Guild Wars 2

sirsquishy.8531:

jayson.6512:

thank’s for the reply i’ll just try other games if i will get higher fps. since i got this laptop with free witcher 3.

The issue might be the 512MB partitioned vRAM on the 970m. Grab GPU-Z, like suggested, using its sensors tab verify the Utilization (should NOT be 3% or less), and the vRAM that is used (typically GW2 will use less then 1GB vram, but ive seen it use 2GB with ALL the options turned on).

If you are in the 2.5GB vRAM usage area then that’s probably the issue. the 970’s are notorious for having performance issues when more then 2.5GB of vRAM is in use. And that could simply be the case here.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Discloses-Full-Memory-Structure-and-Limitations-GTX-970

The gtx970m is not the same as the desktop 970. It’s not affected by this problem at all.

The OS X GW2 client is not just the same as running the Windows 32bit client, it literally is the Windows 32bit client, just put inside the Cider wrapper.
That also answers question 1: the missing window mode resolution is due to the wrapper missing the appropriate resolution preset that compensates for the additional window bar on top. You’d end up with a game window that’s larger than your screen’s vertical resolution, so that option is not offered.

Your game folder should be something around 20 Gigabyte of data. If it’s significantly less, you haven’t downloaded the full game, only the installer. All the programs and game data you need to play will be in that folder.

Please also have a look at this:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/coming-soon-beta-version-of-streaming-client/

This might be helpful in limiting the amount of data you download at home in the future.

You’re CPU throttled, so changing that particular setup with a stronger GPU is not going to make a noticeable difference.
Also, what’s the actual refresh rate you can set for the external screen? Not much of a point in going faster than that anyway, and if it’s 60Hz, you might just set the frame limiter to 60 and call it a day.

Translation of Johns response:
If your friend buys 800 gems with cash and puts them on the exchange for gold, and you buy 800 gems with gold, there is no way to ensure the 800 gems you buy are those your friend put in there, but they have been put in there by someone who paid for them with cash. They are not created from thin air.

I suppose John felt the need to clarify this because in other games with such an exchange system (specifically: EVE Online) the transaction is directly player to player, whereas in GW2 the source of the gems is obscured by the trading post.

Dictonary shows both pronounciations are applicable: why-vern and wiv-vern.

Looks like the graphics card may be overheating under heavy load.
Can you check whether the fan is actually spinning properly while the machine is running the game? Maybe the heatsink needs some dust cleaning?

Ralanost.8913:

Not my fault the devs don’t even know what to call the mechanics in their own game.

You’re just making up a differentiation that doesn’t exist. Living World is the newer, official term for the added episodic content, which includes both instanced and open world additions. Anything that used to be called Living Story, back when they started experimenting with this content strategy, is now called Living World.

A google search with “Mac Pro Crossfire” brings up a number of articles detailing how it does seem to work with Windows.

With GW2 being mostly CPU throttled, this shouldn’t actually make that much of a difference, though it may help with other graphic-intensive games.

You will get the improved performance and higher graphics options that come simply from switching to the Windows client though, that alone will probably help quite a bit. I still wouldn’t expect it to run well at full resolution, 4K is just too much.

Only one card in the Mac Pro is used for actual rendering, the other is used for compute tasks. They are not running in a Crossfire configuration, as OS X doesn’t support that.
Neither the CPU nor the GPU are particularly well suited to run the game at such a high resolution, especially not with the additional performance penalty of the GW2 OS X client which seems to get worse at higher resolutions. Running at half that resolution should work pretty decently though.

In short, a Mac Pro is a work computer, not a gaming machine.

That CPU can boost up to 3.3 GHz, which should allow for a solid fps with high settings (except maybe shadows/reflections) at 1080p. Except zergs/world bosses of course.
Make sure it’s ventilated well so it doesn’t run too hot. GW2 can heat up your CPU quite a bit, and if the cooling is somehow inhibited, it won’t be able to maintain the boost for very long.

papry.8096:

I don’t get the relationship between grind/farm & bad community ?

Who is verbally abusing players for targeting champion mobs outside of the train? Or for pushing an event towards resolution before it was milked for all possible champion spawns?

Players are more likely to be nice to each other when they are not competing. GW2s game mechanics and world design remove many competitive elements that existed in this space in other MMOs, and locked them away in the PvP modes. Whenever some aspect of competition was reintroduced into PvE, either by Anet or the players themselves, the players quickly fall back into the same bad habits as in other communities. Even in this “friendliest community in MMOs”.

“Enhance” jokes in 3 … 2 …

Sir Cusfreak.5971:

OK, so we all know it crashes often on the 5k imac. I have a PC but my wife has been playing on the i7 5k m290x imac, and its crashing pretty consistently at Vinewrath, or any large event. We’re not trying to play at 5k, we know thats not going to happen, and thats ok, but we’d sure like to be able to play and not crash at every large event. Other than bootcamp, I’m not sure what to do. We really don’t want to set up bootcamp. What will make this playable?

This is the unfortunate reality of the Mac client. large-scale events with high player numbers are more likely to cause crashes. You can reduce the chances by changing all settings to absolute minimum just for those fights. Of course that will make the game look like crap.
I don’t particularly like it either, but Bootcamp is to this day the best solution to get GW2 to run on your Mac reliably.

Creating a skill disparity between PvE and PvP that Arenanet has repeatedly stated they want to avoid if possible.

I’d rather they stop trying to make ye olde MMO epic boss encounters in a combat system that doesn’t support them, and rather aim for encounters that are more PvP-like in nature, so the balancing makes sense.

Mallix sounds like a wuss. I don’ think anyone is going to steal that name … ;P

Herre you go, OP. This thread is going nowhere fast, but atleast you can learn something useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Nope. What you ‘re describing there is server lag. When what your client is showing you is different from what the server is doing, because the server can’t send the data to your client fast enough for some reason. That is server lag.

ting.3268:

Though admittedly… this workaround kind of defeats the purpose of playing this game on such a spiffy screen.

Playing at 5k is just not an option, no matter the plattform. Even highest-end gaming hardware can barely drive a game at that resolution. 2560×1440 (exactly half of the native 5k) is a realistic target for the hardware you have to work with on the iMac.

Chase.8415:

Repair Instructions for Mac:
Click on the “Finder” icon located in your Dock or the desktop of your computer to make “Finder” the active program in the Finder menu bar.
Click on “Go” in the Finder menu bar. A dropdown will appear.
Click on “Utilities.”
Once in the “Utilities” folder click Terminal.app.
Copy and paste the following line into the terminal and click “Enter”:
/applications/guild\ wars\ 2.app/contents/MacOS/cider —use-dos-cwd C:Gw2 -- C:\\GW2\\GW2.exe –repair

May I suggest for future use the much shorter "Press command+space to open spotlight, type “Terminal”, start terminal.app from the results list

Also, copy-pasting that link can cause issues with the double dash before use-dos… it is often copied as a long dash (em dash) instead of two short dashes (en dash). That might explain the error message that NWalker and Athilio got.

That MBP model is known to have some issues with the performance/stability of the Nvidia graphics chip.
Maybe look into that:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5552235

Do you have problems with any other game?

Only reason the game might lose OSX support is if they actually do move away from DX9. Since they made no such announcement, there’s also no reason to believe the current Mac client wouldn’t run HOT.

You must have been there before. The point of interest has already been unlocked. Short memory?

Biohazard.7523:

An Error Prevented Saving:
Message Body length must at least be 15.

That’s so poetic …

Jeremy 2015, Nevar forget!

Garambola.2461:

You do realize that …

Yes, I realize all of that. Still the idea that a company can claim some sort of, if not ownership, than at least exclusivity, on something as universal as a colour, is kind of crazy.
Not to mention said company also tried (don’t remember if they succeded) to do the same with the letter ‘T’.

metaldude.4132:

Trademark!! that was the word I looked for. (not a native english speaker) you are right, copyright is smt else!
But still ridiculous IMO

Get used to this madness, it’s only going to get worse. You can trademark almost everything. A German communication company trademarked the color Magenta.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Since MMOs mainly relie on one core should I just look for a Dual Core set up to save money?

Not quite as simple. It’s true that the single core performance is usally what limits FPS the most, but modern MMOs (including GW2) still run on more than one thread, so being able to spread those additional threads over more cores will be beneficial. It’s not a linear scaling, that’s for sure, but there still is a benefit in having more than 2 cores.
Having more than four might not see much of a return. At that point we’re into heavy parallelization, and hardly any game, MMO or not, does that.

TL;DR: A very fast dual core may be better than a slow quad core, but a fast quad is better than both

Killeen T_T

or Verahd!

Why the heck would I feel insulted?
Grow up, for kittens sake, and be a responsible consumer. If it’s not worth the price to you, don’t buy it.

Nope. No date announcement, not even educated guesses.
Coming up is hands-on at PAX East and EGX Rezzed, and Beta shortly after that.

Beyond that, we simply don’t know.

The client does work on 10.10, so there must be some specific issue with your installation.
Look at the troubleshooting steps in the thread " [MAC] Basic Beta Client Troubleshooting" at the top of this forum, particularly step 4 in the first post.

You don’t have to go through all releases, but read the notes for April 15 patch and the September 9 patch of 2014.

Those are the 2 ‘feature patches’ that included a lot of changes to gameplay, game structure, UI and anything you want to know about how the game works these days.

For the rest, I’d recommend going to the wiki and reading up the story of Living Story Season 1, and then looking into playing Season 2.

This has been an ongoing issue with the OSX client. If you use the search function, you should be able to find older threads on this topic that might include a solution.

If you can’t find any, look at the stickied posts at the top of this forum, there’s one called “Basic Beta Client Troubleshooting”. Read it and try some of the things suggested there, specifically step 4) in the first post. That one (temporarily) fixes about 9 out of 10 issues with the Mac client. Good luck!

Dynamically resizing the screen only works on the Windows version currently. The specific technical implementation of the OSX client doesn’t allow for dynamic resizing, so you can only change the Window size on OSX by selecting a resolution from the graphics menu.

Example with fictional numbers:

A Warrior can suit up to mitigate 20.000 damage, an Elementalist can only take 10.000.
Your enemy uses a skill that does 30.000 damage. You can stand still and take it, or you can dodge it.

Is the Warriors extra armor actually usefull there?
Maybe you missed my edit about passive damage there? Armor doesn’t mean much in GW2. You simply do not stand still and take hits! You can’t ‘suck it up’, just doesn’t work like that.

Also what you’ve been told there was a lie. All professions are viable. The only time where people are really selective is in high-end dungeon speedclearing.

Armor classes don’t neccessarily correspond with roles in a holy-trinity combat design.
Even if you wear heavy armor, you still can’t be a tank if you can’t keep an opponents attention focused on you (no taunt mechanics).
And no matter how ‘priestly’ your robes are, if even your best healing skill can’t heal as much as the enemy can do damage, you can’t be a dedicated healer.

Also, armor is a passive defense. You’ll learn quickly that passive defense doesn’t do all that much in GW2. If you just stand still and let yourself get hit, you’re just going to die, even in heavy armor. That’s why it’s not much of an advantage. The light and medium armor classes have other tricks to make up for it.

Combat in GW2 is designed around opportunity cost. If you make a character that can take large hits and heal very well, it will do very little damage. Since you can build a very damaged focused character, and still stay alive even though you’re very fragile, just by playing skillfully, the latter is usually the prefered option. The ‘best defense is a strong offense’ idea is what most players see as the best way to go in GW2, almost to a fault.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I see that a lot more of you have provided your logs, and thanks for doing that. Brad and his fellow team members are still reviewing these things, but I know he’ll be posting as soon as he can more info.

Thanks for your patience!

Just a thought, since the FRA datacenter is right around the corner for me, if you need someone on site to kick some lazy sysadmins behind, I humbly offer my services.

[edited for filter, I’d never kick a kitten!]

Get a friend with a faster internet connection to download it for you, burn it on a bluray, and ship it to you. Shouldn’t be a problem, it’s just peanuts after all.

Respect to LOTRO fans, they are holding their ground against the behemoth.

Healix.5819:

Notice how the location goes from Germany to Texas in a single hop with a minimal difference in response time? Either NCSoft has really advanced technology or…

Yeah, I was scratching my head about that one. The 62.xx.xx.xx. address is localized correctly, the 206.xx.xx. one hops across half the world. Meh, internet … it’s all magic anyway.

To expand on Michaels explanation: the restrictions to textures are the same as in the Windows client when running in 32bit Windows. So the options are either Cider changing to appear like 64bit Windows, or changes to the 32bit Windows client that remove the restrictions.

Neither seems very probable at the moment.

BillFreist.1527:

We’ve been investigating this issue and have something for those affected by latency and disconnect issues to try out.
…
-Bill

Most of the pathpings seem to look ok until they reach the EU servers, only dropping off afterwards once they continue to the Austin servers.

Bill, could you give us a short technical explanation of why the IPs of the EU players all continue to resolve to the Austin/Texas datacenter after going through the Frankfurt/Germany one?
There’s a lot of … ‘interpretation’ going on, with the assorted doomsaying. A little insight into why the data looks as it does might be helpful.

1) Trahearne – Eventually, though only as a support character at best.
2) Writing – Better then Season one. ‘Legitimately good’ is a matter of debate.
3) Mechanics – yes, actually. Most of it is in the new maps though that can be accessed without purchasing the story instances. There’s some cool stuff in there as well though.
4) Characters – It’s the same characters from Season one, but they are getting better at writing them. See answer 2.
5) Rewards – GW2 is kitten about rewards. It’s designed that way. How players still haven’t figured this out after 2 years is a mystery. There’s a new armor skin that you may or may not like, and a somewhat cool back item with a fairly interesting mode of assembly.
6) Expansion – That’s the big question. They keep teasing big things coming after the current season, but we’ve heard that before.
7) Money – This one is hard to say actually. If you only had to catch up on 2 or 3 episodes, I’d say sure, just a few gems. For the complete season, that might be a bit much. Remember you can play the story episodes in a party with someone else who has them, without needing to pay for them. You just won’t get the achievements and rewards that way.

METALROCKS.6097:

@gilosean
thats what i did. i pressed H but that new mask is not there. also pressed the “hero” icon on the top left corner. i guess i will never understand this new option of the wardrobe. wish it would be just like it was before when i got the game.

If the mask is in your inventory, but it is not shown in your equipment screen, that means there is some condition that prevents you from equipping it. The equipment screen only displays items that your character can actually equip.

Locate the mask in your inventory, hover your cursor over it, and look at the description. Is there any text highlighted in red?

Also, don’t ever pay money to change the appearance of an item. The transmutation charges required to do that are very easy to come by in the game, there is no need to pay money for them.

Funny enough, a hallmark of maturity is to stop caring too much about maturity.

What did I want out of this game?

I was looking for an MMO that is aware of the shortcomings of previous games, and attempts to improve on those by questioning established standards and trying do do something different that results in a better experience overall. The manifesto had a lot of very appealing concepts, some of which have been fully realized, some only half, others not really.
I applaud the devs for realising an MMO where nearly every mechanic encourages players to be cooperative, creating a much better atmosphere for players. The difference in general in-game player attitude between this game and others is absolutely baffling.
I love the ideas behind the combat design, and I weep for them only implementing half of it.
I love the idea behind the Dynamic Event system, and I mourn the decision to more or less abandon its further development to focus on telling a single-player story instead.
The game feels best to me where they actually broke with convention, and worst where they played it safe, but I understand that’s not an easy decision to make when you run a business.
I think they are doing a major mistake with their secrecy concerning the future course of the game. And the less said about the OSX client, the better …

1) Split the party! Avoid single-encounter design whenever possible, focus on multiple parallel fights. Allows better scaling, alleviates many issues with large group combat, capitalizes on the strengths of GW2 combat.

2) Accessibility. High-end difficulty will probably require a guild as organizational structure, so make sure the respective tools for that are present, concerning map-/instance management. Ideally the design has a ‘backdoor’ to allow access for less-skilled/organized players outside of guilds to play the raid content too, albeit without the prestigious rewards.

3) Reevaluate non-gear/gold based rewards. Titles, Rankings, guild perks, server perks. Consider rewards that can be reissued and that aren’t ‘succeed once, done forever’ type of deals. Handwaving example: beat ‘easy’ raid: 30% waypoint cost reduction for a week, beat ‘hard’ raid: 70% reduction, beat ‘hard’ raid with special hardcore condition: free WPs and special title.

Fhenrir, you can scale UI elements, there’s a setting for it in the options. Try to make them larger, tell us if it helps with readability.

So far the majority of suggestions seem to replicate the boss-focused raid designs of other MMOs, including all the flaws and problems those designs inherit. With GW2 already missing one of the main design objectives of other MMO’s raids (provide continuous power progression to stretch player retention), a raid in GW2 can (and should) take completely different approaches.

Proposal Overview

Multi-objective raid design with several parallel encounters to facilitate multi-group play that leverages the design of event chains from the GW2 open world instead of isolated single-target boss fights.

Goal of Proposal

Provide a compartmentalized, structured, replayable piece of content for larger groups of players that provides challenge by requiring planning and strong coordination between smaller groups, without overemphasising minmaxing or extreme build-dependency.

Proposal Functionality

This raid design revisits the idea of a GW2 map containing a number of event chains that, when played from start to finish, represent a progression from a starting state to a resolution state. The raid could use instanced copies of existing world maps as well as new maps, and incorporate both existing events that are retuned and linked and new event chains with new encounters. The challenge of such a raid scenario lies in reaching the resolution state within a certain range of win conditions. These could be time limits, resource limits, resolved events, player death count and many more. One core element of the design is that it doesn’t rely on the whole raid group fighting a single encounter, but rather to require coordination between several smaller groups to resolve a number of encounters in parallel to progress the scenario and reach the resolution state.
Instead of a single encounter which tends to be solved rather formulaic by maximizing damage for some, survivability for others, and a few specialists with key skills to counter boss mechanics, this raid design can be tuned to require players to have a plan over multiple encounters, allocating and changing resources to the individual groups, syncronizing progress across groups and more, to optimize the outcome towards the resolution state.
This favours encounters that play to GW2 combat’s strength, namely small groups with strong cooperation, where every single group member has a significant part in the success of the whole group, instead of the classic “100 warriors attack a dragons toenail”-school of encounter design.

With the raid playing out over multiple parallel encounters, this also allows for more win-states than just succeed/fail, as well as more scaling options by adding or subtracting more parallel encounters. Newbies can be rewarded for partial completion, while players looking for harder challenges and associated prestigious awards can be presented with much more tightly-tuned win-conditions or even optional encounters if the raid group managed to exceed in pushing through the scenario.

Thematically, these raids can lean on a number of existing conflicts within the GW2 world, e.g. the centaurs siege in Harathi, Flame Legion conquering Fireheart, Icebrood overrunning Frostgorge, or playing through historic scenarios like the siege of Ebonhawke when Kralkatorrik created the brand, the Foefire, the various attacks on Lion’s Arch etc.

Associated Risks

The biggest ‘risk’ as I see is that this approach requires significantly more resources than creating a number of boss encounters. Also, just like everything else that aspired to provide ‘endgame’ in GW2, the percieved worth of the reward system will eventually decide if player deem this a worthy investment of their time. I’d like to see the character title system revisited as a possible type of reward

Endo Kazuki.2086:

Thinking about getting an iMac too. However, are you guys using the mac beta client or bootcamp?

Both. OSX client for short game sessions/open-world playing when I don’t want to reboot. Bootcamp for WvW/Bossfights/longer playsessions on the weekend. Depending on what you want to do in the game, Bootcamp might be a good idea.

Endo Kazuki.2086:

How well does the iMac deal with the heat (fan) though when playing?

Generally speaking, the iMac runs completely silent. In some situations where the client is extremely taxed, the fans will spin up and become audible, though still not really loud. They’ll run for a minute or two and then slow down again. It helps to adjust your graphics settings smartly (turn down shadows & reflections), and use the frame limiter at 60FPS.
That’s my experience with the iMac of the previous generation (late-2012, GTX680MX).