Guild Wars 2

The Wiki is an online knowledgebase and is also free. So it’s not very likely that you purchased and downloaded it. Who did you purchase the guide from? You’ll probably need to get help from them, if something isn’t working right.

Odds are, if you downloaded a file, it’s a PDF document. If so, then you’ll need the Adobe Reader (or other utility that can read PDF files). Then you need to find the file you downloaded and open it up with that reader.

You have a pretty recent driver for your video card, but I’m not familiar with the nVidia numbering scheme. Do you know what version you have? One of the latest versions seems to have issues that affect its performance in GW2. You might want to do a search on the driver version to see if the problem version is the one you’re using.

If it is, then you probably want to do a full uninstall of the driver (and clean up any remaining files) and then install an older version that’s known to be good.

There may be a way to do what you want to do. Search the forum for threads about “autologin”. There have been a couple that explain how to do it, and as long as Anet hasn’t disabled the comandline arguments, the information should still be valid.

Here is one of the threads.

You can also search the Wiki for “command line arguments” and find out what arguments you can pass to the launcher to automatically log in.

Look in your “My documents\Guild Wars 2” folder. Find the “Local.dat” file and delete it.

That will remove your current settings and let GW2 go back to the default settings.

You’ll probably have better luck asking in the Mac Beta Client forum.

Check out some of the other FPS and WvW threads in this forum. LOTS of people have FPS drops in WvW. In fact, pretty much everyone does, to some degree or another.

It’s mostly a cast of being CPU bound in WvW, and large world events, because the GPU has to wait on the CPU to tell it where to render all the players in the world. Not to mention all the spell effects, world objects, and other visuals. For the most part, there isn’t much you can do about it other than cranking down most of the settings for details, effects, shadows, and the like.

The only cure for this seems to be “faster CPU.” And you can get that by overclocking (if you know what you’re doing) or by buying a faster CPU. Or you can just live with it, if the drop isn’t too extreme.

You might have better luck asking this in the Mac forum.

You’ll probably have better luck getting an answer if you ask this on the Brady Games website, since they created the book.

Posting that information on the forums would get you in trouble for “naming and shaming” people, which is against the forum Code of Conduct.

If you have a complaint, you should report in in-game, either by rightl-clicking the player portrait (or name) and selecting the “Report” option or by creating a GM ticket.

Not to be too much of a jerk, but it would be much nicer to read, and maybe a little handier for the devs/support staff, if you’d save the error report to a text file and then attach the file to your post. Just posting the info takes up a lot of space with information that most people won’t know what to do with. And attaching a file would allow the support folks to quickly save the info locally and attach it to a bug report so the information can get to the devs with a little less hassle.

Are the “F1” keys enabled/locked or is the keyboard set to use the “shortcut keys”? You can tell by looking at the lights in the center/bottom of the keyboard. If the green light above the “F” is not lit, the keyboard is going to use the shortcut keys.

To enable the “F1” keys, press the “F Lock” key at the far right of the function keys.

Alysya.8427:

Noob question, how do you run the repair?

Edit the properties for GW2’s desktop shortcut. You should see a “Target” field with the path to the GW2.exe file in quotes. After the quotation marks, put “-repair” but without the quotes. Then safe the changes and use the shortcut to launch GW2.

After the game repairs itself, edit the shortcut again and remove the “-repair” or it will repair itself every time you run the game.

I think many folks are using 12.10 without problems, so it shouldn’t be a driver issue. It’s likely that installing 12.10 over 12.8 caused the problem by not properly overwriting some of the driver files. At a minimum, you should always uninstall the previous driver suite before installing an updated driver.

The best way to update drivers is to uninstall the current driver, reboot, run a program like driversweeper or CCleaner to make sure all the driver files have been removed from your system, then install the new driver.

Also, depending on what graphics card you have, you may not see many/any benefits to upgrading drivers. Most of the new ATI drivers are focusing on optimizing the driver for the newer 6000 and 7000 series of cards. The 5000 series and older don’t usually get any updates in the newest drivers since they’ve been around for so long and are about as optimized and bug-fixed as they can get.

You might also need to do the “delete the local.dat file” trick to make sure that GW2 isn’t getting hung up on something weird.

What procedure did you use to update your video driver? Did you do a full uninstall of the previous driver and clean up any remaining files before installing the new version? Did you install over the previous version? Did you update the entire driver package or just the CCC portion?

After you noticed the FPS drop, did you try going back to the previous version to see if that fixed the problem?

And just in case there might be issues with a specific version of the drivers, what was your previous version and what version did you update to?

What operating system are you using? Several people with Windows 8 have reported issues with laggy input and other oddness.

Hopefully this official thread will answer your question.

Taarakian.8462:

Developer – Roll back your patches

No. This patch fixed several bugs that were blocking my progess in the event. I also like the new FoV without having to use the commandline argument. I’d rather it not be rolled back.

Definitely get a 64-bit OS. You probably are, but just in case, you will need it if you want to access all of that RAM you’re buying.

As for the individual components, none of them look bad. The real issue is “who is building the machine and how comfortable/competent are they?” It would be great if you could just slap all the components together and get a system that runs at its full potential, but that rarely happens. Most of the time, things will work in most cases. Sometimes, things will need to be tweaked (on a low level, in BIOS or some of the Windows system settings that most people never get to) in order to get all the hardware to play together nicely. Several people have reported needing to manually set their RAM speed because the auto-detect speeds aren’t right. So you’ll want to keep that in mind.

Also, be prepared to deal with some not-so-common issues. Especially with high performance gaming. GW2 is going to push your CPU and GPU hard. Heat will be an issue, so try to arrange the components in the case so that there is plenty of airflow and that all the heat generators are spread out. For instance, don’t put the graphics card really close to the exaust of the power supply or too close to the CPU or you add extra heat to the card, which it isn’t designed to compensate for.

Oh, and don’t overclock anything right away. Run everything at the default speeds for a few days to make sure it’s all stable. This will give you a good baseline for what’s “normal” on your PC. It also removes a significant amount of possible problems, if things aren’t stable right off the bat.

The fix is to troubleshoot the problem.

If the light goes from green to amber, that means the monitor isn’t getting a signal from the graphics card. That probably means that Windows told the monitor to stop sending a signal (to put the monitor to sleep) or that the graphics card crashed and is no longer sending a signal.

What things can cause a graphics card to crash? Corrupted drivers, overheating, and low power are the main causes. Sometimes you can get an unstable overclock with GPU/memory conflicts that will crash a card, but not as likely.

How do you solve the problem? Make sure that the computer has a clean install of the graphics driver. Make sure that the graphics card (and I mean the WHOLE CARD not just the GPU) is free of dust, has adequate airflow and plenty of cooling. Make sure that the power supply can provide enough juice when the graphics card is running under full load, and make sure that the graphics card is not sharing a power rail with other PC components that could siphon off power it needs.

Also, other’s have seen this. There are literally dozens of posts on this. And all those threads have suggestions for how to fix the problem and discussions on who’s to blame for the problem. So the reason your posts keep getting deleted is because there’s nothing new here.

Attach a dxdiag report for your system, is the first thing. After that, the general troubleshooting suggestions are:

Make sure your video drivers are up to date.
Make sure your audio drivers are up to date.
Make sure your DirectX is fully updated and patched.
Undo any overclocks for your system and see if that helps.
Find a utility that will monitor your computer’s temps to see if it’s an obvious over heating problem.
Make sure your power supply can handle the load GW2 will put on the graphics card.

That’s not screen tearing. That’s graphics corruptions and missing textures or missing objects. Check your drivers and make sure they’re up to date. Check your DirectX and make sure it’s up to date (use the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website). Check your GPU temps. If you’ve overclocked your video card, return it to the default clock speed and see if that helps.

FYI this is screen tearing.

I’m curious as to exactly what “12.7 beta” drivers you mean. Do you mean the beta driver from July 2012 (which would be 12.7 based on ATI’s numbering scheme) or do you mean the new “12.11 beta 7” drivers that were released today/recently?

You need to play the game in “Fullscreen Windowed” mode in order to allow the mouse to swap freely between applications/monitors.

Technically, you can also use “Windowed” mode, but then the game doesn’t get a full screen all to itself and there is a border around the game screen. And windowed mode has the worst performance of the 3 modes.

The right subforum for this would be the “Suggestions” subforum. It’s in the “Game Discussions” group of forums.

On my computer, the patched file is about 15.3 GB. Also, if you haven’t played since the Halloween event, you’ll have some pretty large patches that need to be applied. IIRC, a couple of the Halloween patches took an hour or more to download on their own. So depending on your network speed and how long you’ve been away from the game, it could easilly take several hours for the game to patch itself.

I wouldn’t think that the game is re-downloading the entire dat file. More likely that it’s checking all/most of the files to see if they need to be updated, and downloading only the changed files (or the patches to apply to the files that need to be changed).

“-testVerticalFOV” is a command line argument or switch. It’s a parameter that’s added to the commandline when a program is run to modify the program’s behaviour. It cannot be added to the executable file’s properties, which is what it sounds like you are trying to do. If you want to run GW2 with the “-testVerticalFOV” argument, you will need to create a shortcut. That shortcut’s “Target” field will specify the full path to the GW2.EXE file (with quotes around it) and the “-testVertical FOV” argument.

The GW2 TMP and DAT file have locks is probably because Windows thinks they “need to be secured.” Those files don’t have an owner, by default, so anyone can get unrestricted access to them and potentially do bad things.

Doik.9651:

Frame drops from a solid 60 to 10-15 at best after 10 minutes, using a GTX 660TI and AMD 8350 FX with 8GB Ram.

That makes it sound like something is happening that’s causing the GPU clock to be throttled down. That usually happens whe it gets too hot or when another program overrides the 3D clock speed. Have you tried increasing your GPU fan speed to see if that will keep it cooler? Do you have a utility that will allow you to monitor the GPU clock while GW2 is running so you can see if the speed is actually changing?

Are you trying to apply the switch to the GW2.EXE file itself or to the shortcut that launches it?

That switch is added to the command line that is called from the shortcut, which is where the “Target” field exists. So you may need to create a desktop shortcut, if you don’t already have one. It cannot be added to the executable file.

That looks like a pretty significant overclock, so I imagine you did some research to get it stable. What did you adjust your motherboard voltages to? Did you also adjust the power to the video card? What did you set that to?

GW2 is a power-hungry game, and that much of an overclock will require even more power. What power supply do you use? Are you sure it’s up to the task?

Unfortunately, you stopped your dxdiag.txt file right before the important parts. Namely, the page that shows your graphics card and drivers, and the page that shows the sound card and drivers.

You should also include your power supply (make/model) if you know it, since many blackscreen crashes/lockups can be caused by a lack of power to the graphics card.

Edit: Ok, the graphics card page shows up, now. The sound card info would still be good, though.

Look in your computer’s “My Documents\Guild Wars 2” folder. You should see a file named “Local.dat” which is where GW2 stores the configuration info. If you delete that file GW2 should return to its default settings so you won’t get the black screen.

“Making way too much noise” sound like you’re saying “the fans speed up and make more noise than usual.” And if that’s the case, then you’re probably having an issue where something is getting too hot so the computer is throttling clock speeds to prevent that thing from completely overheating. So the first step would be to make sure the inside of the case is clean and that there is nothing around the outside of the case to block airflow.

Well, you might want to try updating your sound drivers. The ones you have are from 2007, so they might be lacking some features thet GW2 and/or DirectX needs. You might also want to try running the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website to make sure that DirectX is fully patched up and has all the latest bug fixes and optimizaions.

You would probably be better off keeping your current 6700 graphics card. It’s at least a gaming card. The 7480 drops down into the media cards (though a high-end media card), so it’s gaming performance may not be as good as your current card. You should definitely check some review sites and compare the gaming performance of the two cards before you switch. You don’t want to spend money on a downgrade. You’d be better off saving the money and applying it to another part of the computer system.

As for CPU’s if you can, you might want to think about going with Intel chips. They are the performance leaders when it comes to games. You can probably find an Intel CPU and motherboard combo that will fit within your budget and be a boost in performance.

For RAM, If you have a 32-bit operating system, there’s no need to get any more than 3GB of RAM since the computer won’t be able to access any more than that. Of course, 4GB would probably be the “lowest” you’d want to buy just because it’s so cheap to get 2 × 2GB sticks of memory. If you have a 64-bit operating system, then you can start with 4GB on the low end and upgrade later.

It’s even better if you read it with an accent like Scotty from Star Trek. Something about those “cna” that always reminds me of that accent.

You might want to check on Microsoft’s forums/website, too. It may be some system setting that needs to be tweaked. If so, then you’ll find out about it faster from MS than you will from Anet.

When you updated the motherboard BIOS, did you also update the motherboard drivers in Windows? You may need some updated INF files and other system drivers to allow Windows to talk properly with the hardware now that it has a new BIOS. You may also want to check around to see if the new BIOS you installed has any known bugs that might cause problems with the PCIe ports or communications. (I updated the BIOS on my motherboard to fix a DVD compatibility issue and it wound up breaking a lot of other things, so I reverted back to the old BIOS and bought a different DVD to fix the problem. So, just saying that the latest BIOS isn’t always the greatest BIOS.)

Also, the 520 isn’t really a strong gaming card and it might be making your CPU emulate some of the DirectX features via software. If there is a driver miss-match between what your driver says it can do and what DirectX thinks your card can do, then that might cause problems. So it might be worth using the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website to make sure that your computer’s DirectX versions are all patched up.

Also, doing what Rabbiddog suggested, and completely removing all the old graphics driver files to get a clean install of the driver would be a good idea.

Check out some of the dozens of other threads on this issue. You’ll see that your situation is nothing special. Lots of people with “good computers” are having issues with highly variable framerates. You’ll also see that there are a lot of suggestions offered in those threads. Some work (anecdotally) and some don’t.

The end result is going to be: either you’re willing to spend the time and effort to try tweaking your system for better performance (including taking time to read the suggestions offered in threads other than yours instead of making people repeat themselves here), or you will just have to live with the old “it’s the games fault you can’t get stable framerates” and then wait for Arena Net to “fix/optimize their game.”

The LEDs should be on the back of the graphics card, or they were on mine, at least. They were easy to see, when they were lit. It’s amazing how bright they were.

I would suspect that something on the 4870 card is failing and causing your grief. I used to have a 4870 (single GPU) card and it would overheat in some games, but not others. It just depends on what parts of the card the game’s features use the hardest.

In my case, the GPU wasn’t getting close to overheating. I had a Zalman GPU cooler which kept the GPU running at 72 F (or less) in every game. Unfortunately, the GPU cooler wasn’t able to cool the back end of the board, where the power connectors were. That left the voltage regulators and a few other heat-sensitive components vulnerable to overheating, so they did. I would suspect that you’re seeing something similar. Perhaps something in the power circuitry or in the VRAM is getting too hot and crashing the card and the PC.

You might be able to get some more information on whether or not the board is crashing by looking at the card after your computer locks up (but before you reboot it). Most of the 4870 cards that are based on the reference design have some diagnostic LEDs on them that light up AFTER the board crashes. (they’re nearly invisible when they’re not lit up, though) If you have them, seeing what light is lit will tell you the card’s best guess at why it crashed.

You can try bumping up the cooling fan speed to see if that will help keep more of the board cool, or if you can find an extra fan to blow on the back end of the card it might help. Another thing to try, if you haven’t already, is to use v-sync or another framerate limiter to prevent the card from doing “too much” work. This should lower the power draw of the card and the heat generated by the card. It may not be a long-term solution, but it might help you troubleshoot things if you can find a framerate that makes the card stable.

I’ve had that happen to me on a few occasions. I have no idea why it happens, and the only way I can really “fix” the problem is to quit the game and start up again. Sometimes changing characters will fix it, but not all the time.

It probably means that you aren’t in a guild, or weren’t representing a guild at the time, and someone in TLOM thought they would invite you to their guild. If you go to the Guild Panel (press G to open it), you should see a list of guilds that you are in or that you have invitations to join. If you don’t want to join a guild, select it in the side panel and press the “Decline” button. (or something like that, it’s been a while since I had to decline a guild invite)

Also, the guild invite applies to your account, which is why all your characters are seeing that message. And the invitation will keep appearing until you either join the guild or decline the invitation. So it’s not like they have a bot that specifically looks for all your toons to log on and sends them a unique invite. It’s just that one invite, that you haven’t done anything with.

That does seem a lot high. My 920 is only getting to 80 C when playing GW2 (with stock cooling). Which is hotter than I’d like, but still a little below the redline.

The first thing to check is the heatsink. Make sure that it’s free from dust and that there’s nothing blocking the airflow around it. It’s also possible that the thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsink has dried up or isn’t making good contact. So you might want to re-apply that (if you’re comfortable messing around with your computer on that level) or have someone do it for you.

This should go in the “Suggestions” forum since it’s not a request for technical support. You might even find this suggestion already there, with a heathy discussion of whether or not elementalist actually do need a swap weapon ability since they already have the ability to swap between 4 different elements.

This sounds like there’s something affecting communication between the game client and the servers. If it’s not your network connection itself, then maybe there is something going on in Windows 8 that’s bogging down the communications.

When you installed Windows 8, did you install over Windows 7 or did you do a fresh install? Or did Windows 8 come pre-installed on that computer? Have you updated the motherboard drivers since you put Win8 on the computer, specifically the network driver?

The issue I have with “knowing your real problem” is that what you’re asking seems pretty vague. If you could give a more detailed explanation of what you are looking for or what you want to happen, it might help people understand the issue and give you better answers.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking for, but have you tried enabling the “Use Free Camera” option on the main Options page? It is supposed to keep the camera from realigning behind your character when you’re moving.

What you took a screenshot of is not tearing, so v-sync and other frame limitations won’t do anything to fix or lessen the problem. That is some sort of graphical corruption. It could be caused by a bug in the driver, a bug in DirectX, a corrupted vertex list in the GW2 data, bad data sent to a shader, many things. It could also be a bug in GW2 itself, as there are several bugs with the camera system displaying or not displaying the world properly at times.

You can try to fix the problem by making sure you have the latest updates and bugfixes for DirectX and the latest version of your display driver. For DirectX, you can use the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website to make sure that everything is patched up to the most recent version. For your display driver, you’ll probably want to check the ATI/AMD website, if your video card can use the generic driver.

When was the last time you updated your display driver? If it wasn’t within the last week or two, then you don’t have the latest driver. I’ve heard that the ATI 12.11 drivers are supposed to be pretty solid and offer some performance benefits for the newer ATI chipsets, so it might be worth getting them. Otherwise, most of the ATI drivers that are at least as new as the 12.6 drivers (from June of 2012) should work.

If you want to see if someone remembers a particular bug in your display driver, you can attach a dxdiag.txt report for your system. That will show what hardware and drivers your system has so the other posters can see if anything jogs their memory.

Depending on what you have to install, you could be installing up to 16GB of data. Taht won’t be a speedy process even if you have a really fast ISP.

Some people have reported their installs taking 12 hours or so. I think my original install was about the same. I started it in the evening, went to bed, went to work, and when I got home, the game was ready to play.

You might have some corrupted settings in the Local.dat file, which is where GW2 stores its configuration. You can find it in your “My Documents\Guild Wars 2” folder. Try deleting that file and running GW2 and see if that clears anything up.

You might want to make a backup copy first (or just rename it instead of deleting it) just in case you need to get it back.