This may or may not help but I started getting the crash partway through the update today at the same spot (assertion in AssetDownloaderCommon.cpp) and I found that by bypassing my HTTP proxy I was able to get the update to finish. If you have a proxy or web filtering security package you might try disabling it temporarily and see if that fixes it for you.
UPDATE: On a whim, I bypassed my HTTP proxy and the update finished successfully. Not sure why this is so since I have had the proxy in place since I started playing GW2 but something seems to have changed.
I did a packet capture and I didn’t see anything being denied (either in the capture or in the proxy log) so I’m thinking it might be related to the proxy caching but that’s just a guess.
Personally, I play every day after work and on weekend, too. (I did a lot of Toypocalypse over the holidays — man I love that as much as Dragon’s Nest in Guild Wars!) Anyway, when I’m online I see many of my fellow Anet folks online, too! We’re an active bunch.
As others have pointed out, for tracking or chat recording or other purposes, we don’t need bots. As the saying goes, “We have the technology.” (Bonus points for knowing the source. )
And for those of you who say “pictures or it didn’t happen…” I have the proof!
l can confirm by packet capture that the 64-bit client is not really downloading anything despite the apparent and slow progress of the download counter. The client GET requests are all being answered by a “404 Not Found” response from the CDN server.
I too ran into the “updraft not updrafting” issue and got to spend 30 minutes watching my other party member fight until he got disconnected. This is one of the few times I’ve wanted to smack the dev who came up with the bright idea of sticking you in a penalty box for the duration. I can see a “time out” of a minute or two but for the duration? Really?!?
Given the bugginess of this section of the story this needs to be re-worked and soon.
This seemed to work on Windows 8.1 (latest updates): disabling “Automatically detect settings” in the Network > Proxy control panel.
Not sure if this was just coincidence, or something else was fixed. Perhaps the new launcher is more sensitive to network issues / crappy proxy detection? I had previously tried basically everything everybody else had in this thread (repair, run as admin, disable firewall/av, uninstall/attempt to reinstall).
It’s a simple setting to test out, so it might be worth a shot.
FWIW, That fixed it for me as well – I no longer have to run the launcher with -email / -password / -nopatchui.
This is on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.
Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings Make sure “Automatically detect settings” is UNchecked
Funny thing is, I usually disable auto-detect but apparently I have gotten lax in my old age.
EDIT: This fixed the issue on all 3 computers. I think we have a winner!
I ran the launcher and it updated itself then it appeared to start downloading the game update but seemed to freeze after about 2 minutes. I noticed that it was still downloading content even though the UI appeared to be frozen but after about 200 Mb that too stopped.
Now, when I run the launcher it either displays an incompletely drawn login screen or it appears to be at 100% complete yet it is still non-responsive. Each time I run the launcher I see this in my system event log:
It sounds like there are multiple issues going on based on the symptoms being reported. For clarification, the issue I was describing yesterday which I resolved by bypassing my proxy cache for “assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com” was as follows:
Launch the game and log in. No update notification and errors.
Game loads and comes up to the character select screen. No errors.
Select any character. Map starts to load and eventually exits back to the launcher with no errors.
Rinse and repeat.
If I hit F11 once we got to the character select screen, the game was reporting the previous build (27,495) rather than the current build that I was seeing on my machine (27,836).
Again, no error message was ever displayed – the game simply seemed unaware that an update was available and (I’m guessing) bailed out when it realized that the server and client versions mis-matched and exited back to the launcher to try to grab the update that it couldn’t see.
This happened on my wife’s computer about a week or so ago after a new build and again today. I finally realized that it was my proxy server that was serving content from cache (apparently old data) which was causing the client to not update.
I ended up adding a cache bypass for “assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com” and the client updated properly. This may not be everyone’s issue but if you’re behind a caching proxy you might consider adding a bypass or flushing the cache.
EDIT: Additional thought: I’ve been running the same proxy config and version for at least 6 months and this issue just recently started. Not sure if something has changed on the server (Arenanet) side with cache hints but something seems to have changed recently.
EDIT2: If using VPN software to connect to an anonymizing service fixes the issue, it’s possible that some ISPs may have a transparent web cache that is affected by the same behavior I was seeing with my local proxy. Using VPN would bypass the ISP’s web cache as encrypted data is not cacheable. If so, it adds some weight to my theory that something has changed with the cache-control from Anet’s Content Delivery Network.
For what it’s worth, this happened on my wife’s computer so I copied my GW2 folder (gw2.exe, gw2.dat) from my computer and it seemed to fix the issue. I tried running with the “-repair” option first but that didn’t help.
If you have a recent backup of your files you might try restoring and re-updating as it appears something got corrupted in the most recent patch.
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