Guild Wars 2

Unfortunately the Mac version has remained in Beta for 8 or 9 months now. I hope they are still working on it, but communication has been lacking.

File a support ticket.

I don’t have problems in WvW.

Kneru.8014:

brunohstein.9038:

Why is CnD chaining a problem?

It doesn’t do much damage, but it’s just annoying to try and combat, like LDB spam.

I find mesmers pretty annoying to combat, because I always end up killing the clones. Maybe the class should be removed.

Waffler.1257:

Believe it or not, most people don’t play WvW to farm loot.

Yeah, it’s amazing. WvW is the aspect of the game I currently enjoy the most, even though is it least rewarding in terms of gear drops or gold income.

I think it is great that WvW somehow is fun without the constant gear grind that seems to be required in many other aspects of MMOs.

It’s normal.

15char…..

You are probably violating some terms of use by letting your friend use your account.

Anyways, a game account exists independent of the client in use. Unless Anet discontinues the Mac client any account will be playable on the Mac, whether it’s beta or final version.

The concept of a physical copy of a game has died a long time ago (although retail boxes still exist).

It’s only the hawks as far as I know.

Did you all file support tickets? I filed one a few days ago. I got a non-generic reply after sending my system report, with some “tests” to run. I still have to do it.

More awareness is better, so file a report with a screenshot or a link to this thread.

Same here. You have to file a support ticket. Anet doesn’t really pay attention to this forum.

Great work, thank you.

I hope that it will be made sticky, and that it will be kept up to date.

Nope.

Did you check the remaining system requirements, since obviously you didn’t check for the OSX version? I’m asking because otherwise you will come back and say “I paid $20 for the system upgrade but the game won’t run on my 2008 Mac that plays WoW without problem. I’m going back to WoW”

MikeFerguson.8921:

Why is it taking so long? Well, I think the best way I can describe how we’ve had to approach this problem is that it’s almost like changing a flat tire on a car that’s still moving.

Best analogy ever!

SB sounds good. You probably should go for acrobatics to boost your health, so you can survive some AoE.

Most of the time running with the zerg should net you quite some experience from completing events (capture, defense, etc). What I also found very efficient is to repair keep walls that are under attack, because it gives you a gold event completion every three minutes.

Macbooks have a long history of WiFi connection problems. It seems to be somewhat random, playing with some router settings might help. It took over a year and many OSX updates on my old 2007 MBP until it finally would stop dropping each and every WiFi connection every other minute.

I don’t think the GW2 client is at fault here.

I still don’t understand this question.

You can turn by holding the right mouse button and moving the mouse, you can run forward by holding both mouse buttons. That is how I always move.

Now if you have a magic mouse, obviously you have to turn on right mouse button emulation. If you try to use the touchpad… well, that’s a bad idea I think, but you can probably make it work by assigning the right click to certain touchpad areas.

I have used a Logitech Bluetooth mouse for a few years. Recently I upgraded to a SteelSeries Kana, since the Logitech had connection issues and had lost precision. Steelseries doesn’t have proper Mac drivers, I use USB Overdrive to assign function to the extra buttons, but I don’t actually use them.

Drozy.1625:

maybe with the new mac os x 10.8.3 update as these are to have improved video drivers?

Unless the patch consists of replacing OSX with windows + directX, it won’t do.

One could interpret a “native Mac application” as something that runs on OSX, rather than requiring bootcamp or a virtual machine running windows.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Tech-Support-Claims-Mac-Forums-Are-Not-Used/first#post1392099

The bottom line is that you should create support tickets for any and all problems you run into.

Note that your bug report (the first sentence of your post) is too generic for the devs to understand or reproduce what is causing the crash. You have to include information about your machine, and a more detailed description about where and under what circumstances you crashed.

So far I didn’t experience any problems that were explicitly related to highly populated areas. I have participated in large WvW battles and in dragon slaying with large groups (50++ players), and while my FPS goes down a lot, I don’t remember any crashes.

where does the link point? To this forum?

I would assume that the person that replied did not understand the “native” part.

I’ve had my ups and downs with WvW. Sometimes I spent hours with the zerg and left with a feeling that I accomplished very little, despite taking and holding objects, other times I help fight in a loosing battle against a stronger opponent, and leave satisfied.

Some notes:
The experience gain from WvW can be pretty decent, both when running with the Zerg or when defending a keep.

Gear drops are rare, in particular for leveling players. This makes you fall behind in the item curve compared to when you level up in PvE. So I understand how it can feel unrewarding to WvW while leveling up.

You earn some server-wide boni, more if you perform well. So there is a reward!

To some extent you want to identify with your server, and want it to do well. It’s like amateur sports, you participate, you want to perform well, and maybe win, even though the rewards can be marginal to non-existent, and participating is as important as winning.

In the end it comes down to what others have said already: Do it because you enjoy doing it. If you don’t enjoy it, find something else, there is so much in this game after all.

Thanks for posting this. It somewhat defeats the purpose of having a tech support forum if they don’t actually provide support there. But at least this message shows that behind the scenes, they are monitoring the situation and are still working on the client.

In terms of gear, what do you guys think is a gear set that goes well with most weapon choices?

Condition (carrion) only really works with daggers (and SB to some extent), and of course has the problem with the 25 stacks cap. Is a mixture of zerker + some vit/toughness items a good starting point?

I’m still building my first decent (rares + exotics) gear set. I enjoyed D/D condition a lot while leveling, but I can’t really play it properly in dungeons since I’m still learning them.

Moddo.7105:

I have it from reliable source that this is Anet’s new math.

It wouldn’t be such a bad idea to randomize the first round of matchups after the reset.

The only effect that spam usually has is getting a thread locked.

@Anet… we’re waiting

reboot can help sometimes (or type “killall cider” in a terminal)

I would like the option to disable the top right corner information, or to choose what information is displayed. The winter/christmas event notification was particularly annoying.

@vince

Thanks for your detailed reply.

Of course the wrapper is responsible for any performance difference between OSX and Windows. I also understand when you say that maybe there is little hope for improvements, based on your past experience with Transgaming.

However for me as a customer, Anet is responsible for what they provide to me. I don’t care where they bought their wrapper, as much as I don’t care who runs their servers or which programming language they use.
Anet is not communicating at all about this, whether they are happy with the current (beta) client, whether they are working on improving it (probably not, since they can not), or whether they are looking into other options to provide a better experience.

Maybe the number of OSX users is so small that they don’t care. Minorities can be very loud on the internet, but maybe it’s just 500 of their 3 million sold copies that run the OSX client. In that case they might as well decide to not care about it anymore.

vince.5937:

They are not responsible for anything other the game files the Cider wrapper uses. Transgaming is the company they’ve worked with to produce the mac client. All edits to the Cider wrapper are done through Transgaming, so they are the company responsible. I’ve been explaining this for years. If you go through the files in the client you’ll see that there’s a regular PC install within the app. Everything else? Transgaming. Think of the Cider Wrapper as a CD player, and GW2 as a CD. If the CD is undamaged and plays well in another device but not in the CD player, what is at fault?

1. How do you know that Anet doesn’t modify the wrapper? I know that all the unofficial ports (e.g. portingteam.com) require heavy modifications of the basic cider wrapper.
2. Anet might have bought or licensed the cider wrapper from Transgaming. Still it is their responsibility to pressure Transgaming into improving the wrapper if they care about their customers.
3. Anet has the choice about what experience to provide. They could use other wrappers, or write a native client. There is no way you can just say “it’s all Transgaming.”

I understand how the wrapper looks on the inside, and partially how it works. But it’s not as simple as blaming Transgaming. If I buy an iPad, and the screen breaks, Apple has to fix it, although the screen is not produced by Apple…

vince.5937:

ArenaNet is not responsible for anything in the mac client except the game files. The company that is responsible for how the mac client runs is Transgaming.

I have said this before, I will say it again: This is exactly what happened with City of Heroes. Transgaming updated the Cider emulation wrapper once and then went dark for three years.

Anet is offering the Mac client, and as such is responsible for it. Whatever happens in the background should not be of interest for us. If transgaming can not deliver a better port, it is Anets responsibility to explore different options (go native, use wine), or drop official support for OSX (hopefully not).

I’m sure it’s banable. Whether it is something they will actually enforce I don’t know.

I sometimes have to log out (& kill the launcher) and log back in to fix it. Not sure if it is a mac related issue, a guild mate told me how to fix it.

Still it’s annoying sometimes.

No problems here. Good luck solving it.

Did anyone actually read the patch notes?

“Daily achievements now rotate on a daily basis.”

If one of the daily achievements is not to your liking, you are free to skip it on that day.

loseridoit.2756:

The difference is that there is a difference in corporate policies. For example, Mark Shuttleworth is willing to listen to the woe of Game developers. Major graphic chip manufactures are giving semi decent direct support and updates to Linux. For these reason alone, Linux is the better platform for gaming.

Yeah but unfortunately Linux is not a platform, it’s 100 different platforms. Maybe Ubuntu could become a platform for gaming (they are also close to publishing a mobile OS). But compared to that OSX is a huge market.

@iBlasiannn
That’s the bottom line. OSX is not the best gaming platform, and the wrapper takes away additional performance. But I think there is also some room in the case of GW2 to improve the wrappers performance.

@loseridoit
Yeah, drivers is a big issue too. Both ATI and Nvidia regularly release updates and work with game producers to optimize performance for many popular games. That’s something you just don’t get from Apple.
Linux is not really a better option. But if you plan on using Linux as main OS, you have much more freedom to put together a PC (or choose from a variety of laptops) that will have better gaming performance (on Windows) and are not restricted by Apples bootcamp drivers.

dipnlik.8972:

Lilsteele, the Intel HD 4000 is an integrated graphics card that performs just fine—the same or little better than my discrete card (330M).

Yeah, intel is improving their integrated cards quite a bit, but still, according to your report, the newest 2012 integrated GPU (the HD-4000) performs on par (or slightly better) with a 2010 low end GPU (the 330M).

Now, the HD-4000 was a significant step up from the HD-3000 that drives most of the 13’’ MBPs from 2011. So while the HD-3000 is listed as minimum playable graphics card, I wouldn’t expect the world.

The OP asked what Mac he needs to play the game on high settings. I think for that you really want a dedicated graphics card, ideally a 2012 model, and probably a windows partition to run the native client.

What might be happening is that the MBP is throttling the CPU because it is not able to provide sufficient cooling. I recommend using the frame rate limiter as a first step of getting the load under control. Set it to 30 fps and reduce the settings until you get constant 30 fps in most areas of the game.

I’ve played a number of games on all my macs. As long as you have a dedicated graphics card, they provide a decent performance, but it’s certainly not comparable to what you can get out of a gaming desktop for the same amount of money. In addition, in the case of GW2, the port is using a wrapper and therefore doesn’t make very efficient use of the systems resources.

I appreciate your input, and some of your tips and the link that Leowan posted will help me to improve.

Overall I’m doing fine out in the world, with caltrops, blossom and dodge I can easily take groups of enemies. My dungeon experience is very limited, maybe I just have to learn when to dodge etc to be less vulnerable. And/or stay at range with the bow sometimes.

Thanks again!

To be honest you need a Mac with a real graphics card to play games. The 13’’ only comes with integrated graphics, that’s not enough to get decent performance in modern games.

Yeah. That’s not a laptop to run games on. I don’t think there is much you can do about the performance.

An option would be to install windows on a partition and see if that gives better performance…

I think the current skill system is a great basis for the future. The current selection of weapons is certainly enough for early levels. And I actually like the idea that the weapon determines your play style. Don’t forget that in most other MMOs, the weapon type is largely irrelevant, so everyone just goes for the highest stats.

I hope that future patches will add more weapon types that become available at higher levels. But other than that, I’m quite happy.

The solution is to buy a gaming PC. Laptops will run hot when you run games on them (or encode videos etc). It’s normal.

A workaround is to enable the frame rate limit. I have mine set to 30 fps. If you don’t put a limit you can not reduce the load on the system, since it will try to pump out as many fps as possible.

Thanks for your answers. I’ll just continue to level up then.

seriously? Just log out if you have to go AFK, or waypoint to some safe area.

Hi all.

I’m playing a thief as my first GW2 char. I like the D/D condition play style for PvE/leveling. Yesterday I played my first dungeon and also participated in some WvW. Overall it was fun and ok, but in particular in the dungeon I felt very squishy.

Level: 35
Traits: 5/0/0/10/10
Gear: Condition and Condition/Precision
Full build: http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/thief#3|3|2642|2786|2645|3997|4485|5|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|10|1165|0|0|10|782|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|

Things I would like advice on:

- Should I go for something like 0/0/10/10/10 instead (towards lvl 40), to be less squishy?
- What secondary skills should I use for dungeons? Hide in the shadows is useful as heal, but is it the best choice?
- I’ve been using a bow as secondary to get out some ranged damage when my health is low. Is that a good choice with a condition gear and build, or would P/P or P/D be better?

Any other tips are welcome.

Dustfinger.9510:

Sylvari aren’t even plants in the sense that they may or may not have genders. They are more like the fruit of the Pale Tree. They have functional sexual organs to mimic humans but it is only to mimic humans. They do not have the internal organs required to carry children.

They are a collection of abstract notions the Pale Tree had about what made up the human, as she really only saw the surface. They are a tree’s interpretation of humans.

http://www.talktyria.net/2011/08/11/sylvari-lore-interview-with-ree-soesbee-kristen-perry/

This is a pretty sensible explanation. I’m not sure what else there is to say. Thanks for the link!

Check this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/I-Just-Feel-So-UP-Am-I-Doing-It-Wrong

Some good advice there

3/4 of the US also have a different time zone. Should i feel discriminated because the forum is not on central time?

I would like a more optimized OSX client. Whether this is realized by improving the cider port, finding a better port technology, or by writing a native client doesn’t matter much to me.

One should not forget that asking for a native client might be too much. I don’t know how the GW2 engine is set up, but it might rely heavily on Windows libraries and technology (DirectX) that is just not available on OSX and might make a native client very unlikely.

The OSX compatible graphics acceleration option is usually OpenGL/OpenCL. As far as I know, this is not as optimized as DirectX for gaming, so overall the gain from having a native client might not be that much, while the cost could be significant for Anet.

I appreciate the information provided here. I bought the game a few weeks ago, and started playing a thief. It took me a few deaths to realize that I can’t just stand in front of mobs and spam my abilities. Now I’m working towards lvl 20 and I’m mostly comfortable with a D/D condition build.

I was happy to read that also others consider the thief to be squishy in PvE. I still get into trouble easily, mostly when I have bad engagements involving ranged mobs. In comparison, I feel that my elementalist has more upfront damage and gets away with slightly less kiting… but that’s only lvl 8 so far