Guild Wars 2

Minis placed in an invisible bag will not get auto-deposited. I can confirm this. The fact they still take up inventory space though, is basically the price of the fun. :P Either buy a bigger bag, or put the toys away.

I will admit however, WoW’s Vanity Pets collection UI did have me spoilt. Being up to summon any minipet I’d collected at will without keeping them in my bags was nice. this said, WoW’s Vanity Pets weren’t account wide, nor were their achievements.

What I would like to hear, if anything other than what has already been mentioned…

What is the philosophy behind the orb bonus? Currently it seems only to serve the function of ensuring that a World that is already performing well, gets rewarded with +5% MaxHP and +50 all stats, so that they may perform even better. All this does is create a monopoly-victory condition for the leading World, rather than encouraging fun, close matches.

This bonus perhaps needs to instead be given to the currently last place world, or set to replace the current “Outnumbered” bonus and the Orb of Power bonus rethought.

</5cents>

Hey, if the card melts running it, I could always return it under warranty? :P

Unfortunately I do not own The Witcher 2 presently, but I will look into possibly borrowing a copy off a friend.

In the meantime, I’ve searched for alternative, more clinical means of testing VRAM. I’ve come across two tools available on the net for precisely this purpose.

memtestG80/memtestCL are utilities developed by people related to the Folding@Home project, designed to test the accuracy and reliability of VRAM for performing scientific calculations on graphics cards. My card passed this test.
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadUtils#ntoc2

The second tool, VMT, is one developed by a Russian chap, designed to test all available VRAM. It seems a lot more like memtest86+ for GPU VRAM. My card also passed this test.
http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/vmt_en

Both of these tests should, theoretically, stress the IMC and VRAM of my card far more than any game, and at the very least, as much as Guild Wars 2. Far more VRAM reads and writes are being performed here than would ever normally occur during the course of playing a game.

As promised, I ran 3dmark Vantage as well and those tests completed without issue as well.

I’m sorry Squall, but unless The Witcher 2 crashes my system when I get it? I cannot agree with your conclusions that this is a hardware issue. I will gladly admit that I have still not completely ruled out the possibility of a software related issue that is not the fault of Guild Wars 2.

At some stage I will have to do a complete reformat of my computer and try to run Guild Wars 2 in as clean an environment as I possibly can. Additionally, I have an old 7800GT graphics card laying about that I can attempt to run Guild Wars 2 in, and see how that goes. That graphics card is from my old system before I upgraded (and has since been stored safely). It has been tried and tested for many years, and assuming that it has not been damaged somehow, should be 100% stable. If swapping out the graphics card still results in a system hang in Guild Wars 2 in a clean OS environment, while other tests on the card show the same results of running without issue, then I will be absolutely ruling out the Graphics card being at fault.

I’ve so far fun Furmark and Unigine Benchmarks. Both on the maximum settings they’re capable of, with no issues. I’ll give 3D Mark Vantage a shot as well just for the sake of completion’s sake, but this is my point really. The only time I have issues is the random occurance of lockups on GW2.

I mean really… I was playing WvW for like, 8 hours or so the other day without interruption. The only problem I had was the usual “invisible people” glitches that start cropping up after that much time playing. And you can’t blame /that/ on my hardware kitten That’s happening to EVERYONE.

Then, two days later, I can’t even run the game for more than 10 seconds and it took me an hour or two of fiddling with settings to get it going again. Mind you, it only took that long as well because I was trying to figure out exactly what causes it to fall over. I was /intentionally/ trying to make it crash after a point. Vsync (in game and control panel), frame limiter, power management mode seem to be the biggest influencing settings for frequency of hangs in GW2.

But then, this is hardly surprising… as these are exactly the settings ArenaNet has given specific values for to reduce the frequency of these hangs. Which brings me back to my very FIRST and original reason for posting…. GW2 is broken kitten Not so broken that it’s completely unuseable perhaps, but there’s definitely an issue there.

Allow me to quote the NCSoft Tech Support Ticket I have open that I’ve been going through the issue with.

There are several people tracking and troubleshooting this and they have found various settings etc that may help until we get an update from Nvidia or ArenaNet that takes care of the issue.

This was after a week of an NCSoft tech support going through the usual checklists of checking drivers, benchmarks, settings, etc with me.

My entire purpose here and with my support ticket, is mostly to raise awareness and make a bit of noise so that something is eventually done about it. That may or may not be necessary, as I’m certain ArenaNet developers are already well and truely aware of this problem, but it gives me at least some peace of mind.

Fingers crossed they figure it out sometime within the next month or two.

How can you tell me that information is inconclusive? It’s simple logic. No other game I have tested hangs my system, regardless of configuration. Guild Wars 2 does.

How recent is ‘recent’? How many months? I’ve listed the exact model and revision, that should be relvant information, since you apparently know so much about this.

No I do not have a PS2 handy. And if that is the case, then please name me a game that does tax the memory controller adequately enough according to you. I’ll run that and see if it hangs. If it does, /then/ we can start talking hardware faults.

Regardless, what you are claiming does not line up with what I am experiencing. Just yesterday, I logged into a character I had left in the Heart of the Mists, in one of the least grapihcally intense areas. The game would freeze my system within 10 seconds of loading the game world. After fiddling with vsync and the frame rate limiter, in addition to returning my graphics card’s power management mode to ‘prefer maximum’ and disabling Adaptive Vsync, I was able to log in again without issue and leave Heart of the Mists.

Further; if the memory controller failing is indeed what is causing these hangs, then this does not explain why running the game on lowest detail settings (thus using smaller textures and less gpu memory) still causes these crashes. Surely by that stage, memory usage cannot possibly be significantly more than a game such as Just Cause 2 or Batman: Arkham City.

Squall, did you actually /read/ what I wrote? I listed no less than a DOZEN different games that have ALL run without issues of any kind, especially not a system hang. How can you justifiably say that when only a SINGLE game is causing such an issue, after THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF TESTING, that hardware or configuration is to blame?

In addition, I’ve found certain configuration settings within Guild Wars 2 that make the problem more frequent and certain locations in the game world that make it more frequent. I cannot say the same for any other game I have ever played on this system, because not one of them has caused this problem.

Finally, your statement regarding invisible bsods. About half of my crashes do recover with a “driver has stopped responding error.” At which point am I meant to get the BSOD then when the system hasn’t completely hung?

Skyve, it may interest you to take a look at this forum thread, where are number of other people are having the same issue we are. One of those people did have a faulty system, the others however, are in the exact same situation that I am.

One of the users believes the issue to be with a recent Windows Update on Windows 7 that is causing a branch misprediction error that forces windows into a panic event. I cannot say for certain if there’s any truth to this, but it’s more information than anyone else has come up with at this point.

Squall, this issue is occuring for a large number of people, many of whom are having no issues with other games. I am one of them.

I also get the “Black screen issue” as people are calling it. It’s a system hard freeze/lock up. The symptoms are screens going into idle/no signal mode (ie, black) with sound stuttering or buffer looping in the background, or the screen completely freezing with buffer looping sound. For some people, windows will recover and display a “driver stopped responding” error.

I get this exact same problem. Allow me to elaborate, before you all start asking the obvious questions…

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3Ghz, Factory Standard Settings)
Gigabyte GV-N570OC-13I rev2.0 Geforce GTX 570 Super Overclocked (Factory Overclocked)
Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD3 rev1.1 Motherboad (latest BIOS)
4×4GB (16GB) DDR3-1600 RAM (PC-12800) (Running at 1333MHz)
Corsair Enthusiast TX750M PSU

Average temperatures for CPU and GPU range between 42 and 48 degrees celsius while gaming. Maximum temperature while being stress tested on a warm day is no higher than 55 degrees celsius. Well and truely below the maximum safe operating temperatures for a GTX 500-Series graphics card and AMD Phenom II CPU.

RAM has been tested for faults and found to be stable.
System will run many other games indefinitely without problems (8+ hours).
Games tested: Team Fortress 2, RIFT, Aion, League of Legends, City of Heroes, Just Cause 2, Diablo 3, Skyrim, Tribes Ascend, Assassin’s Creed II, Darksiders, Batman: Arkham City.
Drivers tested: 295.10 301.42 304.79 306.02 306.23 306.97

Other fixes attempted:
- Put system in DMZ on router (D-Link DGL-4100)
- Various graphics driver settings (VSync, AA, AF, Display/GPU Acceleration, Power Management mode, etc. Many combinations tried)
- Lowest detail possible in game
- Highest detail possible in game
- VSync on/off in game
- Frame rate limiting (30, 60, Unlimited)
- Unloading/closing/removing from startup as many third-party applications as possible

Another system on the same network (thus, connected to the same router) running different hardware (Intel Quad Core with an 8800GT) runs Guild Wars 2 without issue.

As far as I am concerned, all signs point to the culprit of this issue being Guild Wars 2 itself. No other game causes this issue. I have played Guild Wars 2 since launch. Some times I will go does without a problem. Some days I will have several lock ups. Some days (like today) the game is impossible to play as it locks up my system within seconds of launching.

The problem does not seem to be reliably reproducible as I can find no particular combination of settings or configurations that definitively impacts the frequency of these crashes. They are intermittent.

I have already opened a support ticket with ArenaNet support and thus far their assistance has been unhelpful. Now, if anyone else wants to try take a crack at this, I welcome the challenge.

Update: Changing VSync settings in game tends to exacerbate the issue, sometimes causing the system to hang on changing the setting. nVidia Control Panel is set to “Use Application Settings”.