Guild Wars 2

I’m okay if they want to make harder content in the OPEN world. But the entire development team doesn’t seem to be fully aligned on this design principle. I’m sure many of us still recall outrageous (Confessor’s End?) boss fights for many story chapters (instanced and thus private). Where is the design principle in that? I have no freedom to adjust the difficulty or therefore scale the rewards accordingly. I feel that the key here is to remember Guild Wars 2 branded itself as a themepark MMO. That means people should be able to choose how they want to experience the game. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case any longer.

Making story chapters or instanced experiences unfairly hard means locking out casual gamers. In 4 of my guilds, I’m aware many guildies in North America or East Asia either struggles with work or life (especially those who aren’t living with the best of opportunities). This means that they don’t put in the same number of hours a week to have enough resources even for story completion. Just because someone’s casual doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve to experience the story too. Even Dark Souls has learnt this lesson well in subsequent games. Story completion is crucial to a story-driven game, and Guild Wars 2 is an MMO; locking gamers out of its story means no incentive for casual gamers to make more purchases.

e.g. Why would I purchase POF or its related items on the Gem Store, if I know I’ll be locked out of the expansion’s content through unreasonable difficulty?

Other aspects of a game’s design also need to be aligned. With recent examples, Jade Bows and Jade Armors simply do not account for those who have high-latency internet or less-capable hardware. If I’m at 400ms ping and jittering around 30fps, how is it possible for me to dodge those attacks? Whenever we slam down on gamers who make a complaint, we make it harder and harder to have genuine constructive dialogue for the community. And this is a great loss for the developers, who end up with an echo chamber of highly abrasive and intolerant gamers.

There are many basic aspects of the game that should be aligned. Unfortunately, the forums is seldom a place for such discussion. What happens is that gamers eventually become jaded and leave the game, reducing community vibrance.

TotalBiscuit released this video that started talking about one game’s struggles, but (as usual) he meanders off to discuss design principles and visual clarity. I was having a game with gf the other day, and the sheer amount of questions she had made me think hard. Does Guild Wars 2 need better visual clarity? Based off the thoughts in the video, what’re your reactions?

So I’ve noticed that there are plenty of times when my screen randomly turns black or freezes. No bug report or anything. Audio still plays. I’m forced to restart the game, and then it seems fine? Weird!

Running around Tyria. So far so good.

No crashes on Teq. First time ever! This is awesome.
No crashes in WvW.
No crashes in Lion’s Arch.

Managed to jump around different maps and my guild hall. It was great. Then, my entire system hanged. It froze up. Didn’t quit. No sound. Can’t use Task Manager. Help!

Grymlocke.1067:

/sigh guys… (And girls if thats the case)

It has been confirmed by the DEVS that the issue with Dragon Stand whether its CTD or CTCSC both are classed as a crash as something on the platform weather its memory software or some other issue is kicking you off the server and then gives **** :101 or crashes to the desktop (and yes I am very well aware what A crash is in normal terms)

or do you think 25 people randomly logged of and denied themself 130k and items >

Don’t feed trolls lol.

hi, any updates on crashes? Not cool to crash at Teq and be forced to wait 60 seconds for a report… That causes us to miss the rewards totally

Agreed. Did they outsource their support staff or something? They certainly aren’t particularly helpful…

Dajova.5849:

That’s why i said on my post that you should NOT try it if you have a older card than a GTX card, cus that’s what i have…. and it does fix the crash, i never said it was without hitches.
The fix i posted was for the “heap bytes” crash issue specifically, maybe not the OOM issue. I dont know if its any difference, but clearly it is.

Do you not understand that it isn’t about GTX cards? Even between each 980 Ti card, not all of them have the same overclocking potential. Some cards can’t even go beyond 30MHz, while some can go way beyond that. You can look at some of the online benchmarks verified by different benchmarking applications. There’s a very wide spread.

In addition, every computer has different hardware and software configurations. Not to mention that each card may even have different amounts of VRAM. How can you make an assertion for your unique scenario without providing a clear explanation of what that might affect?

Dajova.5849:

VaLee.5102:

I don’t know why you get so hostile, I’m just trying to let the less tech savvy people know.

I have a GTX 980 fyi, but I won’t try this. What are you suggesting might repair issues you might have in all games, e.g. the card doesn’t have enough power or bad drivers or bad chips on your GPU, etc.

Changing the offset to 150-200Mhz on one card, might set another card in flames, those values are purely arbitratry chosen by you for your specific GPU. So unless everyone has a GTX 660 from the same manufacturer and the same production batch then your advice is worse than no advice.

I’m getting hostile? I’m telling the truth and what works for those that have the specific crash issue. There is no more to it than what was posted in the post. I don’t care if you believe me or not, only if you haven’t tested it out yourself…
… and btw, you’re using a GTX 980 card and you have memory issues? Or you’re just here to talk nonsense about something you don’t have yourself? Cus it seems like it.
And if you’re think I’m being hostile, you haven’t been on the internet for very long… I think I’m being perfectly reasonable for what i’ve seen for issues like this.

Maybe you want to check out some tech forums and read up on overclocking? You’re essentially asking people to overclock their chips in a very haphazard way. As the other guy has pointed out, every chip is different and has different overclocking results. I’m using a Gigabyte GTX 970 OC Windforce. I’ve overclocked my card and stabilized it, but I still crash.

Maybe you want to take a look around the forum: Many people with really good GPUs are still experiencing crashes. Your advice can cause GPUs to crash due to VRAM errors or other computational errors because of the overclock. That’s why the other guy’s saying that you’re giving out bad advice.

Awe.1096:

I would be grateful if people having issues with constant OOM crashes try to lower textures setting to “low” (yes I know, the game looks like potato in such case, but I am doing this for science and comment if this improves stability at least in some way. I will keep looking around, any further input and observations from other people would be appreciated.

Got the same result. Crashing between the same numbers too!

Still crashing. I don’t even wanna try playing :\

1) Fix the crashes
2) Fix the poor optimization.

Guys, just to take a poll. How many of you crashing have NVIDIA cards? I’m using a Gigabyte OC Windforce 970.

It may be a possibility for devs to consider. Something about the cards?

It looks like the NVIDIA cards are the ones crashing the most even though we don’t max out the VRAM. Can a dev look at this angle? Any news on this?

trueanimus.4085:

nvidia cards seem to trigger the oom errors.. they need to fix this or start refunding peoples money

Up for this. Can we get a dev to look at this angle? It seems like the AMD folks are fine? Or get can we get a poll done?

Update: I crashed twice, still failing to send the crash report. Can’t even get back into a decent Teq map. -_- I think the server should prioritize putting people together with their party, or at least put people on a map with guildmates.

I’ve even added a list of games that I play with zero issues. It’s getting to be a chore to play GW2. I crash multiple times during Teq and have to wait a ridiculous 60 seconds just to submit a crash report? Do you know that’s enough for me to miss one burn rotation? Is Anet going to compensate me for my time?

Or would Anet rather tease out a class action suit from its paying gamers?

Update: The crash reporter keeps hanging. And why does it take 60 seconds to send a report? I’ve missed out on Teq so often simply due to crashes. This is unreasonable.

Crash log can’t even be read.

The purpose of this new thread is to provide as much information as possible on the crashes I have been experiencing after the HoT Update.

I am someone who plays for no more than an hour each day. I usually jump into Teq with my guild and then move onto other content before calling it a day. After the HoT update, I have crashed:

Friday 23rd: 2 times during Teq, and then once while roaming the Lion’s Arch, and BSOD while in the Mad King’s Realm.

Saturday 24th: 3 times during Teq, and then I stopped playing due to time constraints.

Sunday 25th: 1 BSOD before Teq, 2 game crashes during Teq, and then I stopped playing to write this report.

My system specifications are as follows:

Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming-5 Motherboard
Intel i7 4790k @ 4.7 GHz 1.231V (Noctua NH-D15 cooler @ 58 degrees)
G.Skill Ripjaws X 16GB RAM 1600MHz CL9
Gigabyte GTX 970 OC Windforce Edition @ 1505 MHz
Samsung EVO 850 500GB
Corsair 860 AXi PSU
Windows 10 Professional 64bit

Each part above has passed 48 hour stability tests on AIDA64, OCCT, MSI Kombustor, Prime95, 3DMark, and Memtest86.

The following games do not give me any issues:

1) Crysis 3
2) Tomb Raider (2013)
3) City Skylines
4) Payday 2
5) Deus Ex
6) Fable
7) Minecraft (all versions and mods)
8) XCOM: Enemy Unknown
9) The Witcher 3
10) Trine 2
11) This War of Mine
12) Fallout: New Vegas
13) Divinity: Original Sin
14) Diablo 3
15) Democracy 3
16) Left For Dead 2 (vanilla and modded)

Please let me know if any other information is required.

Just started on friday and got introduced to the Fashion Wars.

I’d really like this “Shadow of the Dragon Value Pack”. :’)

Thank you to my wonderful gifter. :’)

Ooooh! Me me! I’d like:

•Banana
•Rose Breeze
•Fog
•Midnight Olive

Thank you!

Char name is Teneliastormbringer.