Guild Wars 2

Has there been any work done on this issue? Its affecting quite a few players.

A friend I run with all the time cannot chat outside of say, and its ruining my game as well as hers.

One issue with this whole ticket thing is the system is not very good. It has very poor feedback, support personnel frequently don’t actually read the report (its obvious by the responses), and there are no limits on how much you can submit.

Some features that would help:

- show the current tickets when submitting, remind user how many they have
- forbid submission of more than a few
- give immediate feedback on submit, its taken days to get auto-response at times
- give some way to review your tickets easier
- support personnel need to read the tickets, its quite obvious many times they didn’t

On that last note, that might strike a sore note with you, but the fact is I’ve gotten responses that were so off in left field, no one actually read my ticket. Like reporting a graphics issue and getting a response on how to send payment, etc. I’m sure its easy to do but it does appear to happen a good deal.

But mostly, right now its just very frustrating to submit a ticket. In other systems you feel much more connected and its much easier to see that its being worked on. Here its like a black box, and often you just never get a reply.

When I submit to Sony, or the people running The Secret World, response is excellent, feedback is immediate and accurate, and usually they answer and solve the issues in minutes.

Anyway, its a wonderful game, but my friends I have lost so much time, especially over the last few weeks, with one issue after another. When a friend of ours is down, we all are, its an MMO.

If I play my elementalist in the Asura starter area, the game will crash within five minutes. It just basically locks up tight and I have to manually kill it.

If I look at the log file, it usually shows a series of character animation errors like missing objects, then dies.

So far this only happens with my elementalist in that zone. I played my ranger for hours without any issues at all.

I have tried all of the usual things to fix any corruption in the game but that doesn’t appear to be the issue. Crypto signatures match files on someone else’s GW2 install so the files seem to be OK.

I assume its some issue with the zone or the objects in it, but wanted to see if anyone else is seeing it, and of course I’m looking for ideas on fixing it.

If your whole internet is going down, then the problem is not Guild Wars 2, its your internet service.

A game on your PC cannot bring down your network unless its broken.

There are definitely issues with the game, but what you describe is not a game issue.

Drakkonis.2768:

BabelFish.7234:

ens.9854:

50% damage reduction on dancing dagger?

It now does less damage than a shortbow auto attack and STILL costs 4 init?

Methinks they did not think this one through very much.

Yeah that was pretty silly in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong DD deserved a nerf but not that much of a nerf…

Oh, come on, it cripples four enemies for like 6 seconds or so.

And? What’s your point?

The people I run with can do the same kinds of things on their classes. There was no reason to nerf DD, especially this severely.

Thief needs fixes, not nerfs.

Ya, this is unbelievable. To make things worse, they also nerfed shortbow which was our only real option for sustained ranged fighting and kiting.

Its a huge nerf because it affects a lot of how some of us play and how things work together.

Very, very disappointed. Thief needs fixes, not nerfs.

Caedmon.6798:

God Of Fissures.8627:

So you have low fps or lag? The two are completely different things and are not related in any way.

Bull,and dont be so coky,you know Exactly what he’s talking about.There’s Network lag – Framerate LAG.Both unrelated but can both be called LAG.

He didn’t contest that, he asked if the issue was lag or low frame rate. Those are not the same things.

If the visual representation or control input falls behind the game logic, that is called lag. That’s the definition of lag: to fall behind or fail to keep up.

If I want 50 FPS but I’m getting 30 FPS instead, either graphics or network either one… then I’m having a performance issue. There is no reason to assume I’m experiencing lag: a low frame rate might still keep up with the game logic and usually is programmed to do so by design.

And yes, sometimes they both go hand in hand, but frequently that is not the case.

I had the same issue with transparent objects, then it went away after a tiny patch 2 nites back.

I also downgraded my driver to a 304 beta and that fixed some issues and improved performance, which is the opposite of what some other people have seen.

Puzzling anyway… I suspect too much is changing in the code to do much reliable and methodical testing right now.

Cbuzz.5083:

wsiono.2916:

Not trying to hijack the thread, but just wanted to throw this out there. I recently removed a HD4870 and installed a HD7850 with no noticeable increase in performance (across multiple games), and just today tried out a HD7770, again with no real increase in performance.

I’m wondering if this “core issue” might be applicable to this machine?

No, it’s not. The HD7850 = 3 × 4870′s so you’ve most likely got processor bottleneck.

Revelans: You probably should listen to these guy’s & stop trying to justify your bad purchase. You did in fact, downgrade. You may have gained DX11, but you’ve lost a lot of the grunt that the 4870 has, but you already know that.

This is true. I think a lot of people assume DX11 cards are faster automatically.

DX11 is definitely faster than DX9, but that doesn’t do you any good if the game is written to be DX9.

That leaves only raw horsepower and the 4870 has more.

Gaile indicated GW2 can use DX10, but that’s hard to verify without an explicit option in settings.

I think one issue is that the game is using an old graphics engine. Its a modified version of the original Guild Wars engine, and probably still uses older engine designs. Newer graphics engines are more efficient.

Its actually quite impressive they were able to add so much to the original engine, but the cost might be the higher and unpredictable CPU loads being seen, and under usage of modern GPUs.

Also, the game uses Havok for physics.

Since the game ran pretty well on my machine a few patches ago, I am hoping it will all get fixed. New code might just be a little off for awhile.

Caedmon.6798:

Im no intelboy but i think you may want to read this bit,or better yet just gogle it..

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/25/does-disabling-hyper-threading-increase-performance/

“As you can see their are a few applications that perform marginally better, to the tune of one to two percent, with Hyper-Threading disabled. But at the same time there is far more to be gained in terms of performance from leaving Hyper-Threading enabled than there is to be gained from disabling it.”

“On average the 3770K with Hyper-Threading disabled offers only 90 percent of the performance of the same chip with this feature enabled. Thus it stands to reason that leaving Hyper-Threading enabled is the best choice for consumers.”

Keep in mind though, they are talking about desktop usage where you have a large number of light threads, not compute intensive threads.

Hyperthreading is a clever “hack”, and is not an actual extra core. Its just attempting to use the processor’s internal parallelism to simulate an extra execution thread. It works if the work to be done is relatively uncomplicated.

That said… it may still be wise to leave it on. I asked in another thread because I was curious if anyone had observed anything interesting by testing it on or off.

If you have a lot of desktop background noise, I would think HT helps a good bit.

I’m just curious if anyone has had time to methodically test this. Its more curiosity than the idea I think it would solve performance issues.

Its public information that “hackers” had people’s accounts, and that is by definition a compromise. So, let’s quit being silly and playing word games.

The question is were they all user caused? Yes, no doubt users do dumb things. I manage hundreds of systems with 22K users in a single city, and even on that small a scale is pretty unbelievable what people will do.

However, I know some of the people who lost their Arena accounts personally. They used unique usernames and passwords and their machines were well checked for compromise, and in at least one case the machine was brand new. There were no key loggers or a previously used account found in a database by a “hacker”.

The common thread is that during launch week, email authentication failed repeatedly for them. It did for me too, though my account was not compromised, I just lost access to it for a few hours that first Saturday.

Their account data was changed, and at no point did they get an email verification of those changes from Arena, which included the changing of their email address.

Any system which allows an email address to be changed without verifying it is broken by design.

Even if a “hacker” has your account information, if the a system like this is functioning correctly, it should send verification to your email address. That’s the entire point having that system in place.

I think Arena was just hit by a “perfect storm” of concentrated external attacks and some internal mistakes during launch week.

Regarding all those “multitude of laws…”, that’s just painfully naive.

A good example is Sony: they not only covered up a severe account system compromise, they didn’t learn anything from it and did it again. The last time they covered up even severe credit card fraud for nearly 3 weeks.

Have any of you tried turning off hyperthreading to see if it helped?

I wonder if the game code is smart enough to avoid using that, because it seems to use two threads on one CPU instead of splitting up threads by physical CPU.

Hyperthreading is a gimmick except for fairly light processes.

I don’t really think hardware is the issue anyway: the game ran fine on my system a few weeks ago, and only had issues with performance after some of the patches.

michaeljhuman.3940:

In some areas, I get very high fps. I might get over 180fps in some areas, and the GPU is hitting it’s max OC, and the GPU fan is on full power. Then you move to a different place on the map, and the fps drops, and the GPU starts underclocking as it’s not being fed. Ok, so maybe that’s CPU bottlenecking, but I see where nothing can be done.

Just because your CPU bottlenecks the GPU, does not mean the problem is your CPU.

Bad code can cause that.

That’s the thing all of the people blaming hardware can’t seem to understand.

Its very easy to write code that causes instruction and data stalling or generates much more load than it should by being inefficient.

The behavior of the game seems to suggest that some of the changes have resulted in very poor optimization and a lot of data and instruction stalling.

It’s pretty easy to make mistakes that stall data and instruction throughput, and if they put new code in they might not have had the time to work on it like the older code. It can appear as if the hardware is at fault when really its just poor use of the hardware.

If they put a lot of new code in recently, it may take some time to work out issues like that.

No reason they should not keep us informed though. They did the same thing with their security system during launch: blamed it on the users and kept everyone in the dark about their errors and what was being done about it.

SolarNova.1052:

The old C2D/C2Q/C2E cpu’s have a real hard time with modern mmo’s. Specialy GW2 which is so cpu bound.

Even if you are not seeing 100% cpu load, that does not mean your cpu is not slowing your system down. The way old cpu’s process data compared to new cpu’s means that they may not be fully loaded, but they still process the information slower than a new cpu.
Any old cpu that tries running GW2 and has over say ..70% usuage ..or there abouts, is bottlenecked. This can be proven further more by looking at GPU usage ..if your fps is under your vsync (60fps usualy) and your gpu usuage is UNDER 99%, that means its being slowed down by somthing, and in 90% of cases thats your cpu.

Bad code will also cause GPU and CPU stalling, which appears to be what you are referring to.

The game was not CPU bound a month and half ago on a wide variety of hardware, including those “too old for MMO” CPUs.

The latest mini-patch seems to have fixed a lot of the issue, which sort of proves it was the code all along, at least on some hardware like mine. I barely even noticed the download, so it must have been code only.

For me, my frame rates are now back well over 100FPS, and CPU usage has dropped tremendously over the last patch.

Much nicer looking, nicer sounding, and smoother running game now.

I’m almost afraid to say that, but for the last half hour anyway, looks improved.

I would be interested in hearing from people with older hardware.

Griim.5142:

Define “lag”. Do you mean latency (clicking an action button does nothing for 1+ seconds) or visual lag (frame rates of <30)?

These are very different things with very different solutions.

It would also help to know if you mean low frame rates or visual hitching.

Also do you ever see your character move, but the rest of the world and chat stop.

For my part, the last few patches have degraded the visual frame rate and sound quality. I have also had minor command lag, but its the lesser of the 3 problems. In the last 2-3 patches, I also have started seeing visual hitching, where the frame rate doesn’t drop, it just stops entirely for a period ranging from fractions of a second to a small number of seconds, usually under a second.

During the poor performance, rarely is my system working very hard, and my communication is generally fine. After the last patch around October 12, I started seeing fairly large CPU spikes sometimes on more than 4 CPUs.

The last patch introduced quite a few disconnects, or long-term loss of chat server and the world appeared to hang (i.e. I could move but the mobs and the world stopped).

Squall Leonhart.2075:

All culling bugs from the CPU culling the game is currently using.

Ouch, they can’t have tested this too much.

After the latest patch, I am getting a ton of graphics artifacts, and degraded performance.

On launch week the game ran fine on maximum settings, now it runs poorly.

System has an i7 920 3.8GHz CPU, and a GTX 690 GPU.

Artifacts observed today:

- walls of buildings and sometimes the ground become semi-transparent
- screen goes black or only shows updated areas of screen
- severe FPS stutter, even when no one is around and little action is happening

Otherwise it looks good, and most of the time it runs around 50FPS… but a few patches ago the game ran at 100FPS.

Is it possible that something in the game is becoming corrupted?

I play a few games, in since I got my 690 GPU, some games and drivers have been patched, and the result has been increased performance and better looking graphics in every application except for GW2.

For some reason, GW2 has degraded during the same time period.

Since the game only degraded after patches to it, I have to assume its the game code.

Squall Leonhart.2075:

Its not my CPU either

Says who?

The game was fine at launch week. I have an i7 920 3.8GHz, with an nVidia GTX 690. Still a very fast CPU and the fastest GPU you can get from nVidia right now.

Game runs poorly now, was fine on launch week and for some time after. It started performing badly after certain game patches.

Each patch that changes graphics, it gets slower with more artifacts and frame rate jitter.

During the last 2 months, several other games I have are running faster with newer nVidia drivers, same with some GPU computation software and some GPU accelerated commercial code I have.

All of it runs faster now.

With GW2 the only application showing issues on my system, it seems highly unlikely the problem lies elsewhere.

Of course, I’m always looking, but so far this seems an issue out of our hands until Arena fixes it.

Home Style.9640:

Hi guys,

Just a quickittentle rant here:

For some odd reason, I’m able to pull 60 fps on my 4 year old system; I’m not complaining about that at all, but it does confuse me since people with high-end systems are getting 30 fps average on low settings. However, the problem I am having here is the random fps drops that I get just from walking into a certain area. I’ve been seeing these random fps drops throughout the whole game (I’m level 80) and I was able to just ignore them, but now I’ve had enough of it. I could be in the most graphically demanding area on high-ultra settings and be pulling a constant 60 fps, but if I go into a less demanding area, or what seems like a less demanding area, my fps drops all the way to 30 making it very unplayable (30 fps with vysnc capped @ 60 fps creates stuttering).

What I find very odd about this is my GPU and CPU usage. When I’m pulling 60 fps, my gpu usage ranges from 20-30% and my cpu usage stays at 20% all the time, however, as soon as I step into these random fps areas, my gpu usage spikes up to 100% and my cpu usage just stays at 20%! This really puzzles me. I mean, if my gpu usage is at 100% you would think that it would still give me 60 fps, but instead it just drops to 30 and my cpu usage stays the same.

Here is my 4 year old beast:
gtx 295
i7 920 @ 3.6ghz
6gbddr3
1920×1080p

My cpu is HT enabled, so it’s functioning as 8 logical cores instead of 4. I also disabled core parking, so all of my threads are now working to power this game, but that gave me no improvement in fps.

Could anyone shine some light on this issue? I doubt this could be resolved because I’ve tried every possible solution, but I would just like some reassurance that it is not my system.

Thanks for your responses in advance!

My system is the same with two exceptions:

- 12 GB RAM
- nVidia GTX 690 GPU

This latest patch… its not uncommon for it to spike all 8 cores on my machine, and often there appears to be no real reason for it. These are areas where just hours before the patch I would see 3 CPUs hit 50% or less on average, suddenly spiking all of them.

GPU usage seems lower or the same, and to date it has never fully used even my old GPU.

Launch week, this game ran 100FPS with full settings turned on.

Now I am lucky to maintain 50…

Squall Leonhart.2075:

in the latst patch, cpu usage is up, gpu usage is down.

i expect they are optimising cpu culling or something.

This latest patch is worse than before for me.

CPU usage is way up. Before I had maybe 30% of 4 cores used, now it routinely pegs all 8 in bursts, 4-5 50% plus all the time.

Its like they put more work on the CPUs and less on the GPUs… you generally want the opposite of that.

This game ran so perfectly at launch week, sigh…

Refraction.1892:

If the game was the problem, everybody would be having it. I personally haven’t lost any FPS recently, infact i think my FPS went up slightly, but again this could be a placebo change.

The issue is only affecting a few people, so it’s more likely something else running on their computer, overheating or some other factor.

Well, the people reporting BSOD and crashing… that’s certainly their machine. Games don’t cause those things.

However I have a perfectly find system, with a GTX690 DPU and a 3.8GHz i7 CPU.

At launch, game performance was excellent, routinely over 90FPS with all the pretty stuff turned on.

Several patches have degraded the game’s performance and now I never go over 60. Its perfectly playable, but pretty obvious that some of their changes have had a negative impact on performance.

During this time the other two games I play have been patched, and their performance is better, so this seems strictly isolated to GW2.

My hardware and drivers are not changing, and my machine has no overheating or other issues. The issue is new GW2 code not performing well.

Its happening with sound as well since the last 2 patches. Missing effects and music skipping, which again like the graphics performance, was never an issue when the game first came out.

While playing the game, I have frequent issues where the music “skips” and sound effects do not play.

The first week of the game, this never happened.

It seems like this problem keeps getting gradually worse (along with other issues).

A good number of these patches seem fairly retrograde in terms of sound and graphics performance.

Anyone else notice sound dropping out, worse with the more recent patches?

I’d really love for thief to have ranger’s underwater weapons.

Thief spear in particular just makes no sense, and with targeting a little messed up in the game its harder to use than it should be.

That said, I’d be fine with the current ranged weapon on thief if they’d just polish the melee.

They also took away too many thief abilities in 6-0 when underwater, IMHO.

metaphorm.6904:

let me just re-iterate the weakness of Dagger Storm in dungeons. i’ll go over it in a bit more detail.

1. Vs. a Single Target: Dagger Storm will actually deal less damage then your auto-attack
2. Vs. Multiple Targets: Dagger Storm has the potential to be worthwhile as an AoE attack. Caltrops, Death Blossom, and Cluster Bomb all do more damage though. They’re also safer. Dagger Storm has only one advantage here, which is that it doesn’t take initiative.

Not my experience.

Dagger storm against especially champions and veterans does far more damage than my normal attacks, occasionally several times more. Not sure how I could do so much with normal attacks in most situations.

Caltrops is very nice, but does very little damage. I use it mostly as CC and letting mobs bleed while I hide.

Seems to me all of the work well in the right situation, but here I see people stating pretty much the opposite of what I see.

Of course, maybe you guys are much higher level, and that makes the difference? I’m a level 41 and daggerstorm is definitely more damage than my other attacks, regardless of what the description says.

I will say that it can get you into trouble.

I run mostly with an elementalist, and the combination of fire fields and thief attacks is pretty amazing, and dagger storm really burns them down then.

Revolutia.6507:

eiksto.2076:

Crawford I5 2500K has no problem utilizing GTX 690, there is not much improvement even using I7 Ivybridge with GTX 690 over I5 2500K when gaming go check out the benchmarks. Plus it’s custom build underwater PC so i don’t know what you are talking about.

Also just to add about GW2 FPS it looks like a lot of FPS drops are caused by fog effects, at least for me there is something that is causing massive FPS drops when fog effects appear but if i alt tab and alt tab back in the game FPS returns to normal maybe it’s just a bug.

Sorry to quote this, but I am pretty much certain thatt fog effects have HUGE impact on FPS drops, whenever there is a fog effect and I zoom in really close my FPS can drop to 20 really easy, once its gone I am again at steady 60+. I have old GTX 460 1GB with i5 2400.

On my 690 GPU system, fog seems to cause absolutely no change.

It did slow down my older graphics card.

Oddzball.4280:

I’m sorry you feel that way Freetobe.

I just feel that Ive worked on enough computers in my lifetime to realize that 90% of the time its something on the user end, not the program.

Your graphics are either turned up higher then your hardware can support, you’ve got driver conflicts, a virus, virus scanner is slowing performance, OR it is possible that the 690GTX just has issues with the game. That isnt Anets fault, thats your hardware vendor’s fault.

With games like this, most of the time it is game bugs. Most of the bad performance reports came after a few initial patch sets that lowered performance. The end users didn’t cause that.

This game ran very fast on my 690 GPU based system on launch week, and dropped a lot in performance after the first few patches.

Likewise the 25 September patches introduced UI, animation, and NPC bugs. We (the users) can’t even do this if we wanted to.

Those are all game bugs, not end user issues.

Yes, this happens to the point where sword is useless.

Lot of thief bugs. Switching some combinations of dagger and pistol does not give new commands either. I’d have to login to verify which, but its one of the dagger/pistol combos doesn’t change my commands.

Thief also fails to shadowstep for attacks like steal and others that are supposed to, but you still get the cooldown timer. This happens even on perfectly flat ground on unaware targets so it isn’t resists or whatever.

I play with a friend and constantly see her using the wrong tool when harvest. In other words, mining with an axe, harvesting with a pick, and cutting trees with a sickle.

The animation of Reaper of Grenth frequently fails to activate.

When our group separates by more than 20-50 meter, the blue group dots on the minimap disappear, making it very hard for us to stay together if we spread out even a little bit.

The name of the world has not shown on my minimap since 25 September.

The minimap frequently does not remember the size I set it to.

Sometimes my character’s movement, attack, or idle animations stop.

Snow sometimes turns into long, brown cones… looks a lot like graphics primitives so I suspect this is a graphics driver/engine issue.

Panning camera really low, the ground occasionally becomes transparent.

Nycthemeron.7690:

What I am saying is to not down-scale me to level 45 and put me in a room full of level 45 mobs. Fill the room with level 45 mobs. If the player wants to tackle it at level 45 (or 40, or whatever) groovy. If, like myself, you’d rather not be quite so challenged then wait for a few levels and then take on the room full of level 45 mobs.

Again, this is about personal stories. There are no “balance” issues here. The only thing that needs to be “balanced” in a personal story is my enjoyment of the game.

Actually this would hurt balance badly.

You’d have high level toons burning down storyline quests (and others likely) for low level players. That would be totally exploitable, unfair, and game ruining.

Please devs, don’t ever do this.

The solo missions are easy if you just wait a few levels to do them. Yes you will de-level, but your gear and skill will be much better.

A level 80 playing in a 45 zone is far more powerful than a level 45 playing there.

This systems works, please don’t change it.

Instead, they need to look at individual missions and tune them if they were set too hard. Far better to take a careful look at this than make a blanket nerf on the whole thing.

Keta.9601:

mulch.2586:

A MMORPG — if something seems too hard for you, try it with a friend.

You shouldn’t have to. If the personal stories are designed to require a party of any size than they need to clearly state that. As it is, they’re set too hard. The fact that most of the missions require you to rez and repeat multiple times is an indication that the difficulty level is too high. I no longer bother with any of them on any character.

All you guys need to do is come back when you are a few levels higher. The storyline missions get easy if you out level them a bit.

I know that’s not necessarily your ideal, but it does work if you are having trouble.

So far I’ve had little trouble doing them on a ranger, some minor issues on a thief.

Most of the time I run with a friend just because I find the solo stuff boring and well… I play an MMO to play with my friends, not run solo.

But if you are stuck, I would add a few levels and then go back. You’ll have better skill and equipment and it makes a big difference.

marianitten.1247:

I have no problem with any of the personal quest. And i’m a necromancer, the most bugged/broken class in the game( for some )

Necromancer is one of the most powerful classes in the game, no surprise you can solo them.

Ranger can too.

My thief had some issues, just sorta fragile up close and personal if you miss a mob’s attack animation, but doable.

Of course… this being an MMO, I much prefer to run the storyline with a friend. Its fun, and if your stories are the same, you even get options to continue together after one of you starts a section. Well done really.

dromor.3108:

Hi, I play a Charr engineer.
I am nearly 80 and am going to post a bug report once I am finished here. I have done a lot of farming the past weekend for items to do leather working. In the 15-25 area that follows the Charr starting area there is a cave that has flame legion that spawn in large numbers. AoE farming them down I experience the same issue after maybe 10-15 minutes of farming. I have also experienced this while farm wolves in other areas, harpies in other areas, and a few other places with other mobs. I picked out the flame legion because that was the most jarring example because I found it was a good place to farm loot bags and copper coins, this happened while I was with friends who were still getting items from it too. I was getting no loot while they still managed to loot most mobs. I’m unsure if this is intended or not, but from that example it seems that it may be a bug.

Its a bug whether intentional or not.

If it is a code error, then it is a code bug.

If it is intentional, then it is a design bug.

Bug either way, and very frustrating. Sort of like having to pick up items from the trading post… totally inconsistent with being able to remotely bank at a crafting station.

Just… silly stuff like that is so annoying.

Dominae.3146:

It is an odd situation right now.

If you want to craft as a way to make your own gear each tier, as you level, you:

- Often gain character levels faster than you can collect the mats and advance your crafting level.

- Often find drops that are on par with, or better than the items you can craft.

Now, if you are short some mats and decide to farm for them you will gain further XP and outlevel your crafting ability even more.

If you think “I’ll buy mats from the TP to supplement what I’m short on” you’ll quickly find that the mats are often more expensive than the cost of the good they produce (which too is often also for sale on the TP). [snip rest]

Very well said.

The system is currently broken in several ways. Its a neat crafting system, but with some jaw dropping flaws.

Right now I can buy armor far cheaper than making it, and even being fairly liberal with my free time, there is no way to harvest the materials I need.

Mog.1589:

Actually Lydiaele using Discovery to level your craft is the more efficient way atm for some crafts, specifically the armor/weapon crafts.

I to have been just trying to discover all the recipes associated with each insignia and armor type for Leatherworking and it has been going well. Seems like you gain skill faster that way and more XP too!

I actually hate gaining character class XP while crafting and harvesting. The game already levels too fast, and this is maddening.

I play with a friend most of the time and we don’t want to get very far ahead of each other. That makes it very hard for us to craft or harvest while the other is away, because we’ll gain XP.

Dumb system, it should at least be optional.

Aion was like this too, made it really hard to keep a group in sync if some were crafters.

I think since we can access the bank at a crafting station, and most of the market functions, it makes no sense at all to not let us pick up the items we buy while there.

Its a pure useless times sink and error creator to make us run to the trader NPC to get mats.

I can’t see how it stops bots and sweatshop players because they can just use more than one toon and the mail system to coordinate.

Also Skrit city gate quests are failing. Cannot enter Skrit city because you cannot clear any of the gates.

Lot of issues in this zone. The Skrit city area… all the gate quests are bugged and you cannot progress to the inside of the mountain.

Cbuzz.5083:

GW2 is all raw CPu mhz, which the OP does not have (not even close). He is stuck at 2Ghz as his processor will not turbo (not even 1mhz) because all 4 cores are being utilized.

OP, don’t waste your time trying anything to improve your fps, especially overclocking like one clown has already suggested. Laptops are not designed to be overclocked & will only end in tears.

If you want better performance then get yourself a “PROPER” gaming desktop or laptop.

This is complete bunk, please don’t listen to this.

This game is a heavy CPU and GPU both.

My current system is a 12GB, 3.8GHz i7 with an nVidia GTX690 GPU, and its slow even on that since some patch regressed performance. Or I should say slower, it runs fine but definitely not like it should.

The problem is primarily the game code, not people’s machines.

Your laptop will not run all the pretty stuff, but its faster than an old Opteron/8800 GPU system I have that runs 25FPS.

The heart quest system does feel rather sparse.

The event system is basically a copy of the Rift event system, just that Arena did a better job, its the same basic thing. It also has the same basic problem: a mass swarm of players that totally destroy any sense of immersion or challenge.

Having a bit more to do would be nice for sure. I like the quest system over all, it just needs a lot more variety. Right now its extremely limited and repetitive.

One thing they did right though, is the way you can just wander around and find it fun and profitable. I don’t want that to change, I just like how other MMOs had a lot more quests, lore, and story.

Terrahero.9358:

Drunken Mad King.8193:

As is typical in massive programmed things…. such as MMO’s you fix one problem you then create a greater problem with the fix.

By adding cooking ingredients to a drop table you now take items that were in short supply and put them in dire levels.

Furthermore with the anti farming script if you go out and attempt to gather the resources yourself the script kicks in and prevents the drops.

They really need to relook at crafting demands as this is a horrible state of affairs for crafters (not speaking of cooking as this hasn’t changed the ease due to the monumental drop rates).

That anti-farming script makes no sense at all. At lv80 if you want gear, you need to grind for it. And then, you punish people for grinding. What?

They also bragged endlessly before release, for YEARS, about how they were going to be different with GW2 and not do things like this.

I like the crafting, mainly because its simple and not some silly mini-game like EQ2 and Vanguard were, but the material supply situation is a joke right now.

I also don’t understand little annoyances like having to run to a marketplace NPC to get items you buy… but you can look at your bank account? Silly, just completely silly, and sometimes a big time waster.

I have the opposite issue. There are too many players, swarming events just like in Rift, and ruining any possibility of challenge or fun.

I suppose this is a balancing issue of sorts, but not sure how they’d solve it.

I’m still 20 or lower on my toons, I suspect you are higher.

Cbuzz.5083:

If your Gpu’s are not being utilized, then your cpu is slowing you down. That simple mate.

Unfortunatley no, it is not that simple.

I have a 3.6GHz i7 CPU and its not remotely close to being maxxed out either in computation or data transfer speed.

The issue is clearly the game and possibly also the drivers.

During the first week, the FPS was very high, though it didn’t use both GPUs very well.

Now the FPS is down, so something has changed in the game code, and GPU usage is lower than it was, and CPU usage is about the same.

One thing I have noticed is that GW2 does not seem to make use of all GPU memory when first loading a zone. It doesn’t appear to do any ‘read ahead’, but rather reads data as you encounter it.

I often will just spin in a circle to get a lot of data loaded, which seems to help.

What I noticed mostly in the last few days is long loading times and waypoint teleportation times (same thing I guess), even to areas I’ve recently visited.

My system should be fine, its a 3.6GHz i7, 12GB RAM, GTX690 graphics card and generally well maintained.

Its perfectly playable, just performance is a little lower than expected, and indeed a good bit lower than it was 2 weeks ago.

TheValkian.4715:

I currently have a Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti 2GB GDDR5 which I bought recently, also a EVGA GTX 570 which was my old graphics card.

Computer Spec’s

2Core Intel Processor with 4GB Ram and is stable.

I’ve done a clean installation of my drivers which is 306.02

I’m seeing ppl with a lower verison even outdated graphics cards getting about over 40-50 FPS which is just odd. I don’t know if its the driver that is missed up or part of Arenanets, I just want to know a solution. I didn’t have time to look around for a forum so someone give me a direct link that help for others in fixing the mess.

-Thanks

I have an nVidia GTX 690, which is currently just about the fastest graphics card you can buy, and GW2 has lower framerates that other games with a lot more detail.

I think the issue is either driver issues, GW2 coding, or some combination of the two.

One thing I notice is that GW2 doesn’t seem to fully utilize CPU or GPU, and certainly not more than one of them.

Lot of games are like that to be fair, and there are various programming reasons why it can be harder to make happen with an MMO.

For one thing, your frame rate is heavily affected by your network frame rate as well.

Gliese.4317:

(In reply to Vanadiel)
Only way that could still happen is a key logger or something that is capturing your information while remaining undetected.

Unless of course the issue is on the server end, not the user’s.

Bugs in the authentication system locked my account for hours during the first week. My system has never been compromised nor was my account and password an issue.

Just one example. There are a lot of ways for account data to be compromised without user error or user system issues.

Banning the IP address the “hacker”(1) is coming from is a bad idea. There are a lot of people who use systems with shared IP addresses, and you’d sometimes be punishing totally innocent bystanders.

1) I wish “hacker” had not been misused to the point where it now means something it wasn’t intended. I’m a hacker, a real one, a professional… and I never commit crimes or hurt anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_

Vryllyn.7923:

moonslightv.6704:

I really do not understand why he has to deal with this. He is up there in age and he doesn’t need the stress with his health conditions. I told him I would handle it because of that fact. If i can provide all the information, why can’t I get his account back for him especially since i paid for it?

Would you like it if someone could randomly call on your behalf and make changes without your permission? That is a pretty standard security measure.

It is, and one of the issues during the first week was precisely that: the GW2 system allowed account data to change without authorization. Took awhile to get my friend’s accounts fixed but it all seems much better now.

The original poster needs to make arrangements with the other user if they are going to take care of their account.

I’ve done that before in the past, and what I did was just never have the friend register at all, I just created more than one account and they gave me the money for it.

Otherwise, Arena can’t know its legitimate, not easily anyway.

I do wonder though… seems a lot of families and/or couples would like to delegate account maintenance.

Deviija.7869:

I just wanted to post here and sign my name on this issue. I have all ports forwarded, I watch my connection to make sure my router/modems aren’t disconnecting on my side of things, and I still get ridiculously frequent Network Error 3032 errors and game client can’t get a response messages.

When there is known maintenance going on behind the scenes I get these much more often, to the point where I’m being kicked out every five to ten minutes. Makes trying to do WvWvW/PvP/Dungeons/Personal Story missions impossible.

If you guys can play for a few minutes, then it is not likely your firewall.

I am getting similar errors. The ground flashes on and off at certain relatively low angles, and some vegitation flashes. This is with the recommended beta nVidia driver, and the latest release after that.

anonymouse.9053:

They will give up updates eventually. There are a lot of people who choose to use the same email address and password for GW2 as they use for other sites or services or games. Once the login credentials are compromised elsewhere, the GW2 account can be stolen. It seems a lot of GW2 players are the type to use the same login credentials at multiple places, which means there are lot of tickets to go through. Each one takes time to process.

As for accounts being banned AFTER the damage is done, this is not always the case. It depends on how much the person who stole the account gets done before the ban is applied. In any case, a ban to prevent further misuse of the account is better than no ban at all.

A lot of people had their account data changed without any authorization. This was a bug, not the user’s fault.

Even users with good passwords and GW2-unique accounts were burned by this.