Guild Wars 2

My HoM rewards have also been stolen. I logged into GW and went to Eye of the North to confirm that I still had the title for my account, I do. Went back to GW2 to discover that I still don’t have the title.

Apparently, I didn’t wait long enough before logging back into GW2. One needs to wait about 15 minutes or longer after going into Guild Wars to get your title back.

I have lost almost all motivation to do anything in GW2 due to the way it now handles XP. What do you do when nothing you do improves you?

My primary character has runes of the Traveler and the in city Greater Swiftness Bonus granted by the Leader of the Pact achievement. I see the swiftness animation however I am no faster than anyone else around me. What gives?

Don’t forget dolyaks in WvW. It seem to be standing beside it and getting told it is our of range some other direction.

Yeppers… I went in with four guildies all four saw her is different places and each of us was unable to talk to her.

Hannelore.8153:

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

My guild’s main problem is that we simply can not get the favor (Influence) to be able to mount an expedition to claim our hall.

Our guild managed to do this by setting guild mission prefernces to PvE only, then waiting until it refreshed (once per week?) and presented us with a guild trek. This is a simple mission that you can complete with 1 or 2 people by using the dulfy guide. If you don’t already have the locations memorised, one person won’t be able to do it, two might, and three is the safe number. But after you get them memorized even a single person can complete the easy guild trek in the alotted time.

Make sure you have the guide preloaded, preferably on another monitor or laptop or something not intefering with your game, set all settings to low to minimize load times, avoid a lossy internet connection and use a character who has a good balance between speed, survival, and damage. Speed is most important.

Moderate jumping skills are required, so practice jumping puzzles beforehand.

Thank you, that very much helped. After reading your post I was about to complain about those non-existent “Guild Treks” then I jumped over to Dulfy and discovered they do exist, even if there is nothing on the guild tab about “Treks.” Wiki is very poorly cross-referenced.
It may take us a while but at least now we can earn our favor. Why didn’t wiki have these cross-referenced as a way to ear favor, or anything else actually.

My guild’s main problem is that we simply can not get the favor (Influence) to be able to mount an expedition to claim our hall.

Fengzhou.9853:

My friends and I are in a similar position sadly.

We managed to enough enough favor to start the quest.. but now the problem is the quest you clear out the Exalted area guild hall for example is far over-tuned for small groups.. It’s impossible to do with 3-4 people in the time limit they impose.

Granted I know they are all about big everythings when it comes to guilds/pvp, but there are many many MANY small guilds of friends/family only sort and to be shafted like that really is insulting.

We’re to the point that unless we get more people we can trust on a friends/family level.. that we’re never going to achieve the guild hall we REALLY wanted and with that goes those guild hall only vendors and gear things too.. It royally sucks since most of the people I knew before hand have quit playing gw2 even the expansion didn’t bring them back.

Not sure what else to do aside from join someone else’s guild, but that doesn’t solve this problem for smaller guilds at all and I would really hope that Anet could do something to help smaller guilds out somehow.. Please? :<

Congrats on being able to get as far as you have. If you want an extra ranger and are located or playing on NA servers send me a note in game. I would be happy to assist.

For small guilds the current nightmare that is the method of acquiring a guild hall is next to impossible. Please bear with me while I try to explain what I mean.
My little guild consists of three (sometimes four) real life friends that; for the most part, we play the same way. Our primary focus is PvE, we do a little WvW but only to get dailies done. As for PvP, I am the only one that has even made an attempt at it and that was specifically for a newly released rebreather. One I got it for my ranger, I got it for my wife’s elementalist. I have not touched PvP since. The guild was founded in Guild Wars (also known as Prophecies) about eight months after the game came out. We have played together ever since. When Guild Wars 2 came out, we agreed that we wanted to stay together so we launched the guild. After a little over a year we changed to a different server (which cost us everything we had built up) and had to rebuild the guild. We joined a larger guild willing to take us all, but that guild faded away after a few months, leaving us as the primary group of players. So we talked about it and went back to our guild and continued rebuilding it.
Earning influence was something that happened while we were busy doing other things. The item of least importance to us was guild missions.
Now Influence appears to be gone, we have to earn favor. So, how does one earn Guild Favor? Guild Missions. I have joined in on a few Guild Missions only to find out that the to get credit for it you need to represent the guild doing the mission, only the guild you represent gets any influence for your efforts. In other words, there is no way for a small guild to earn favor.
If anyone knows of a way to gain Guild experience, influence or favor: please feel free to post it here. I have not been able to find a way, I have read what little there is in the wiki and ingame.
Let’s cut to the chase, whoever designed this system for guild leveling and getting rid of influence cut the knees out of small guilds. The way leveling works, we can’t even acquire more guild experience with a guild hall, which we cannot acquire because of an inability to acquire influence or favor. Every member of my guild had expected a lot from guild halls, what we did not expect was for ArenaNet to make them next to impossible to acquire. In no uncertain terms every member of my guild feels that ArenaNet has betrayed our trust and lied to us. ArenaNet promised Guild Halls as part of the base game, that didn’t happen. Now we have this mess and they call it Guild Halls. As for as I am concerned what has been done with Guilds is unforgiveable.

Would it be possible for the client to tell us that it is the 64bit client in game? Say in the F11 options? Thanks.

A fine example of a play test failure.

mad kings clocktower… cant wait

My only feedback on the druid is that there was nothing that told me how or what I needed to do to unlock, accomplish or earn it. I got two mastery points with no idea where they came from or why they ended up in the hang glider mastery.

BWE3 was not that much different than BWE1. But once again, I only played for a couple of hours because I was unable to find anything to actually do. No hints on the map of where I needed to go or where I could pick up a quest. There was no “next step” or even anyone to talk too in order to figure it out.
I am not really disappointed in the game, just lost.

Here I was hoping that would be some news as to when the leaderboards would be fixed.

DeceiverX.8361:

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

Of all the things promised to be in Guild Wars 2 when it shipped; an x64 client was not one of them. What was promised, but we still don’t have nor will ANet even acknowledge, is DX10 support.
I was there when she (Gaile Gray) was asked about both DX 10 and a 64 bit client. She confirmed that Guild Wars 2 would support DX10, but she did not know anything about if there was going to be a 64 bit client.
It irks me no end that we are stuck with DX9c and even worse that we are stuck with a 32 bit (x86) client that won’t even distribute itself (some what) evenly across all available cores.. Shoot, even Guild Wars would take advantage of multi-core systems better than Guild Wars 2 does.

The original post itself was necroed recently by by Gaile when called out: No promise was made. What ANet did promise early on was an attempt to create a DX10 client. It was made, but it was extremely buggy and unfamiliar to most of the developers working with it, and had several major issues, so they stopped supporting development.

They fulfilled their end of the bargain, but I believe it’s something that should really be considered. They could do a lot more with the game by opening these doors up and ultimately just improve performance across the board. The game itself is already very well-optimized for the platform it runs on. Imagine the glory of it on a DX12 64-bit client O.O

Thank you for the update. I knew that the Guild Wars Wiki showed Gaile’s statement as a “they will try,” however I was not aware that it was recorded anywhere other than in-game chat logs. I was actually in Lion’s Arch when Gaile made the statement, I might still have the screen shots, not sure where or even if I have them.
I was not aware they even attempted a DX10 client, but given how buggy DX 10 was at release I can imagine how buggy that client would be.
Like you, I would love to see a fully threaded, x64, DX12 client. ANet would have something to proudly shout about and not be snickered at.

Of all the things promised to be in Guild Wars 2 when it shipped; an x64 client was not one of them. What was promised, but we still don’t have nor will ANet even acknowledge, is DX10 support.
I was there when she (Gaile Gray) was asked about both DX 10 and a 64 bit client. She confirmed that Guild Wars 2 would support DX10, but she did not know anything about if there was going to be a 64 bit client.
It irks me no end that we are stuck with DX9c and even worse that we are stuck with a 32 bit (x86) client that won’t even distribute itself (some what) evenly across all available cores.. Shoot, even Guild Wars would take advantage of multi-core systems better than Guild Wars 2 does.

Actually there was an answer to these and other questions during one of the live streams. The reply was that we who are in small guilds need to rethink what a guild is.

No player housing.

Thank you Anet, I have now completed the meta.

Go into your BIOS and disable the onboard (built into the motherboard) HD4000. You should find instructions on how to do that in the manual that came with your Computer/Motherboard.

Ayrilana.1396:

http://dulfy.net/2013/10/15/gw2-blood-and-madness-achievement-guide/

There are 12 meta achievements but 4 do not count. To get the remaining 4, you have to do 4 of the 6 dailies. They only count once so you cannot do the same one two days in a row and have both count.

I can verify that this is working as intended as I currently have the pumpkin carver and door closer achievements remaining. I completed this the first day and these were what I had left.

If you still feel it’s not, please take a screenshot of your achievement tab for the Halloween festival and post it here including whether you have done all daily achievements at least once.

Edit

Looks like the three story ones were supposed to count. It’s now easier to complete the meta although it was never impossible.

No other meta event had ever worked that way.

I too am stuck, this is not working as we were lead to believe.

How about some system specifications so that we can attempt to help you resolve the issue.

The new pre-event for Shadow Behemoth is to destroy 13 portals that spawn a variety of creatures. Alas, on my server (SoR) the portals spawned but we were unable to damage any of the portals. Auto-targeting would not select any portal, not even those who’s defenders we had killed off. I could target a portal if I double clicked on it, but still no damage to it with any of the weapons.
The event failed.

I logged in before the patch today to do my dailies, got them done. I had 4/2 of the monthlies done. I come back after the patch to discover that my monthlies have reset now I have nothing done.
Very upsetting, to make it worse no one else in my guilds were effected by it.
I am glad that they fixed the chat error, but really? SB now required that you destroy 13 portals which would be fine if we could damage them, but we can’t.

My question is simple. First off let me state that I play a lot of PvE and very little WvW, but I use to go into WvW to help build up the score so PvE players like myself would get the various bonuses. These days, I never know if the WvW bonuses are working or not (I know someone claimed they were working again), some times they do some times they don’t.
Why should I be bothered to go into WvW when I don’t get to enjoy the benefits?
And before anyone says other wise, yes that was the ONLY reason I would go into WvW other than mapping (I still think that is wrong on so many levels).

I would advise you double check to make sure that your processor driver is properly installed and that your video card is actually running at full PCI-E x16 speeds.
To check your video sub-system check into GPU-Z.
To check your processor driver; load up a CPU monitor that will provide you with a load chart for each core then launch an application that will load up all of the cores and keep them loaded. After about then minutes load up Guild Wars 2, you should see one or two cores close to 100% while the rest are running at somewhere between 10-30% (depending on your system). If that is not what you are seeing, your processor driver is not properly installed. Uninstall it, then install the oldest and try again working your way up to the “latest and greatest” or you are satisfied with the performance of the processor.

I think I am going to sit tight and see what happens.
I understand that in Korea and China the game is/will be subscription only (due to local laws). I hope that we in the US never see a subscription.

My kneejerk reaction to dueling is I hope it never comes. Phew, I feel better now. Anyway – As long as both parties have to agree to a duel I see no real issues with it provided once I turn down a duel I can not be bothered by that person again for at least 24 hours.
If one cannot reject a dueling request, then I hope it never happens. If one can reject it that I am all for it, I might even encourage the devs to make a victory count achievement. I can tell you now that my score in such an achievement would be zero.

As an owner of an FX8350 I will say that the performance of the processor varies wildly in GW2. To get the performance where I wanted it I had to reinstall the processor driver (a few times) to get GW2 to use all 8 cores (or if you prefer all four dual cores). Because of the processor driver being reinstalled I had to physically re-install my 6950 2GB video card to get the PCI-E port unstuck from x1 back to x16 where it should have been. Once everything was done I get a constant 35-55 FPS in LA. In WvW a medium size Zerg will cause my frame rates to drop to about 45, large Zergs will drop it to about 30. Once I was in a really huge Zerg, where my frame rates dropped down to about 10-15.
My wife also has a FX8350 with the same mobo/ram configuration I have but she has a GTX 460 1GB. That blasted card consistently puts out about 10FPS more than my AMD. Even when I disconnect my second monitor and use my main (which is the same model as hers at 1080).
I have seen several tests that show that FX systems perform better with Nvidia cards than they do with AMD cards. Go figure…

As an owner of Howler I can say that it is a great Legendary for Rangers. I don’t really like torches. My next one is currently scheduled to be Bolt. Perhaps a short bow if they every put in one I can stand looking at.

One of the reasons I don’t buy skins.

Alas, yes. I have spent a lot more on gems than I would have if the game had a subscription.

What sound cards are you folks using? I have heard this same issue with my card, I chalked it up to Alchemy trying to emulate EAX. I only really notice it when an NPC talks.

While I can’t address your SSD issues (I don’t trust them enough to use them, yet), your motherboard, CPU & GPU are fine. Give the applications Avelos mentioned a shot, you don’t really have anything to lose.
If you are looking to improve performance; I would advise you install an old style 1TB drive and move your swap file as well as most of your applications to it. Based on what I have read, you really don’t want Windows swap file on an SSD.

BillFreist.1527:

Part 2:

…snip…
Q: When you say “optimization”, do you mean making your engine more compatible for multi-core systems? Right now your game’s engine runs primarily on single-thread, which Intel CPU’s seem to thrive on; while at the same time your game’s engine is poorly designed for multi-thread CPU’s, which AMD is best at.
A: As I outlined above, this is mostly server changes that I’m involved with, but there are client optimizations in the works, but we don’t know when those will go out. Optimizing is extremely dangerous and requires a lot of testing. The server side changes are more controlled in the sense that we don’t have to worry about testing on different hardware configurations like with the client. Its unfortunate, but necessary to ensure that the changes don’t end up doing more harm than good.

The engine isn’t as single-threaded as you might think. It will only use as many threads as your machine can support. if you have a 4 core processor, you may only get 2 threads plus an additional 2 worker threads for processing things like animation. Though I we are definitely looking at other ways to improve other game systems to take better advantage of using multiple threads while they’re not in use.
…snip…

Thank you very much for your detailed answers to the many questions posed you and the rest of the development team.

As for the section quoted above and if you refer to my above post you will not that the lack of threads may not be an ArenaNet issue. Since then I have checked several of my friends computers, almost all of which have AMD processors. Of the six that are using FX class processors I found that only twice did the chipset/processor driver install properly. I can not speak to Intel processors, but I would as that you advise people experiencing low frame rates to uninstall their chipset and processor drivers, and then reinstall them starting with the oldest version first. This was the only way I found that consistently corrected the multi-threading issues in Guild Wars 2 and a few other games.

Thank you again for everything you do for us that we never get to hear about!

Not to change the subject but I wonder how much of what everyone is talking about (other than sales) are background reasons why two of the three founders left ArenaNet during the development of Guild Wars 2.
I know that one of the founders that left did comment that he did not like the direction that Mike was taking the game. When asked if that was the reason he left he commented that it was “time for me (him) to move on.” He declined to comment further.

You must be thinking about Guild Wars where you could actually have a customized set of skills to play with. While I love the idea of what you are saying it has been stated that one of the reasons Guild Wars 2 does not have the same skill system is that it was too “hard to balance.” I don’t see this happening.

20131005 – Prior to the update on 03 September 2013 I had no lag issues what so ever. I was however having a lot of issues with a new sound card I had purchased (testing the third factory replacement) so when my FPS dropped from an average of 4(with all the eye candy turned on max) 5 in Lions Arch to 3 (in performance mode!) and lots of skill lag, I thought nothing the sound card driver was the cause of it. Since that time I have formatted the hard drive and did a full reinstall of Windows and reinstalled my old reliable sound card, my FPS went from 2 up to 12 (still in performance mode) with about the same number of people around. Since that time I have seen some improvement with recent optimizations, I can reach 18FPS (yes, still in performance mode) and most of the skill lag is gone. Almost everyone I know of that uses both an AMD processor on an x90 chip-set motherboard and an higher end AMD video card seems to have the same issues.
I want to make sure you understand, I don’t give a kitten about WvW or any other form of PvP, I am all about PvE. So here is my question; Will these upcoming optimizations improve the situation for us?

Edit: 20131006 – Today I had my sound card drivers crash when I logged into Guild Wars 2. My frame rates are almost back to normal and most of the skill lag is gone. I really dislike playing with that kind of disadvantage however.
After restarting my computer I expected the issue to return. It did not, which would indicate that the sound card driver was at fault, except for one thing. Before I had a single core always running about 50-75%, now I have five cores running between 30-75%. I think it may have been an issue with the processor driver. Either way, I am glad that it appears fixed.

Abue.8795:

I see alot of people posting systems with dual core AMDs…. If you’re expecting to run a game that surpasses your cpu by 4 years, forget it.. it’s not going to happen, it doesn’t matter what video card your using IT IS JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, the game uses about 3 threads, so you can’t even maximize performance on such cpu. For those with high end systems, 3 threads doesn’t do the job. So unless you’re OC’ing the living kitten out of your cpu, mainly looking at AMD’s, not gonna happen.

FX8350 stock
32gb RAM 1866mhz
ATI 6970 x2
128gb SSD OCZ vertex 3

I get around 60-80fps in common areas , ~40 fps in Lion’s arch with everythign maxed out.

WvW i tend to have settings to low/low or lowest low, i get around 25-30fps in fights, its’ not amazing, but its good for the encounter.

this is defnitely not a high end pc, but a decent computer.

The point is, the game is not gonna do much more if it does use multi threading well, specially with today’s cpus. There’s little consumers can do.

However, those of you posting old computers with 2 cores or 3 cores… I’m telling you right now, dump that extra 300 bucks and get yourself a decent mobo/cpu. I know the AMD Phenom II 955+ perform better than the fx8350 for this game, so there’s your budget cpu.

For those cfoncerned about the cpu not being at 100% and getting poor performance, check usage by cores and not your typical task manager output, it’s not the same thing at all.

Overall I wish they did improve the game like they should performance wise but coding software for multi threading isn’t exactly easy either.

my 2 cents

My system is much like yours (see specs below) and I use to get about the same frame rates as you are reporting. However when SAB was re-introduced they also included some optimizations (the only one I could find specificly mentioned was sound sub-system ie: F-Mod) that appear to have a very telling effect for some people. My frames rates have dropped to the point that the game is almost unplayable in any size of zerg group (FPS less than 10 using performance (the lowest possible) settings).
Any ideas? I have even gone so far as to format my hard drive and reinstall windows installing only the latest drivers for the chip set, processor and video card. I have even updated my Sound Blaster drivers…
I have no clue what to do now other than wipe everything clean and install baseline (product introduction) drivers and work my way up from there.

I am not so sure that it is an AMD performance issue. My wife and I have almost the same system, the main difference is that I have an AMD 6950 2GB card and a Sound Blaster X-FI sound card and she is using on board sound with a GTX 460 1GB. About five weeks ago, I had no video problems at all, consistantly 30+FPS (I think I was in a zerg once where the FPS dropped to 20FPS). When SAB was reintroduced into the game suddenly my FPS dropped to 7 (and that was in performance mode!). From what I read they did some optimizations to the sound sub-system (F-Mod) when the released SAB. Since then my performance has improved, my average FPS is not upto 15FPS using performance settings.
I am not a happy campter at all. What ever they did, I would like them to either undo it or fix it. I think what we really need is a properly optimized multi-threaded 64bit game client. I am not sure we actually need a 64bit client, but I can hope.

I have an AMD FX-8350 with a 6950 2GB video card, until the newest SAB came out I was consistantly running 60FPS execpt in a huge zerg where I would drop to about 35FPS. Now I get between 11 to 20FPS. My GPU load is always between 75-99% while my CPU load is never higher than 50%.
It’s not his hardware it is the game. They changed something when SAB was re-introduced and that something has borked a lot of people including myself. My wife also has an FX-8350 paired with a GTX 460 1GB and she consistantly runs at 60FPS or more on highest settings.

Alas, building a profile did not work for me. My 6950 did not have any issues with 2D or 3D GPU core clocks.
The issue is not at my end, it appears to be either a server issue or a routing issue on Level3’s part. I am being sent to level3 in Japan, Germany, Paris France and all over the United States.

Someone on reddit found a PDF of a presentation from GDC 2013, slide 46 of that covers one of the causes of lag and a host of other issues. It may be that the servers are exceeding thier memory limits. Here is a link to the presentation: http://above-the-garage.com/blogstuff/Clarke-Willson_Stephen_Guild_Wars_2.pdf

Long story short, I am now looking for a server update.

kanderous.7512:

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

I would really like to hear from ANet about this latest rash of lag. Attached is my Network Diagnostics log.

First thing I’m seeing is that your ISP’s routing through Level3 to connect to Guild Wars 2’s servers.

You’re not alone on this. The Level 3 routing has been pretty bad for us despite pings being nominal. Packet loss is just horrible.

What really sucks is that my wife’s computer plays the game normally. Here is a copy of the Network Diagnostics test from her system. Note that we share an internet connection. I am not sure why she has no lag and I am almost paralized by it.

Behellagh.1468:

Kendra Nightwind.8734:

Geemo.6018:

I’m not going to claim to be a programmer of 30 years, but I will say this. When wow launched it’s 64bit client my fps doubled. A 64bit client in Gw2 would mitigate the pain that is WvW. Please stop trying to convince yourselves that a 32bit client is just as good as a 64bit client. Even a monkey knows it’s better to have 64 bananas over 32 bananas.

Too bad your comment will never be heard. A 64bit client would go a long way to fixing a lot of issues. So would moving from DirectX 9c only to 10 or 11. Wait a minute; we were promised GW2 would support DX 10.

No we weren’t (promised Dx10 or 11) and 64-bit isn’t the panacea you think it is. The game already can use 4GB of memory as it is, 64-bit would just let it have loads more. Performance improvement would be negligible. Performance issues like this are a design problem and while refactoring the rendering pipeline is doable it’s not a quick or easy endeavor when you are making sure you aren’t breaking anything or making it worse. It’s obvious the game has problems when loads of players are packed into a relatively small area and/or the area is visually complex. This shows the problem is algorithmic in nature.

Also it’s easy to create lots of threads, the game spins off over 40 not counting the TP, but what’s hard is to do it in a way where these threads can efficiently run in parallel to one another and not be blocked, frequently forced to sync or have vastly different run times so the performance improvement is no where near what you would think.

Sorry, but you are not correct. We were promised DX10 support shortly after Vista came out (I believe it was back in 2007). Gail Gray was the one that publicy announced it during an ingame chat. At the time she was very pleased that she was allowed to announce it.

I would advise (based on running both Nvidia and AMD on two identical computers) going with a single Nvidia card. My wife has had a lot less issues wither her Nvidia than I have had with my AMD 6950.
We are both running 8350s at default speeds with 8GB of RAM.

I would really like to hear from ANet about this latest rash of lag. Attached is my Network Diagnostics log.

River Drake = Sparky
Black Bear = Grumpy
Armor Fish = Fugly
Wolf = Wolfie the 10000 (Actually he is the great, great… grand son of my GW1 pet)
Black Moa = Southern Fried