Guild Wars 2

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Let me explain to you why you cannot guest on worlds in another region.

There are two databases: European player data is stored in our European datacenter, American player data is stored in our American datacenter. This is to ensure that people in these regions can still properly play in case there is an issue with the connection between the datacenters.

When you do a world transfer from the US to the EU (and vice versa) your player data is transferred from one datacenter to the other. This is not the case with guesting, as you are still “registered” on your home world.

I understand that some of you are disappointed that you cannot guest on worlds in another region, but considering the complexity of internet routing, our main priority is to ensure that players have as much of an uninterrupted game experience as possible, which is the reason why we have two datacenters.

On another note: I will try to get an answer to the guild influence question that has been posted a couple of times.

I do not understand… Why won’t you just let guesting create a copy of the player data on the other regions database if switching between regions is the case. Update the data after the guesting is done and then delete the copy.

Yes you can do other starting zones too. It won’t give as much xp as lvl appropriate content, but it still gives a fair amount of xp.

poison, bleeding and burning all deal their damage once every second. So that increased duration isn’t gonna do anything unless it adds at least an entire second.

Altair.7560:

If the past 12 years of gaming have taught me anything, the thing is that forums are a quick way to change your viewpoint on a game. Sometimes good, sometimes down right awful. You see the ugly side of things that make you hate certain aspects of the game. You see yes men and zealots attacking anyone that speaks their mind. You see people endlessly complain about things and point out the faults of the developers. Your mind changes, you don’t just enjoy this game anymore. You start to be more critical and analyze every little piece of game information, and may even dwell too much on opinions. Is that good? Balthazar knows. All I know is that sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

No it is not. The problem you describe has nothing to with being ignorant or not. It’s a matter of being influenced by others. You need to become aware of the fact that everyone is always at every moment being influenced by other people and once you’re aware of that you can try to shield it off to a point that it wont overwhelm your own opinion.

mathisk.6427:

Madmardagan.7945:

I am not so sure why installing it in the Programs Directory would cause problems, but if it fixes it not doing that, who cares!

Windows likes to treat programs in the “Program Files” folders almost like they are system files, so it severely limits access to them. Sometimes you can get around the issues by having an administrator account or running programs/games as the administrator, but even that is problematic. So programs that constantly have to modify/update their data files have issues – like many games and their habit of installing lots of patches, creating temp files, deleting temp files…

So for games (and other programs) that do a lot of file access and need to create, delete, and modify files a lot, it’s always better to keep them out of the Program Files folders to keep Windows (and some anti-virus software) from interfering with the game’s normal operation.

Hmmm, I’ve got all my games installed to a second hard drive and almost never had a problem with crashes. So might be worth to try it for the people having these issues.

Imho the most important thing about a mouse is it being comfortable for you. And well it really should have 5 buttons otherwise it’s not a proper mouse :P But if you like to offload some more functions to your mouse I think you should be able to also do things like shift + mouse 4? Haven’t tried it myself yet but I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to. Don’t let others tell you it isn’t worth the investment btw, that’s only something you yourself can decide. (well unless everyone who actually used it would say it’s a crappy mouse ofcourse)

You can find all armors in the heart of the mist in the pvp locker. press preview to see the appearances. Some armors do have different names in the pve area though, but check the wiki, google around and you should be able to find it.

Some areas seem to be somewhat poorly populated by events, however except for some big events like dragons I really do not see why you would go ask /map for some random event just because you want to do “some” event. Like lorazyck explained pay attention to npc’s you don’t always need to talk to them and in fact most of the times it will be apparent when there’s something going on. Either the npc is rushing up to you and actually asking for your help or npc’s talk to each-other and from the conversation you usually can pick if they’re intending to do something and if so that will likely lead to an event.

What not to do? Just go do what you want to do… try to find some armor of which you like the looks and make it your goal to go get that. If it’s a dungeon armor that means you’ll have to play that particular dungeon a lot.

In any case you could just change your key binding for taking screenshots in gw2.

tmpp.9260:

Also I wanted to point out the a MAC is a PC.

Isn’t Apple marketing wonderful.

InsanityPlea.9163:

I’ve watched what happens when my client crashes, and here it is.

1. The GPU doesn’t overheat, as the highest it got to was 45C
2. The CPU doesn’t overheat, at the highest it got to was 42C
3. My client seems to use about 2GB of RAM, although I have 12GB and I’m running a 64 bit system.
4. After the game crashes, the memory usage goes from 2gb to about 900mb.
5. The graphics fail after the game crashes, meaning that nothing can be shown correctly. Skype, Firefox, etc. all crash, or have shapes everywhere.
6. I am running a mid/upper tier computer.
7. I have used the -repair launcher.
8. I’ve contacted support, and have tried:
-Changing startup programs
-Setting the CPU to stock speed
-Underclocking the GPU
-Running the game on low detail.

However, running the game on low detail solves the crashing issue, but that shouldn’t be required.

Sounds like a problem related to either you graphics driver or the chip/card itself, you might want to try different driver versions to see if that has any effect.

I didn’t have any problems on Gandara, so might be zone specific, however someone I know that plays on abaddons mouth was mentioning the same as you. Later it got fixed for him though.

HCProfessionals.3601:

Windows 8 might be released to the manufacturer, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is completely ready for it – AMD, nVidia, etc. There are still going to be several bugs on release and it will be several months (just as with any OS) before Windows 8 will be ready. So no, it is just silly to ask for support for GW2 on an “unpolished” OS. There’s enough in the works for ArenaNet than to deal with this at the moment.

To help you out of your dream, every major piece of software is gonna have bugs forever! Many thousands of them even. Luckily the majority of them won’t effect your usage.

SegFault.8035:

I recently installed windows 8 profession 64-bit and noticed a few things:
-changing dye colour crashes the game
-zooming in/out map and mini map crashes the game

In addition to those it also crashes at random times which i can’t identify the cause.

It’s likely crashes are caused by certain combinations of hardware/software. A friend of mine also has crashes at random times using win vista.

Works perfectly, I’m guessing they will officially support it once it’s coming out through mainstream channels.

It’s laptop cpu’s, what VirtualBS said is correct you will want the core i7 because it’s a quad-core.

Nope you can’t, so better pick carefully if you care about the armors.

I’m fairly certain the game doesn’t give akittenabout your items. It looks at your total stats and scales those down. So if you’re not wearing lvl appropriate items then you could indeed get scaled down lower than you’d like.

edit: why is the filter removing spaces that’s messed up.

Try to participate in events when they occur, gather crafting materials by mining ore, cutting down trees and harvesting plants. You could go explore the city of your race and get all points of interest, waypoint and vista. Exploring an entire map gives you a nice boost next to the xp you get for completing every little task in itself. With gathered materials in the world you can try crafting. It also gives xp.

If for some odd reason doing all that doesnt give you enough xp (it really should) you can always try to go to other areas that are of your lvl. In your homecity there’s an Asura Gate that goes to Lions Arch. In that city there are gates to every major city and thus can get easily to all start areas.

Jeweling never disappointed me, tailoring has been sort of an annoyance, however I do like the appearance of some of the sets so I will most likely end up using it anyway.

Samaul.6073:

Samuel, you’ve named your topic “How to get the most out of your high end PC” Simply put overclocking makes you do that. It’s perfectly safe IF you inform yourself on this topic. I think that Rolo’s issue is that you advice people to not overclock based on false/outdated info. While I can perfectly see that you do not want to advice people to overclock and I would definitely agree with you to not advice it. It’s a whole other matter to advice people to not do it at all.

Some people need to get a grip on reality when it comes to talking about overclocking in the official GW2 forums. Lets say that we turn this into a massive overclocking thread. Then someone fries one or more components in their high end PC. Who are they going to blame? You guessed it, ArenaNet.

Lets try to be responsible. Leave the overclocking discussion to the overclocking enthusiast sites.

I don’t think you’ve really read my post. I clearly stated to not be in favor of advising to overclock, I opposed your statement of advising against it.

wolonggong.3469:

Its a great list of advice but I would add one to it…and its one tip that I continually see overlooked for some reason even though it should be on every single gamers list for their system.

A small fan, round about 3 inches in size facing the front of your systems intake can help keep the temp of your system down a tremendous amount. Larger fans does NOT make a difference, in fact is worse. A very small fan, right outside the case blowing inward works far better than a case fan, just inside the case does.

Eh what? Bigger fans being worse, are you kiddin me? Bigger fan means more airflow, or letting it run much slower for the same airflow but while being much more silent, or a combination of both. Yes a fan outside your case could help in addition to case fans and possible, depending on a situation actually be more useful than an additional front intake fan, yet it’s certainly no replacement and I personally wouldn’t want it for the noise. Nor is it as much a must as you seem to think it is.

Samuel, you’ve named your topic “How to get the most out of your high end PC” Simply put overclocking makes you do that. It’s perfectly safe IF you inform yourself on this topic. I think that Rolo’s issue is that you advice people to not overclock based on false/outdated info. While I can perfectly see that you do not want to advice people to overclock and I would definitely agree with you to not advice it. It’s a whole other matter to advice people to not do it at all.

I think lvl 30 as entry point for dungeons is a well chosen lvl. Dungeons are intended to be hard and not a play-ground to get familiar with your character. At lvl 15 you’re still learning how to play your profession. At lvl 30 you can get your Elite skill, should’ve made yourself familiar with some utility skills and should have an overall decent understanding of your profession.

If you want to try out grouping up you already have every possibility for that. Just general pve but also storyline for instanced combat.

Scamming implies they charge you without providing the promised good. I wouldn’t know if that’s the case and neither do I want to find out.

You don’t lose progression that would be silly. Even though they look exactly the same they’re really three separate maps.

Samaul.6073:

Synyst.2163:

Can someone please clarify the assertion that ‘heat’ is the cause of an FPS drop? The game is pretty good at staying in the 98-100% cpu load range on a C2D, so I think the issue is better explained as the game being CPU bound, therefore freeing up CPU cycles and overclocking, temp lowering, and stopping services have the larger overall benefit.

The harder your cpu and gpu work, the hotter they get. The hotter they get, the slower they run. If they get hot enough, one of them will generate an error and your game or system will crash.

Only partly true. Yes they do tend to get hotter, however with a proper cooling setup that will not be an issue. Stating that hotter chips will run slower is simply untrue. Only if cpu’s and gpu’s are too hot they will usually clock themselves back as a fail-safe.

However overclocking can indeed result in instability of the chip. This is caused by current leakage within the chip. This is normal but it will increase on higher clocked chips. To stabilize the chip again a higher voltage must be set. This will result into a quicker degradation of the chip. Though with a small increase not something you’ll notice during the lifetime of the computer usually.

There are stability benchmarks to use when you overclock to make sure the system is still stable after the overclock. This is something you really should do when you’re going to actually use your overclocked system on a day to day basis rather than just benchmarking. Overclocking isn’t something you should just not do period, however only do it if you are well informed about the risks and how it all works. It does void your warranty.

edit: Just wanted to add, all the tips on optimization are actually more useful if you do NOT have a high-end machine. Because if you do then you actually can have a browser with 20 tabs open en be perfectly fine. Now I must say I am a user of no script so I’m sure there’s no idiotic huge scripts running that I’m not aware off, but still. Yes it uses ram, but if you have a high-end machine that means you more than likely have 8gb of memory. (or more) Yes this may not actually be enough for literally every program you’re running but operating systems are smart enough to prioritize memory allocation to programs that need it at that moment, the rest will be swapped out to disk. I actually recently played a game of League of Legends while I had gw2 still running in the background as I was interested in seeing how my system would handle that. Worked without problem. For reference I have a i5 3570k, amd hd7970, 16gb, ssd storage. Yes turning it all off might give you 1 – 5% speed increase which means it isn’t gonna do a thing in any practical sense.

VOLKON.1290:

There should never be dolyaks doing jumping puzzles. .

That idea….. it’s hilarious xD

Why? Why would you want to do this other than to extract in-game currency from addicts and ignorant people, which would obviously be a bad thing and shouldn’t be allowed with the teen rating this game has. If it would actually be purely for the fun of it why don’t you just set it up with an even chance for both parties.

Little tip for those that want to go back to a city without having to spend anything. Press H, go to the pvp tab and press “Go to the heart of the Mists” Tada you’re now in close proximity of an Asuran gate that will bring you to Lions Arch.

edit: on-topic no mounts! they don’t fit into the game.

You could’ve gotten a cpu that’s two third the price and as good for pretty much any game and better spent that 100 euro you would’ve saved on a better graphics card. Or just saved it all together.The cpu power could be useful for professional software though, think video editing, compiling software and things like that. And well either way it’s not exactly a bad graphics card, it should run most new games still at or at the very least near max settings at your resolution.

Yeah you should. I’d normally say your pc is a bit badly balanced for gaming but GW2 actually eats much more cpu power than gpu power.

There’s no promote/demote option anywhere. You do have the option to give members the rank that you want them to have. But you only actually get that if you click on the emblem that is associated with the rank he/she currently has. All other columns give the standard social option including kick from guild in case you have the necessary rights for that in your guild.

The problem is that this game keeps getting compared to WoW. The thing is this game is not trying to be WoW and that’s exactly what I like about it.

oh wow LOL really? Because in your opinion there’s no option to create a beautiful Sylvari it’s bad???? You do realize this is entirely subjective….

There’s plenty of options to choose from, sure we’d all like to have more options, but that doesn’t mean the current ones are lacking.

Btw given the lore on Sylvari I think it is bad to even have the difference between males and females but that’s an entirely different subject.

go play WoW?

And no they shouldn’t allow such range, because lvl’s actually do a lot. defense and/or damage also actually scale with lvl difference. For that reason you can’t go take out creeps of 10 lvl’s higher than you at like lvl 60 even though the stats don’t differ THAT much.

the Keeper.9310:

Also, the human eye can’t even see 30 frames per second, so trying for more than that is a waste of money.

nuhuh. Eyes see continuously, they however don’t sent data to the brains very often. Most modern games will implement a degree of motion blur and will therefor be fluent enough around 30 fps.

Another thing you might want to try is dagger offhand. The #4 ability blinds and transfers up to 3 conditions from you to your target. This attack bounces a few times. And the #5 ability weakens and bleeds your enemy. This is an aoe skill.

And well obviously kill that assassin asap

Yes salvage, don’t sell.

Szx.7319:

ill try it mom
i cant upload archiev
and i cant change to jpg or something cuz i havent programm to edit this files

Odd, I don’t see any archive type on the unaccepted list at support. Then again neither do I see .dat in the list.

You don’t need a program to change the extension. You need to first make sure you can see known extensions, otherwise windows hides them. You can do this in folder options. Open the “Control Panel”, go to “Appearance and Personalization”, then click on “Folder Options” and go to the “View” tab. In that list you have to uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types”

Now that you have done this you can simply change the “.dat” at the end of the filename to “.jpg”

Support email address is “support@guildwars2.com” but don’t know if they will actually accept anything that isn’t sent by the game itself or the support form on the site. You could always try of course.

edit: how to unhide the file extension should be the same for vista and onwards, but folder options might be located elsewhere on xp. I can’t recall, too long ago :P

No need to go change file extensions if you can just put in an archive right.

I’m not playing a warrior but my guess would be that you shouldn’t use if you’re fighting a single monster and you will expect it to take longer than the cooldown. (Well you could still go for it near the end ofcourse) But I would probably recommend using it if you’re fighting multiple enemies and are in need of mowing down a few. Oh and ofcourse you should use it if the fight will last 10 seconds tops if you use that signet.

Like others said a cpu upgrade would be good but you will need a new motherboard and memory too. Your gpu should hold out fine if you don’t care too much about running games on very high settings. If you want advise on what to buy you will need to specify your budget.

edit, nvm about the need for new memory I see your post about having already plenty of ram and of the current type.

Asum.4960:

The rule for me is, revive downed players at any cost but getting downed myself, but leave defeated players alone till the fight is over.

Getting up defeated players in nasty fights takes way to long, and does more harm than good. To see 5 people dieing in a AoE of a boss, trying to revive a defeated player forever hurts just as much as seeing people “bleeding out” while people stay right next to them in a good position without the fear of aggro, doing nothing but autoattacking.

The distinction between downed and defeated is indeed very important. I wouldn’t go as far though that your rule is the best in every case, but it often is.

There’s a lot keys you need to press so it’s understandable that it will take time to learn to fully control your character. Experiment with different key-mappings. Put some often used skills on mouse buttons, you can use things like shift + key to reduce the number of different keys you need to keep track off.

The travel popup comes from the fact that there’s overflow instances of the map if the main instance is full. If you end up in an overflow instance you will be automatically queued for the main instance and will be given that popup once there’s place for you on the main instance. Once you’re there you obviously won’t be bothered anymore, but you might choose to stay on the overflow server if you just were busy with some event (chain)

There’s two types of questing. The heart quests, these will automatically popup once you’re in the area of one. These quests are static and you do them on your own. You can also find these by talking to scouts, they’ve been introduced to you at the start of the game. Then there’s the events, these count of everyone participating in them. They either popup randomly, are a continuation of a previous event or are initiated by talking to some npc. Often npc’s will come running at players saying they need help with something if any of the players will decide that he wants to help such event is started. The randomly popping up type of events are things like bandits raiding a farm and you need to defend it if you’d want to do so. A continuation of that event might be clearing the bandits hide out after a successful defense or clearing the farm of said bandits when you failed to defend it. In any case the game will mention these if you’re close to an event and they will show up on your (mini)map. To participate you just have to run in and help with the event.

Besides this there’s ofcourse the storyline missions which you can play and further down the road from lvl 30 and onwards you can play dungeons, which are a lot harder and require team effort to succeed. You might also be the explorer type of person. You receive xp from visiting new places and completing the map. It’s great to sometimes just wander around and explore new awesome looking areas. There’s plenty hidden areas too.

I’m assuming all are pre-build and as you mention no price all around the same price?

If that’s the case go option #2, it’s by far the best. The gpu is way faster than those off option #1 and #3 They have faster cpu’s but the gpu is way more important in games and it’s not like the cpu of option #2 is bad, far from it. As a nice little bonus you also have an ssd which is nice to have for installing your os and programs on.

Don’t bother at all with option #4 the graphics cards are old and the only reason they might keep up is because there’s 4 gpu’s in total on those two cards. Scaling is too bad to be worth it and it’s all very driver and game dependent.

Looks good Thechin

gtx 670 specs right from nvidia site.

Thermal and Power Specs:
97 CMaximum GPU Temperature (in C)
170 WMaximum Graphics Card Power (W)
500 WMinimum System Power Requirement (W)4
Two 6-pinSupplementary Power Connectors

Mind you that minimum system power requirements are always on the very safe side. This because some bad psu producers will list peak wattage rather than sustained output.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5818/nvidia-geforce-gtx-670-review-feat-evga/17

There a benchmark for actual measured power usage from the net. So not including the loss of power in the psu. The actual power usage by the system is thus even lower.

Btw in those same benchmarks we can see the cards you mention indeed draw more power. So you’d need a 600 watt psu for those. But either way those cards are eol. So unless you can get a very good deal on them I wouldn’t get them.

Btw specs dictate a max usage off 300 watt for graphics cards. 75 watt through the pci-express slot, 150 watt for an 8 pin connector and 75 watt for a 6 pin connecter. Some cards will come with two 8 pin power connectors to facilitate overclocking. But that’s naturally off-spec.

In games graphics cards will also never be at 100% load, so you’ll always be slightly under the specified usage in practice.

The proposed system will use about 300 watt at load. PSU’s are most effecient between 20% and 80% usually with peak efficiency around 50%. You also need to take a little bit of degradation of the PSU into account. So 500 watt is fine, you could go 550/600 for upgrading safety/overclocking. If you consider going sli/crossfire in the future as upgrade go with 700 watt or higher.

As for the 60/120hz fps discussion and about your eyes supposedly only registering 30hz. That’s about information being sent to your brain. You do continually register everything. That’s why things get blurry when you move your head fast. All that information gets mixed. The thing with monitors is that you see static images. If the objects on your screen will move a great distance you will notice this as stuttering. Therefor higher fps does matter to a certain degree. Most monitors run at 60hz, that means they will read out the gpu buffer 60 times per second. So even if your gpu will render more frames per second, you won’t notice that. Having a 120hz monitor will thus up this limit to 120hz.

DABhand.2079:

Zalastra.6290:

Sad that you put this nonsense next to your otherwise good advise. There are alternatives to physx and cuda that do exactly the same but are not limited to nvidia cards. AMD had their own alternative called havoc. But either way most developers will be using standardized technologies, namely opencl and directcompute, that work on both. Thing is though, they don’t work very well yet for games. Same goes for cuda and physx. Physx only ever worked good with a second dedicated physx card and then there have only been a handful of games that actually used physx to an extent that it would actually be worth having it.

Actually more and more games are using hardware Physx and CUDA, and havoc will be used of course also, but the main point is any Physx instructions used in a game works off better on an Nvidia card than an AMD which has to use the CPU to emulate it. Unless as you said the game supports Havoc.

Was a bit rude of you to say Nonsense, when you just instructed someone to get 16GB ram without warning them about the 64bit OS requirement (like I did). :P

In short there’s no real reason to choose one over the other besides price/performance or personal preference. Note that price/performance can easily differ from game to game so it could be worth to look at benchmarks of games that are relevant to you before deciding.

Many people are too engrossed between the companies, and become (dare I say it) fanboys, so they are one sighted on GPUs.. so you will always have people who will buy Nvidia or AMD only. For me I am giving my honest opinion on what is coming out the next couple of years (in terms of software) vs the hardware available, and at the moment Nvidia is trumping what AMD has to offer. So far that is.

You’re right, didn’t need to be rude about it. Btw I recommended 8, not 16. Not that would change your argument. Either way I kinda assume that people know this by now, but yeah maybe I shouldn’t.

Anyway about the argument. I’ve considered hardware physx as good as dead. Anyone still using it is likely doing so for using the libraries and will actually take into account that it will need to run on the cpu. As I said as far as I know it only ever was worth the trouble if you actually had dedicated physx card. If you have evidence that goes against this I’d be interested to see it.

CUDA support was something that could’ve been a deciding factor the last few years because Nvidia was ahead of opencl and directcompute and AMD’s havoc. However as far as I know products coming out now that support gpu acceleration will all have support for both amd cards and nvidia. If not, the developer is either stupid or produces for a small niche of expensive professional software.

DABhand.2079:

Actually there is a reason why they have more stream processors, of course they have different architecture thats common sense right there, but they had to since Nvidia bought the Physx brand and started putting them on their cards, the only thing AMD could do at that time was to include more stream processing to combat it.

Just no :P Ofcourse they’ve been putting more of them in their chips, nvidia has obviously been doing the same. That’s the main reason graphic-cards get faster. Because they can do more calculations at the same time. That’s all graphic-cards are about do a ton of calculations in parallel. It has nothing to do with Physx whatsoever. Physx has actually very little to do with the hardware itself, but more so with interfacing with the hardware. Anyway I’ll stop here before it gets too technical since we’re getting a bit off-topic here.

Just wanted to re-iterate that there’s really little reason to choose any over the other unless you have some specific demands that don’t apply to the majority of users.

There’s no different stats specifically for ranged and melee combat. There’s 4 main stats: Power, (increase direct damage) Precision, (increases crit chance) Toughness, (increases armor) and Vitality, (increase hp) Suffice to say the first two increase damage, and the latter two your survivability. Also each profession has their own specific stat. For the guardian this reduces the cooldown on virtues. Then there are secondary stats, crit damage increase, (crits do 150% at default) Condition damage, Condition duration, Boon duration and Healing power. The trait lines all give a boost to one primary and one secondary stat.

Which you want to take depend on decisions you need to make about your build. What is it you want to focus on, may be dealing crits, may be some supportive skills, or just raw damage. Some weapons are good at one, others good at another. Certain trait lines boost certain aspects of your character with the actual traits you get every 5 lvls of a trait line.

Dont worry about it too much, resetting the points is cheap enough so feel free to just try some things out. And besides that you will need to buy tomes to update every new 10 lvls of the trait lines. 10 sp for the first 10 at lvl 10. 1 gold for up to 20 lvls in a trait line at lvl 40 and 2 gold at lvl 60 for unlocking the last 10 lvls of the trait lines. These tomes do not only unlock these, but also reset your traits. So you will get a “free” reset at lvl 40 and 60 anyway.

I can’t give you further specifics about the Guardian as I haven’t played it yet.