find it under Libraries or Users -> <username> -> My Documents).

If the problem stills persists after both these steps you may need to reinstall the game from scratch to rule out the error being in the Gw2.exe file (which is something the -repair command unfortunately doesn’t check).

If even a reinstall doesn’t help, then the next step would be trying to find out if anything changed on your system around the time when you started having these glitches in GW2 – were there any major updates to Windows 8? any updates to your graphics drivers? did you install any other games or applications around this time? (the games/app themselves shouldn’t have any effect, but a redistributable file that came with them might have borked something up).

Yes you can copy the client directory straight over to the other PC and run GW2.exe to start the game (or create a shortcut to it on the desktop) and it should work just fine.

When there are large game updates you can also save bandwidth by patching the GW2.exe and GW2.dat file on one PC first and then copy both over to the 2nd PC and overwrite the existing files with the already patched versions. This saves you having to download updates twice.

This sounds more like a change to the Post-Processing setting within GW2. There is quite a big difference between None, Low and High, so assuming you remember what you had that set to before changed from Windows 7 to 8, check that it’s still set to that.

If you never changed the graphics settings yourself it could be that auto-detect is simply giving you different results with the new OS.

I’m only guessing here, but the reason the message has changed is probably because they’ve investigated and think that your account was compromised by account thieves, who probably used your account for the botting that led to your ban.

Make sure that you have a ticket open for each account that has been banned so that they actually investigate both of the accounts (if you try to do both in one ticket they might not actually be investigating both of them, as customer service usually don’t read tickets properly).

Also whilst you’re waiting make sure that your computers are secure by scanning all machines you’ve ever logged in on with both a virus scan (for ex. AVG or Avira) and at least 2 different malware scans (for ex. spybot, bitdefender, malwarebytes) to ensure that you weren’t the victims of a keylogger.

You might also want to investigate options to use either the google authenticator (this provides two-factor authentication, which is one of the best ways to secure an account) or a much more complex and longer (preferably randomized) password to keep your account safe from future ‘hacking’ attempts.

I myself started using a password safe after one of my email accounts was compromised through brute force a few years ago. Since I (still) don’t own a smartphone, two-factor authenticator is usually not an option for me, so I rely entirely on the strength of my passwords. The advantage of Keepass is that it allows me to easily set up randomized and insanely long passwords for every game, service and website I use, as well as changing them as often as I like. I only need to remember one master password to access Keepass and I can take it with me anywhere I go on a USB stick. There are some minor inconveniences (like having to make regular backups and needing the USB stick to log in from remote locations), but the pro’s far outweigh the con’s when it comes to security.

PS: if you had email authentication enabled (this means the system will send you an email message each time your account is accessed from a new IP address) then you should also make sure your email account hasn’t been compromised, because with email authentication turned on the only way account thieves could have gotten into your account would be by accessing your email and clicking the confirmation link or by spoofing your exact IP-address. Usually it turns out that it’s the former, which would make it very easy for the thieves to re-compromise your account after you get it back.

Yeah it’s been in pretty much as far back as I can remember, however I have to admit when I first spotted it in Process Explorer my first thought was that it was crapware (mostly due to the name) and it gave me quite a scare. I laughed when I realized it was the GW2 ingame browser.

Your computer shouldn’t be in any danger as long as the cooling is good enough. If you didn’t build the computer yourself, then you may want to install something like HWmonitor (free and easy to use, monitors pretty much all temperatures, just leave it running in the background and it will track current, as well as min/max temperatures) to make sure your CPU and graphics card aren’t overheating (or getting close to).

The reason you’re suddenly hearing you CPU fan might be due to higher population density, which can increase the load on the CPU, thus making it run hotter and need more cooling.

A well-built and well-maintained gaming PC shouldn’t have any problem running at 100% useage for long periods of time though – if you do have any problems you might want to look at ways to improve your PC’s cooling (adding extra fans, cleaning, reapplying thermal paste on the CPU, etc) to avoid overheating problems. Also buy a can of compressed air and cleaning out the dust every few months can help a great deal (make sure the PC is fully powered off and let it rest for about 20 minutes after cleaning before powering it back on).

What does the error say?

Have you tried with a different browser like Firefox or Chrome? Especially if you’re using Internet Explorer it’s adviseable to try a different browser, because I think GW2 is one of the websites that actually works worse with IE than the other popular browsers.

It’s also worth checking all the hardware that you didn’t replace part for part for stability – this means run memtest on the memory, and if that checks out run intel burntest on the processor and run a graphics benchmark of your choice on the graphics card.

The fact that other games don’t produce the same BSOD doesn’t mean your hardware is fine and dandy, because GW2 is a really intensive game and puts more pressure on the CPU and GPU combined than pretty much any other game out there. Because the BSOD is limited to GW2 the most likely cause is an instability in the system that only shows up under high loads.

Also as Rabbiddog pointed out make sure to install the latest BIOS for your motherboard – the initial BIOS versions can often be quite buggy and cause all sorts of strange problems, so it’s always a good idea to update the BIOS if you run into a problem like this.

Also when you get a BSOD Windows normally creates a minidump file which might contain more clues than the BSOD error code as to the cause of the BSOD. There are some free utilities on the web than can analyze the minidump file for you or at least display it in a readable format.

It can’t be a bandwidth problem, since as you said GW2 only uses very little bandwidth during actual play and with 30mb of fibre it should have no impact on the speed of the stream whatsoever, so the problem is more likely to be something about the way your modem/router/network is operating or configured.

When your wife is streaming LoveFilm and the like I assume that’s on a different computer in the house? Have you tried streaming those videos on the same computer that you’re running GW2 on and if so does it make any difference or do the streams still freeze up when all the traffic is coming from one machine in the house?

I’m curious if this might be some kind of port problem, mainly because it’s only happening with such a specific combination of applications. It might be worth trying to find out which ports the streams and GW2 use and see if any of them are the same (or in the same range).

Not sure why those shortcuts wouldn’t work for you. I’m using a Razer Imperator myself and I’ve got weapon swap bound to mouse button 4 (and dodge on 5) and the function works just fine.

Just to check, you are trying to bind the mouse buttons directly ingame and not using a macro or keymapper as a go-between right?

Are you able to rebind other functions besides the elite skill and weapon swap to your mouse or other keyboard keys?

Happening to me as well and it’s been doing it on and off since launch. I’ve reported this bug before and I know others have as well, so they can’t be unaware of it – but either it’s not an important enough issue or they’re just unable to find the problem and fix it permanently.

There seem to be so many things in this game that they keep trying to fix and failing, like the sound bug with pet footsteps suddenly being 10 times too loud, which they keep saying has been fixed when it hasn’t… :/