Guild Wars 2

JaironKalach.4938:

However, with the theme of this thread… I’m certain that always bothered me more about GW1. Changes were only in instances. If I went back to a 4-man area, no one had noticed the changes wrought in the world.

Thank you, and quite right on the instancing effect – I think this is what inverted in GW2 but needed to go further.

I think the essence of my post, on re-reading it, is that in GW1 what changed is you the player – for example you experimented with a build, went out into an instance, got your kitten kicked (or not), and learnt from that. In GW2, that has gone, but much less changes instead. I find myself yearning for that larger-scale change & consequence to my actions, as though I end up yelling internally ‘is anything I’m doing here achieving anything at all?!’

If nothing else, it’s an interesting discussion on what psychologically we perceive as progression vs stagnation, and how that varies from player to player.

TsubakiChi.8507:

It just doesn’t have the team feel anymore. I have no reason to be in GW2 – nothing to work towards. I could care less about legendary weapons. I have no sense of “guild” or “team”, and I am not going to play to get on a gear treadmill or buy gold sufficient enough to ease the pain of farming.
There are other gear progression games out there – people played GW (and dare I say it, planned to play GW2) to stay away from all of that.
I do believe Arena Net staff must have changed drastically from the original core of masters who created GW and who cared enough to give GW2 a vision and breathe life into it… to a group of people doing only what they are told to do by their parent company. The “team” just isn’t there. Or at least that’s how it feels.

Well put. I ended up playing GW1 for the longer term primarily because there was nothing quite like going out as a party of 4 or 8 and having fun with something different (completing missions as a PUG was often an optional extra. GW2 feels like such a dramatic upgrade of the world, and yet such a downgrade in how it conveys a sense of belonging or a sense of changeability (not a word). It’s essentially a bunch of people running around, but nothing brings them together, and they rarely if ever change what they’re doing or why they’re doing or how they’re doing it.

There’s nothing akin to the desperate flight from Ascalon to Kryta (for example) to string together events. The dynamic event system isn’t long-term enough or wide-reaching enough to have players go ‘ok, tonight we’re going to push the centaurs back to the border’, and the player communication system isn’t sophisticated enough to turn a 30-person zerg on the last big enemy of an event into the pleasant experience that was a smaller party pinging targets and skills, coordinating without anything but in-game tools (and often coordinating well). I didn’t need loot narcissism or gear treadmills to replay Thunderhead Keep over and over; it was a fun challenging mission that was difficult to attempt, and fun to tweak builds and/or heroes over (the brilliant post by AcidicVision nails that aspect as well).

If anything, I would say that this complaint (mine at least) is that I want more from GW2, not less. I want better tools to coordinate & feel like I’m part of people taking down some nasty enemy beyond spamming in the lag; I want reasons to go kill stuff beyond ‘diminishing returns loot, please go to the cash shop’ etc. I want reasons to replay the same area or event trying a different approach for my own personal player progression & skill. Maybe the personal story just didn’t grip me and that’s what was missing for me; I don’t know.

This last paragraph is deliberately exaggerating for effect. GW2 ends up, for me, feeling soulless. It’s as though I turn up e.g. as an elementalist, and have one role, and most of that is spamming buttons. There’s no flavour to it, nothing that suspends the disbelief, and nothing that suggests the people around me care any more about what they’re doing.

Overall as a long-term GW1 player, I find myself agreeing with the OP. This doesn’t mean GW2 is a bad game; simply that it doesn’t appear to hold up to the long term fun that GW1 provided, at least for me. That said, I think people need to be careful to separate ‘what made GW1 great’ from ‘GW2 is automatically a bad game’ because the two don’t equate & I don’t think that’s what people are saying.

GW1 had long term goals that you could grind towards, but again were designed cooperatively, where items could be traded, where you could max out your given playstyle and still reap benefits symbiotically with those that preferred something different. GW2 has so much, especially around gear requirements, that is bound to the individual player that it not only stifles trade but prevents people from doing the thing (whatever that may be) in the game that they enjoy and do it well, and still reap those benefits. Selfishness & narcissism have won out over community.

It’s no coincidence that I got taken for a Drok’s run by a player who was grinding cash for some item they wanted. They were able to build up funds for trading with other players doing something they loved doing. GW2 just doesn’t offer anything like that flexibility. If you want X, you must do Y. Often a great deal of Y. If you don’t like Y, tough luck, sucks to be you. Hardly an improvement in game design. Hardly even following the vaunted Manifesto.

The active funneling to keep you poor and spend gems seems ill-considered, better relegated to Asian grind MMOs (and I sense NCsoft’s hand in that decision), and the over-emphasis on vertical progression & gear harks back to old MMO designs that have had their day & been superseded. In particular, GW1 made a superb decision to create true horizontal cooperative progression by capping at level 20 and creating significant party-based instanced content. It resulted in repeatable content that made the game fun long after you’d done all the Pavlovian dinging & skinner boxes you could stomach. The equivalents in GW2’s open world just don’t bear up under the same scrutiny & population variance. Good luck even attempting stuff solo that was designed for group content, and courtesy of eliminating all the skill variances, you can’t do neat edge cases like the 55-monk who could solo group content with player skill.

The days of a single MMO successfully appealing to all forms of playstyles appear to be gone. GW2 has plenty of plus points, particularly if you’re looking for the next raid or Pavlovian gear treadmill to consume. Sadly I’m not one of them, nor do I particularly wish to get onto (again) a loot conveyor belt that has ‘try the cash shop’ at the end of it.

This is primarily due to an enormous skinner box effect by which the existing MMO playerbase has become conditioned to need and expect certain things.

The real problem is a temporal one. The speed at which one can create content is always outstripped by the speed at which some players will complete it. This means that you (whether ‘you’ is the player or the developer) must accept one or more of the following premises:

• End-game is just a permanent revolving door, treadmill, insert other endless staircase analogy.
• People will stop playing your persistent world when they reach the end and come back when you add more content.
• Provide some form of tools for player-generated content of some form, from trading to crafting to PvP to building, and accept that end-game is significantly more generic, but player-driven.

The game doesn’t need to be a sandbox to do the last one; arguably anyone running around in GW2 to find all crafting recipes and become the best crafter of raspberry pie ever is providing self-player-generated motivation if not actual content. EVE’s economy alone provides a huge source of player-generated content ignoring all of the other ways in which that game provides player-generation tools.

Actually, there are two problems, of which the first is temporal. The second problem is that people play games for entertainment, and other people aren’t necessarily the best entertainment. Thus we have seen a significant rise in ’it’s an MMO, but I’m doing my thing over here which is only indirectly affecting you over there’. EVE’s economy is again a classic example. One can play EVE entirely solo and yet have enormous impact on the game world.

Specifically in the case of GW2, I would say the game failed to make good on the dynamic event system and where it might have gone. The events are small-scale, localised, and exist solely for the purpose of giving XP & providing quick gratification. If instead the world was a simulation, and the players perturbed that simulation, then we’d see a lot more indirect involvement & players out ‘just doing stuff’ because it changes things for their benefit.

Sollith.3502:

MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online
RPG = Role Playing Game

MMORPG: A game with lots of people playing roles of characters in the world the game is set in.

RPG’s are about character progression, but that doesn’t mean they have to be about stat progression (especially in a vertical manner). In an RPG you are supposed to be playing the role of a character in an alternate fictional setting. The whole point of RPGs is the Role playing part, a part which most of us do not really take part in anymore. We are supposed to be immersed in the world, the story of, and life of a character; usually a character that is some kind of adventurer, seeking battles, places to explore, etc.

Traveling across different lands, kingdoms, through dangerous wilderness areas, making friends and acquaintances, overcoming challenges, making discoveries, etc. The mechanics of a game are just one small part of an online role playing game, typically designed to try and bring out the most of the fictional settings.

If anything an RPG is about the story; in an MMORPG it’s about your characters story. What kind of life does your character live? What kind of challenges does he/she overcome?

…

Players should be asking for more to the worlds view, the worlds story, their story, instead of asking for a piece of virtual equipment that does nothing for them than give a false sense of progression for a very short period of time. Ask for more challenges, more epic conflicts and puzzles that force us to think and work together or on a more personal level with our character.

We should be etching out who are character is in game, who we are playing as, by overcoming the challenges presented to us and making choices that show the character of our characters.

This. This strange notion that MMOs are defined by grinding gear treadmills & where numbers get bigger on a daily basis came out of D&D et al. where notably you might take a month of tabletop to go from level 1 to level 2. It no longer applies or fits to the scope & speed of the average online multiplayer game. Yet the core principle of such tabletop games, that of crafting a character & enjoying the journey that character takes, is even more important, and sadly neglected.

If all people want is a treadmill, where they’re logging in to do the same routine day after day (and I count raiding in this unless raiding has become a lot more interesting than it used to be), then I seriously suggest they examine their lives and what they consider to be entertainment, because oddly enough most people already have a real life that provides boring routine in spades. Also I invite them to check out some of the Asian grind MMOs that cater to precisely this playstyle far more effectively. There is no requirement to homogenise all MMOs to the same level of mediocrity – I would much rather people play the MMO that fits their chosen niche than vice-versa.

The days of MMOs consuming your every waking hour are gone. There are too many activities competing for the player’s time, and that’s just in the entertainment space alone. It’s not even about player age or nostalgia – there are simply vastly more options available than there were a decade ago.

mirko jankovic.5147:

Thank You!!

Two screenshots, gw004.jpg with FOV fix, and 05 wihtothy. 6048×1080 eyfinity.
Thank you!

Please go with this option

This is why it’s not just about zooming out. FOV is about the angle of the view frustum, not the frustum’s starting point.

Great move ArenaNet. I’d love to see some actual UI to control all this fully, but a great start.

This new FOV reduces my already poor performance. I am on a low end system, but I’m mainly wondering: is this change also also CPU dependent? I know the game uses more CPU than GPU, but this change makes me think it could be GPU based, and I could simply upgrade my graphics card to offset the frame rate hit (much easier than buying a new motherboard and cpu). Any developers wanna comment?

A larger FOV will of course have a performance hit. The clipping planes are now further out and so more objects are visible. This will inevitably have a hit on both CPU & GPU. You’re loading more resources and putting more onto the graphics card.

Arguably this is why this change needs to be on a slider, so that users can control it to their tastes.

I’m honestly not sure where to begin…

Why are you using Java? Why are you trying to run GW2 as a jar package? Why are you creating a text file in notepad? Why are you attempting to use Java’s memory allocation pool with GW2?

If you have 7GB of RAM, GW2 will use what it can of it. That by definition on a 64-bit OS is 4GB of said RAM. End of story. That’s the maximum address space it can or will be allocated – 32-bit pointers insist. Java is unable to change that in the slightest.

I applaud the theme behind the post. I genuinely do not grasp the logic behind players desiring more Pavlovian conditioning to get one more carrot. I think what appalls me the most is when people don’t even see it occurring to them.

Now, if people want to have a conversation about how to make the game provide more of the ‘wow we did it’ self-reward (yes, ok, it could be classed as a carrot, but it is at least a healthy carrot), or the ‘cool, I really had to engage my brain & think about my skills there’, ideally promoting self-worth rather than comparison-worth, then I’m up for that.

I like to explore and treasure hunt. I kill everything indiscriminately just so I can see what it drops. I’ve gotten killed umpteen times (don’t mind it anymore), I have horrible collections of mats, and I find it disappointing when I put so much effort into killing something BIG and I get nada. The explorer in me kicks in and I just move on. There’s always something else new and big to kill, but… if I never find any treasure by the end of this game…I really hope that isn’t the case!

What you describe requires an infinitely scaling loot table so that there is always something more shiny later on. That just isn’t practical. There’s always going to be a limit, or something else that gets in the way of you obtaining an item. What is deeply ironic & worrying about the complaints about e.g. dungeons vs rewards is that the primary complaint is that they’re too hard for too little reward, but if they weren’t, what’s next on the giant hamster wheel of loot?

Forgive me if I appear to be criticising your playstyle; I’m truly not. I am just trying to highlight that it’s got a fundamental limit somewhere along the line.

Jack.1469:

But those in the former group still have the option of playing casually as they obvious appear to do so. They can buy gems and cash them in for gold as well.

Lets’ not go nuts. It would be distinctly offensive to a lot of players to suggest that they must compete by expending real cash. It shouldn’t be about competition at all. It is supposed to be about fun.

Grind in GW2 is never going to yield huge quantities of cash by itself. The drops just don’t work like that, and nor should they. Events and so on yield the most money.

The original problem was farming for crafting items. Those don’t drop really by other means, so it’s a reasonable area to address. Gold is come by in many forms; grinding should not yield significantly more than other equivalent playstyles. That again is fair.

Jack.1469:

you’re relying on your own subjective interpretation of what MMO’ing should be about.

Jack.1469:

Word of advice: If that’s your issue, MMOs are not for you. You’re playing the wrong game.

Pot kettle much? Please try to follow your own advice.

As for the topic – you seem to be assuming that GW2 is following all the standard staples when their manifesto quite clearly states they do not wish to.

They want players to have fun. Grind, by the commonly accepted definitions, is rarely itself considered fun. As I stated above, there is a difference between actively discouraging grind, and not encouraging it. I firmly believe GW2 takes the right approach in not rewarding grind for grind’s sake when compared to other activities.

The original point (lets’ not lose sight of that) isn’t that though – it’s that players who are grinding are being actively discouraged from doing so. There’s a difference. That is perhaps unfair. It does not mean that a player who does not grind should not achieve the exact same effect by doing something else, but rather that both playstyles should be deemed equal. That is fair, is it not?

Why do they need to be level 80? We already have level scaling in place so that anybody can come along.

More events sounds like a great idea, along with greater dynamism in the dynamic event world. I particularly love the idea of day/night events. I for one always find day/night cycles irritating unless there’s an actual point to them in the game (maybe just because I go ‘oh it’s dark… and…?‘, but I can accept that’s just me!)

Spam bots would love this. No more ddfgffdggdd

There are a number of RPG name generators out there. I would have thought clicking on them enough times would yield something that would suit.

Interesting idea though.

Darkstorne.6348:

But I will happily spend an hour or more grinding once or twice a week. I think it comes from the old JRPGs I used to play as a kid, where grinding allowed you to get ahead of the game slightly, would give you some rare drops to make you more powerful, and would level you up and give you access to better skills. It was like a challenge, and felt rewarding.

I believe GW2 went out of their way to state that they did not want to encourage grinding at all.

Now there’s a significant difference between not encouraging & actively discouraging, but I for one am very happy with the idea that the game does not reward grinding or those that do so. Pavlovian treadmills are so last year

Better yet, connect up those reports to a suitable training filter. After a bit, I imagine you could auto-filter a lot out.

I could have sworn GW1 did all of this, but I have been in too many MMOs to keep track of which ones had this sort of feature.

We’ve even had comics on the subject.

I like the pared down approach – GW1 probably had too many by the time all the expansions came around – but unless I’m missing something, I’m not really sure I see the value in unlocking the few meagre skills we get in the first few levels combined with that being the (almost) total skill set for the next 70 or so levels.

I must admit I was expecting a few more over time.

I understood the run debuff to be to make it harder to run through areas that are too high level for you; the lack of speed increases the likelihood that something will kill you. I have not tried this in practice to know whether it’s necessary or not.

However, it is quite irritating, I agree.

Adding the same as GW1, where you can only follow if grouped & in range, seems a reasonable compromise.

Agreed, although better indication of which map one is in (e.g. overflow vs actual server) would also be needed or I can imagine much chat of the form ‘but I’m at 320, 640, you’re not here!’ following

Just because one game allows it does not make it carte blanche for everyone. GW2 is a significantly larger target. It’s not about whether GW2 makes money – it’s about the stance they must have on botting, addons, and people exploiting said for making money.

A ‘no addons’ stance is significantly easier to police & enforce for an overworked & busy CS department. If they allow one, they then have to evaluate every ‘special case’. That also costs them money.

If the addon does something genuinely useful, then lobby for it to be included in the game (as I believe an existing thread already does). Far greater chance of that happening.

RLD.7439:

You can’t hold millions of people responsible for their own security. They simply aren’t capable of it and also… things happen. I don’t care how careful you are.

Actually you can & must. Pretty much everything that the user does to authenticate & identify who they are must come from the user’s choice. ANet can impose very little that they have not already done so without legions of users going ‘but we can’t log in, stop making this so hard!’.

ANet have to send email to an email address for example, even with email authentication. The security of that email address is entirely outside their hands. What else can they do?

Your proposed system (if we truly want to debate security) is as vulnerable as the current one. It misses the point that if someone can hack into your account and clean out a character, they already had access to at minimum your website account page, your in-game login, and probably your email address login. No code in the world will prevent access if that is already breached.

If ANet want to improve security, it has to be at the cost of annoying legitimate users. They should mandate gmail email addresses, two-factor authentication enabled on those gmail addresses, and provide two-factor authentication to users either in the form of a physical RSA-type key, or a mobile phone app. How about a mandated password complexity, such as at least 16 characters long, containing at least two special characters? Going further will annoy legitimate users even more.

By far the best simple account security measure is one that users like myself repeatedly told ANet we’d want, and they ignored (probably because NCSoft insisted) – and that is to stop making email addresses usernames. If instead we had to pick a username to log in as well as a password, then a given attacker has one more piece of information they must obtain. This is pretty classic security stuff, and I’m disappointed ANet did not follow this.

Nevertheless, security is as good as the user makes it.

Yes please. A latency meter would be invaluable.

GuildWars has always had significant issues with botting & unlike other MMOs derives its revenue from other sources than subscriptions. No addons is a sensible policy for that reason alone.

If you want something for genuine disability support, suggest that. I’m sure ANet’s UI designers would consider it. This tone of post just looks disingenuous, as well as taking a genuine problem and making it about addon support.

Willowleaf.5721:

I’m in for DirectX 11 too.

Also more support for ATI cards, it’s pretty annoying to see those NVidia features that I cannot use. There are still bugs with ATI cards that are not fixed.

And thus we see the classic gamer problem – ‘I want X, but I also want Y’.

Game development is a finite resource. Any time spent on any feature is time not spent on something else (and please, dear readers, do not suggest anything so stupid as throwing more money/people at the problem – development doesn’t work like that, never has, never will).

Sure, DX11 would be lovely, but so would any amount of improvements & fixes. Is it critical to the state of the game? No. Is it vital to players? No. Should it be a higher priority than fixing actual performance issues in the graphics of the client & bugs therein? No.

A 64-bit client, by comparison, would be as trivial as flipping a switch (because that’s all it is in a compiler), unless there’s some third party library they’re dependent on.

Edit: As for DX10, practically nobody codes for it. It’s just not worth the extra effort. DX9 & 11 are the defacto standards now.

Does the sound also stop when you freeze? Can you alt-tab and use other programs during the freeze?

When you state a freeze lag, could you describe the symptoms in more details. What exactly occurs to your character and to the game around you?

Laptops hard-reseting is an internal safety measure. I’m sure you recall the story where someone got burned by a laptop – ever since, they’ve had built-in cutoff features due to high temperatures. Something somewhere in your laptop is overheating if it just decides to turn itself off. It is not and cannot be a game bug. Hardware should survive maximum usage; if it doesn’t, that’s a hardware problem.

Stuttering sound crashes are different – that is more likely to be a driver hang, sometimes due to overheating, sometimes a driver bug or corrupted VRAM, or sometimes a driver conflict. I would try uninstalling all your sound drivers & devices & disabling them; ensure both Windows & GW2 have no sound available at all, and see what effect that has. If it gets better, you’ve got a sound-GPU driver conflict. If not, try Unigine Heaven benchmark on your GPU, turn everything up, AA & AF & Tesselation to the maximum, work the card for an hour and check everything survives.

If after all of that you are still having problems unique to GW2, then it’s more likely to be an incompatibility with something GW2 specifically is doing.

Hmm that’s odd, those logs listed Windows 5.1. I understood that to be XP. Oh well, confusing.

Top of the list would be get a 64-bit OS, followed by more RAM. Personally I’d also say use Windows 7 – it’s pretty much better in every way than Vista especially on features like RAM virtualisation, and you also get DX11. Those options are likely to be cheaper than replacing the other hardware, and should give you some improvements along with using that hardware to its full.

After that, we’re into what you can afford by way of better CPU (possibly also motherboard if that is incompatible with the chosen upgrade) and better GPU. That’s a small flamewar in of itself.

Bear in mind that a given download speed is limited by both ends of the transaction.

I just noticed that your error log has a lot of an error I haven’t seen before:

Mem Arena ‘Transient’ capacity exceeded. Attempted alloc category: ‘Cinema Tex’ Size: 65584

I wonder if something is starved of resources… I noticed you’re on XP 64-bit. I’m just wondering if DX9 on XP is doing something a bit unexpected (as you won’t have DX11, that’s Windows 7 only).

Here’s a random theory – you have a 2GB VRAM card. On DX9, even on a 64-bit OS, chances are your 4GB of address space is going to get rather tighter when 2GB is mapped in. Windows 7 does a lot more virtualising of VRAM than XP does. I wonder if you’re just running low on address space. It’s only a theory though. The other symptoms still sound like some sort of hardware issue, if only a configuration problem of some kind (as you say above, it’s a bit weird…)

Anyway, on the subject of performance, try turning reflections off. Those get pretty expensive. You could also put a frame limiter on to 60 fps and save on some heat either way (or vsync if it’s not dropping too low to cause other problems).

Typically the way these things work, you sign in on your web browser, and then your PC is allowed access, however, it’s almost impossible to say at a distance.

Assertion: *bucket == block
File: ..\..\..\Core\Platform\Common\MemAllocatorTLSF.cpp(318)

That from your log sounds suspiciously like either a memory problem or running out of memory. With 8GB of physical RAM, I find this remarkable, and none of the numbers in the log suggest you were running low.

However, that log shows a lot of access violation crashes as well, which is more like a typical crash. The addresses it’s failing to write to are pretty consistent too, and not the usual NULL dereference. Intriguing, but without any other information, not much to go on.

Have you tried a full uninstall & downloading the client direct from the web & trying that one? Perhaps you’ve been very unlucky and got a corrupt install somehow?

I had the same sort of issue, where most games were fine, but GW2 is very RAM & VRAM intensive. If there is a corrupt address somewhere high in your physical address space, only really intensive applications will use enough memory to access it. Try a full benchmark application like Unigine Heaven on DX11. Run memtest. If everything runs stably through that, then that is a good indication that the problem is software-based.

In my case, once I had EVGA RMA my graphics card, I’ve not had any problems since.

As an aside, new or not, expensive or not, PCs can have faults. There are well known cases of motherboards, fresh off the production line, having problems. Same with RAM chips. These items are not perfect. There’s a reason why when presented with the list of problems you detail, most people go ‘check your RAM, check your power’ and so on – because flaky hardware is exactly what it sounds like.

It won’t hurt to run a full memtest & benchmark. It’ll give you peace of mind too, if they all pass.

Thud.4712:

Looking at the log though, I noticed the majority of the entries were related to missing parent/bone/child, etc.

That’s actually pretty normal. Crashes are never entries in log files themselves. The way crashes work is that by the time the crash has happened, you won’t get a nice neat log entry of what went wrong. The log is to say what went wrong up until that point, and often contains warnings about something that wasn’t right in the game but didn’t cause a crash. Most modelling is missing parts; it’s remarkably common in game logs. They don’t accumulate – crashes either happen or they don’t.

For example, looking at Cartman’s log, that’s an access violation. Something attempted to dereference a bad pointer. If I were laying a guess, since it tried to access address 2, something was expecting a valid pointer to offset from, and got NULL instead.

That’s a programming bug. It needs fixing. By comparison, a lot of people with hangs & crashes show errors that sound like they are entirely hardware-based.

I also think that if I have to read one more post about someone saying it sounds like its a fault of the power supply or memory I may just lose my mind. That’s just an unrelated side note I felt like sharing

Thanks for sharing. Whilst in your case it might well be justified, I’d point there are a fair number of threads where users go ‘it must be GW2’ and it is quite clearly their system. New PCs & new games are great ways to get hardware problems highlighted. The same cry has been heard on every game forum this year, and it almost always is not true.

I’m not flaming – just pointing out that people are giving their free time to help, and it’d be great if everyone was cordial about it. I went through this myself with GW2 hanging & crashing a lot, so I empathise with the frustrations.

I guess one thing that confused me in reading that is why a BSOD forced you to reformat your PC. It’s a kernel crash. It doesn’t mean your PC is permanently broken.

Explorer.exe needing restarts is not something that GW2 could have affected. I would check recent installations of shell extensions such as Adobe, as well as run a full memory test of your machine. Explorer.exe doesn’t restart unless it itself crashes, and GW2 cannot in any way crash Explorer.exe. It doesn’t have the access rights.

BSODs and driver resets & hangs are all related to the drivers & hardware of the PC. I have been in exactly the same situation as you, where SWTOR runs fine, but GW2 has no end of hangs & freezes. That one game or even most games are ok is not an indicator that everything on your PC is fine.

Whilst it is feasible for a game to push drivers & hardware more than it should, no user-mode application can cause a BSOD. It’s always the driver or the hardware, without exception.

In my case, GW2 highlighted that, for once, a game was pushing the total VRAM in the card and found that one high VRAM address was corrupt. EVGA RMAed the card, and since then I’ve had no such freezing issues. I would strongly recommend you benchmark your card with something that is very intensive in DX11 (my personal favourite is Unigine Heaven, but anything that Process Explorer/EVGA Precision/whatever reports that the GPU usage is 100% for a full hour is good (as long as it tests the majority/all of the VRAM as well).

One other thing to consider is your sound hardware & drivers. There are some known issues where HD audio drivers conflict between actual sound hardware and the ones Nvidia provide, which yields pretty much the same sort of hang. Hope that helps get you started in the right direction.

That’s conclusive at least that there is a problem with your system. I would try completely uninstalling & wiping your graphics drivers (try something like Driver Cleaner, Driver Sweeper, there are guides out there on the internet on how to do a full uninstall) and putting on the latest that you knew worked, and try the benchmark again.

If it’s still doing that, consult your card’s supplier, because it may be indicative of a fault in the card.

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.

When the display driver stops responding that is a sign of a driver fault. This can come from numerous different causes. When I had this occur in GW2, the end result was RMAing the card to EVGA because it showed a memory fault in the card, that GW2 happened to illustrate because it’s very memory intensive. Other games were fine, because they don’t use as much texturing & VRAM. Your description sounds identical in behaviour to mine, even down to low settings.

I’d strongly recommend running a heavy benchmark on the card like Unigine Heaven that can really push the card to maximum for an hour in DX11 and see what happens there.

That would depend on whether you’re using the NCsoft Launcher. That is a separate application from GW2 itself. GW2 has its own independent launcher & downloader which does not appear to use Pando at all (thankfully).

In essence, PMB is installed on your machine because at some point you used a program that needed it. Until you know what that was, it’s hard to state from a remote viewpoint that it’s safe to remove it. It would certainly appear that that program was not GW2 though.

You need to provide significantly more detail. For example:

DxDiag
Do you get a log or other error report from GW2?
Are you submitting those crash reports to ArenaNet?
Does anything specific occur just before the crash?
Is it every instance, or just some?
How long before the crash once you’re in the instance?
Does it happen if you change your settings, e.g. drop everything to low?
Etc.

Not installed here as far as I can see. I haven’t seen any indication of it being used by GW2. It’s used by LOTRO if memory serves.

I would try a CPU benchmark, run all your cores at full for an hour, and see what happens. If your laptop shuts down, or is otherwise getting really hot, time to get that heatsink checked out by the manufacturer/supplier.

Your description sounds similar to an unrelated problem I had with a work laptop; once it got all four cores really busy (in my case it was compiling, rather than gaming), the laptop would eventually start behaving strangely and then eventually shut down. Turned out the heatsink was gas-based and the gas was slowly escaping. HP replaced the heatsink, and the problem stopped occurring.

That is a crash in the game. More specifically, it’s an assertion that a calculated rectangle is valid, and presumably ought to be and isn’t. It’s a bug, send your crash dumps to ANet, let them fix the code. That’s pretty much all you can do.

NB: If you don’t get suitable ‘Send this crash report’ dialogs, report that as well (because you should) and consider turning on user mode dumping, so that Windows makes the crash dumps for you which you can then send by hand.

Edit: I should add it’s worth making sure you give as much detail about where you were when the crashes occurred, what settings you were running, because usually when the fundamental maths of a graphics system break (which is what it sounds like) something pretty weird is going on. One classic we had in our application was a crash we couldn’t reproduce until we realised the user started the app and then locked his machine – which meant the app booted up thinking the screen was 0 pixels wide. Stuff like that. Anything vaguely out of the ordinary that might help Anet find the problem.

What sound hardware & drivers do you have? Have you tried an install without installing the Nvidia Audio HD drivers? Those have known issues with some motherboards/sound equipment. I mention this because my GTX 470 had crashing & freezing issues until I took the issue to EVGA who told me to uninstall said drivers.

Note – the typical driver uninstaller & driver sweeper programs aren’t so good at removing those drivers if they’re already on. The only two ways I’ve found to uninstall them is to remove them by hand (requires you to fiddle with OS permissions) or potentially a paid Driver Sweeper program will do it.

Might be a red herring, but I thought I’d throw it out there as a potential to try.