Guild Wars 2

Aldrin.7641:

Hello there I just came back and wanted to get an ele to 80, but don’t have that much fime to explore around. Question is, does crafting still get me to 80 faster? And how much gold would it be?

Thanks

Currently trying to get a character to 80 fast (and just done another), so this is dear to my heart right now…

- Use the biggest level boost you have up front, clearly. Then Tomes of Knowledge (1 level)/Experience Scrolls (5% level)

- Crafting got nerfed; still good for the final push, but you’ll get about 7 levels from going to 400 (could be 8, I forget), so probably not going to be the way you get all the way to 80

- Edge of the Mists is really good if you can find it when your server’s organised and running a good train (lousy and frustrating when it isn’t); stack a few XP boosts and food, and watch the events pile up. You can get quite a few levels in a day if you’ve nothing better to do. You’ll also get Proofs of Heroics when you gain a Rank, which can be exchanged for the HPs you’ll want to get your HoT Elite spec together fast (for my money, buy the Tyria ones first; if you’re power-levelling, you won’t be seeing most of those HPs for yourself, whereas you’ll have a chance to pick up plenty of the HoT ones once you get into Verdant Brink and beyond).

- On days when the zone level isn’t too high for your character, you can get a reasonable number of events in whatever zone is on the Daily list. Not usually as fast as EotM, though, and there can be “quiet” times. If you’re clever, you can probably get most of the zone completed along the way (between events, fill out WPs you don’t have, then the few bits left in the zone, for completion and decent XP). Again, XP boosts are good – with lots of people, some of the events scale so large that you can get serious XP from the kills alone (I’ve got over half a level from a single 5 minute defence at Restricted Zone XRB in Harathi more than once).

- Do the PvP dailies. If you throw a couple of characters through (use a farm server if PvP itself doesn’t push your buttons) you should get a Tome of Knowledge with little or no effort. You can grind a second, if you’re so inclined.

- Do any other easy PvE dailies. These give Experience Scrolls

Edit: Also – merely logging in every day and selecting what dailies to track will net you Tomes of Knowledge once a week (10 across a full 4-week cycle) – even if you then don’t actually have the time to do the dailies. And even if that’s too slow for your current needs, it’s worth doing to stack up for the next time you decide you want to level a character fast.

Healix.5819:

Yes, email authentication sends a code now, which the launcher will ask you for. As for initialed, they’re referring to the location as being like a signature.

Well that’s one good thing (although, as I indicated above, the correct spelling is “initialled” (double “l”) – and bad grammar/spelling are classic red lights for possible malice, hence my concern).

What is a bigger pain is that one of my two accounts is now currently unreachable – it’s prompting me for a code to confirm the new network, but not sending me the confirmation emails (or none that are reaching my email account – and that includes my spam folder). And for tortuous reasons I won’t go into, the same is true of my attempts to access my account info – the web interface prompts me for a code, then doesn’t send me an email with the code in. I have SMS enabled on this account – but not, unfortunately, that one as yet. And if ANet have replied to the support request I sent in, that hasn’t arrived either. Ugghh.

Please confirm: Has the email authentication mechanism changed, or is this an attack vector? I don’t remember seeing anything to this effect (and can’t find anything on the forum either).

On previous occasions, when my network has changed (as it inevitably does from time to time when my ISP connection drops), I’ve been asked to visit a web page to confirm the login attempt.

This morning, instead, and following my entry of email address and password on the client, I received a different prompt, asking me to enter a code sent to me in an email (akin to the SMS authentication that I haven’t, as yet, signed up to). Now – my ISP connection definitely dropped yesterday evening, so it’s quite possible that this a confirmation is to be expected. However, I’m concerned by the apparent, unnotified change in mechanism. (I’m also slightly concerned by the standard of English in the email, which talks of the login attempt being “initialed” as opposed to either “initiated” or (in the case that this is ANet jargon “initialled”).

It occurs to me that nothing in that sequence proves that either the request or email actually came from ANet. In principle (if my machine were compromised), the email address and password could have been harvested from the previous screen, and my active conformation used to confirm that the harvesting was successful (although that seems like an odd way of doing things – better to simply harvest and keep quiet – but even so).

I’ve changed my password, anyway, and am seriously considering signing up to SMS authentication – but, frankly, if it was an attack, it’s presumably still present, and will simply harvest my new password as well – and neither a new password nor SMS authentication would change that.

Beldin.5498:

Btw.: Somebody on Reddit found out how to automatically kill the mutex here :
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/32fo6g/multiple_clients_on_one_machine/cqd4ymz?context=3

Nice! Yes, that works fine for me (and I also learned useful basic stuff fiddling with it to make it work the way I’d like, which is always a bonus). I set up a scheduled task to let me kick it off without the annoying UAC prompt, and I’m now one happy bunny – my second client is now just another icon on my desktop. Many thanks to all for the help.

Healix.5819:

Fredd.9784:

all I get is a syntax list

If you copy/pasted what was posted here, you’ll need to change the quotes due to how the forum converts them.

Yes, I discovered that. It’s always the little stuff. 8-)

It’s working fine, thanks. As Beldin said, killing the process is a little fiddly – but the result is undoubtedly better-performing. If I get time this afternoon, I’ll do a couple of quick comparisons of zone load times with MultiWars2, and post the results here as a “for instance”.

Edit:

OK – I did a few quick measurements, and this is what I came up with. Very non-rigorous and unscientific, but.

My rig is hardly cutting-edge by today’s standards, but it runs a single copy pretty well at fairly high settings:
Intel i5-2400@3.10GHz
8GB RAM
Win 7 Home Premium
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

I have a copy of GW2 installed on an SSD drive alongside my copy of Windows, and a second on an HDD. I launched each copy separately, went to the character screen, selected a character I knew to be in Lion’s Arch, and manually timed the time taken for the display to come up. I took 3 such reading of each, and averaged them. I also took similar readings for single copies of the game launched via MultiWars2, and timings when two copies were running (launched with and without MultiWars2). In the case of the pair launched by deleting the handle, the HDD copy was launched second.

Results in seconds (SDD/HDD in each case):
Single copy, stand alone: 19.3/19.6
Two copies, handle deleted: 28.0/12.9
Single copy, MultiWars2: 44.7/44.3
Two copies, MultiWars2: 68.5/74.6

It’s pretty clear from that, that running under MW2 is adding significantly to load times at least; what’s not visible from that is the huge times it also took to return to the character screen under MW2 (when it did at all; a couple of times things locked up and I had to restart, so I guess there could be an underlying problem that’s not entierly MW2’s fault, but – even so). Whereas the native copies just dropped straight back with little discernible delay.

It’s also clear that running two copies by simply killing the process loaded far faster. I also can’t detect any noticable lag, whereas I’ve felt it under MW2 from time to time.

It’s not obvious, either, that I’m getting much benefit from using the SSD.

But that second figure in the “killed handle” line – the HDD load of a second copy under another userid being the fastest of all – seemed so counter-intuitive that I went back and repeated the tests – with very similar results (20.4/14.0). Maybe someone with more knowledge than me might have an idea what’s going on; personally, I’m out of my depth.

But basically, I’m a convert. Deleting the handle is messier, but the result feels clearly better (plus opening a second session that way is a decision I can make on the fly). It’s simpler to launch two copies via MultiWars2 (and probably more so if you want even more parallel clients, or only want to use the one installed copy), but if I want to do anything serious on two accounts at the same time, I’ll run them native.

(“Closing” the handle. OK, I said I wasn’t a Windows expert.)

Healix.5819:

Fredd.9784:

Out of interest – in that sequence you give, where does the second admin account come in

Beldin.5498:

c:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /savecred /user:admin “g:\gw2\Gw2.exe -autologin -maploadinfo”

“runas” is used to start a process using the specified account.

/savecred is used to remember the login credentials (not available on Home versions).
/user:admin means to use the “admin” account.

The last part is the process to run, in this case “g:\gw2\Gw2.exe” with the parameters “-autologin -maploadinfo”

Bonus:

To create that “admin” account (or whatever you want to name it), instead of using the control panel:

net user "admin" "mypassword" /add

net localgroup Administrators "admin" /add

Yes, that’s what I thought. Except that, as a batch file, the command window just comes and goes with no launch; and from a command line window (so that I can see the output), all I get is a syntax list (presumably telling me I’ve done something wrong). I’ve trimmed my GW2 directory name back to something the command line is happy with. I’m on Win 7 Home Premium (but taking out /savecred changes nothing, and the syntax list simply says it will be ignored anyway). In both cases I’m running as adminstrator. I guess I’ll just have to live with MultiWars2 for now.

Edit: Hah. Got it. I dropped a PAUSE into the .bat file, and spotted the problem: I don’t know where the problem comes, but, by the time I’d cut-and-pasted the command from above, the double quotes around the GW2 command in my .bat file weren’t standard code-page quotes – looked identical, but different code-points. I couldn’t see that on a raw command line because the command wasn’t being echoed, of course. I deleted and retyped them, and suddenly the game launches.

Beldin.5498:

Blu Hawok.5648:

Ty for all your answers.So playing with 2 acconts in windowed modus on the same PC is not possibol with this game when you have the 2 installations installed to different folders,thats wired

I run 2 different accounts in windowed mode in the way i explained above.

And I’ve just run Maw with two accounts from two installs on the same PC (one copy on an SSD, one on an HDD), both in windowed mode, using Multiwars. But as Beldin said – loading times are long and the game is slower (and my frame rate during Maw itself was appalling, but my graphic card’s hardly top-end, so that’s to be expected, I guess).

Beldin.5498:

Multiwars however makes the game, especially all loading times, very slow.

Yeah, been trying Multiwars, and I definitely can’t disagree. Even the copy of GW2 on my SSD takes ages to load a new zone. And so far it’s never let me close the game down cleanly, either. But on the plus side, it needs almost no Windows knowledge, and once it’s configured, getting the game up is pretty trivial. Horses for courses, maybe.

But to be fair I haven’t tried the method you suggest yet, so I can’t really compare until I have.

Out of interest – in that sequence you give, where does the second admin account come in (I can’t really claim to be deeply Windows-literate, I haven’t the foggiest what your command line is fully doing, and you don’t explicitly mention it)? Do i substitute “admin” with the name of the second account?

This may seem really dumb, but – I bought my account using PayPal, and I’m now looking to update my billing information for in-game purchases – and, try as I might, I can’t find it anywhere within my account info. Where exactly is it hiding, please?
Edit: Yup, it was dumb. It’s in the game, not on the web site.

The preferred way to do this seems to be MultiWars2, which is simply a launcher to actually get the two copies going. Do a search on Google or YouTube for TheMechanicalGamer’s setup guide (which also has links to the software).