Guild Wars 2

Hero Of Time.1053:

I have bought gems from them Gem store in the past, and i just did buy 4 gem cars from Gamestop, but that was with a gamestop card.

My guess would be either you were accidentally flagged by the botting auto-detection system, someone compromised your account, or the gem transaction you did directly through the gem store screwed up somehow.

The only way to find out what happened is to send in a support ticket and ask them why you were banned and that you aren’t aware of having done anything wrong. While they do read the forums, they don’t deal with account issues here – the ticket system is the only way to get them to investigate, otherwise the account will just stay locked.

I know it sucks to be banned, but all you can do is contact support and be patient.

Another possibility is the cities. Some players don’t realize there are 6 cities in total, one for every race + Lion’s Arch. You can easily get to all the racial cities from the portals in the middle of LA.

Look at the top of this forum page and click on “Support”, then click “Ask a Question” and fill in the ticket form. Make sure to choose the most appropriate category. After submitting the ticket check your email, because the support system uses a different login than the game itself, so you should get an email that will ask you to set up a password so you can then sign into the ticket system and view the status of your tickets.

The ban could have occurred for a variety of reasons, but most commonly people are either banned for suspected botting or goldselling or due chargebacks on the account key or gem purchases. Sometimes the ban is accidental, for example due to flaky detection systems, but it’s also possible that your account was compromised and you got banned for something someone else did on your account that you were not aware of.

In the case of chargebacks it sometimes happens that the bank, or creditcard company or even a family member reverses the transaction unintionally causing an account lock, but more commonly it’s the result of a fraudulently obtained game key – this happens a lot with keys purchased from online resellers (like cd key shops), which sometimes originate from criminals who use stolen creditcards to buy them. The resulting chargebacks lead to the keys being disabled and the associated account being locked.

Better scan your computer with a virus and malware check just in case, however as Meijo pointed out if it was the Awesomium exe and GW2 was still running in the background, then that was a legit sub-process that GW2 uses for to display the ingame browser which displays the TP and gem store.

Officially the HD graphics that came with the first gen core i3/i5/i7 series is below the minimum requirements, since it’s less powerful than the newer HD3000 chip, but I’ve seen a few people on the forums who suggested the game does run on it, although with rather low performance.

The crux of the matter is that GW2 doesn’t like running on lower end hardware and is extremely CPU dependant in crowded areas, so performance-wise even on lowest settings your friend would be lucky to get 20-25fps, but anywhere that’s busy it can easily drop as low as 5-10fps. Some parts of the game, like WvW and larger dynamic events will feel pretty sluggish as a result.

Whether the performance and graphics will be acceptable to your friend is something that I can’t answer for you, because it’s very subjective and the answer depends a lot on what your friend is used to.

Just to give an example 8+ years ago I used to be just fine with running games on lowest settings at 10fps, because I had a crappy old computer and I was used to things running poorly (or not at all). That changed drastically when I bought my first halfway decent computer, which could run most games on high settings with 30-60fps. It really opened my eyes to what I’d been missing out on and spoiled me forever when it comes to graphics and performance. My tolerance is definitely a lot lower now, but that’s because my expectations are much higher.

If your friend’s expectations are low and he’s not used to games running that well anyway, then he might be happy enough playing GW2 on his laptop. Ultimately though the best way to find out for sure is to try before buying, but unfortunately the game doesn’t have a trial. If you trust your friend enough you could let him try it briefly on your account, but make sure you change your password afterwards (not suggesting your friend would do anything horrible, but it’s better to be safe than sorry).

Emsel.6702:

Response GM Bunni3 via Email 11/06/2012 09:23 AM
Hello Lee,

I apologize for the misunderstanding. Upon further investigation of your issue, we have found that your purchase of Guild Wars 2 has been chargedback. As a result of the chargeback, the game account associated with the purchase has been closed and the credit or debit card used in the transaction has been blocked and will not be available for use with NCsoft in the future.

Our decision to close an account in the event of a chargeback is the result of both regulations set forth by our credit transactions services provider as well as the fees involved with a chargeback that NCsoft incurs as a result of the chargeback.

The issuer of the card will only process a chargeback if the credit card owner has already attempted to resolve the billing dispute with the company making the transaction without success.

Please be aware that NCsoft support has no record of any requests for assistance regarding billing issues from either the owner of the credit card or the person who created this game account prior to the credit card dispute.

Regards,
GM Bunni3

What do our GM mean by this reply? My account is stil blocked/suspended. Are they still investigating or is my case closed for good?

Your account is locked because the payment for the game key present on your account has been reversed by the creditcard company originally used to purchase it. What this means for Arenanet is that not only is your account now an unpaid for product (since the money paid for it has been taken from them), they also incur chargeback fees from the creditcard company each time a chargeback is issued, which means your account has just cost them money.

Now, chances are you’re probably confused and annoyed because you didn’t initiate any chargebacks and as far as you know your copy of the game is properly paid for. However I’m guessing you didn’t purchase the game from buy.guildwars.com firsthand, but that you got yours from an online reseller instead. The problem with those places, in particular sites like ebay and game key stores is that their keys come from a wide variety of sources and not all of them are completely legit.

Something that few players are aware of is that game keys have become a popular way for criminals to launder money. What they do is they use stolen creditcard details to buy large amounts of digital keys from a game’s official store and then sell those on to ebay traders and game key stores, who in turn sell them on to players at attractive prices. Because it takes time for the fraudulent purchases to be discovered (which can sometimes take weeks or even months if the creditcard owners aren’t paying attention to their bills), most of those keys will be turned into active accounts long before the game company can disable them, which means the players think the keys are fine and the inevitable account ban comes as a complete surprise.

The problem with this type of situation is that it’s very difficult for Arenanet to know what is actually going on. If you look at this from their point of view, all they know is that someone purchased a key from gw2.com, that key was used to create an account and then the purchase got charged back – they have no way of knowing whether you are responsible for all 3 of those steps yourself or whether there was any reselling or scamming going on. As a result the GM could only state the facts and the course of events and that your account is locked.

What he perhaps should have mentioned or linked to was the responses some people have been getting, from Gaile Grey for example, that in the case that you have been sold a fraudulent key you can get your account reinstated if you contact support to explain the situation AND buy a new game key from an official retailer to add to your account. To avoid paying for the game twice you’re advised to contact the seller you purchased the first key from and try and get a refund from them. Obviously I would also suggest never doing business with them again.

If you didn’t buy your game from a third party reseller at all, but got it yourself from buy.guildwars2.com, then make sure your bank or creditcard company haven’t made a mistake. If someone else gave you the key or if someone let you purchase it with their creditcard (or you have a creditcard shared among family), then make sure to also check with those people to make sure they didn’t reverse the transaction by accident. If it was a mistake then the same thing applies as above, you’ll need to get a new key and plead with support to get the account reinstated.

I wish you good luck, and hope you can get your account reinstated.

Try going to this location: C:\Users\Asus\AppData\Local\Temp\ and deleting the GW2.tmp file you find there and then running the launcher again. Does it get any further this time?

If not, then the problem might not be with the patch file but rather the location of the file you’re trying to apply it to, aka the place where GW2.exe (the launcher/game executable) is installed. If this is in Program Files or Program Files (x86), try moving / installing it somewhere else, or try turning off UAC (User Account Control), because windows permissions might be interfering.

Another possibility is that it’s your antivirus interfering. Which one are you using?

These types of glitches are usually caused by one of two things:
- graphics drivers
- overheating

Given that it’s a laptop and that it started so suddenly I would lean towards this being a case of overheating. GW2 is known for using both the CPU and GPU quite heavily at the same time, something that systems with less cooling (like laptops) don’t always cope with very well.

What you should do first of all is install a program that will allow you to monitor your laptop’s temperatures, most importantly the temp of the CPU (processor) and GPU (graphics card) – I personally prefer HWmonitor as it displays pretty much all hardware temperatures, as well as recording the min/max values, which means you can just leave it running in the background while playing GW2 and then look at the max temps afterwards.

In terms of actually fixing the problem, if the temperatures ARE high (anything over 80 Celsius for the CPU and 90 Celsius for the GPU is generally pretty high, whether or not it’s directly dangerous depends on the exact hardware as some chips can take more heat than others), then a combination of the following might help:
- clean out the exhaust and fans with a can of compressed air
- always put the laptop on a flat hard surface when gaming
- buy a cooling pad OR (the el-cheapo approach) find some way to raise the laptop a few inches off the desk to give the heat more room to dissipate at the bottom
- tweak the graphics and/or limit the framerate to prevent your hardware from reaching full load in GW2 (this might not be possible depending on your specs, but if say you’re able to get 40fps on the lowest settings, then limiting it to 30fps with the ingame frame limit option might relieve just enough load on your GPU that it doesn’t overheat)

If the above lower your temperatures to more acceptable levels, but the glitching problem persists, it could a case of permanent damage to the GPU (this can happen if it’s been exposed to high temperature stress for extended periods of time, sometimes the GPU will be partially damaged and remain glitchy for the rest of its lifespan). If this is the case then the problem will usually show up in other games as well, so if you have any other graphically demanding games installed (or are able to install some to test), I would suggest running those with the graphics set to a level that puts a decent amount of stress on your your GPU and if you have graphical glitches in those other games as well, then it’s possible your GPU has simply bit the bullet.

The other possibility is that it’s a problem with the graphics drivers instead. This is especially likely if the temperatures are fine and you can’t reproduce the glitches in other graphically demanding games.

If you haven’t changed graphics drivers on your end, it might be either some file has become corrupted, or the updates to the GW2 client have caused an incompatibility to occur between your drivers and the game. In either case, the first thing to do is to check if your graphics drivers are the latest version available for your laptop model (you need to check the site of the laptop manufacturer for this, don’t rely on automated updater tools or windows update to update your graphics drivers, always do it yourself).

If your current drivers are already the latest version, then all I can suggest is trying to do a fresh and clean reinstall in case something has screwed up. To do this first download a new copy of the graphics drivers from your manufacturer’s site. Next uninstall your current drivers through the control panel -> program features, and follow any instructions to restart. After this run the install for the drivers you just downloaded earlier, then see if GW2 still glitches.

It’s completely irrelevant what your system specs are in this situation – even if you are running a NASA supercomputer, it doesn’t matter one bit when you are still using a 32-bit OS.

The problem here isn’t with your hardware, it’s with the memory restrictions that using a 32-bit OS puts on your system. Firstly a 32-bit OS limits you to just 4gb of physical memory (and this includes VRAM) – if you have any more than this installed, the OS simply doesn’t recognize it. Secondly any single application run on a 32-bit OS is limited to 2gb virtual memory – if the application exceeds this limit, it crashes.

The reason you may not have had any problems in many other games is because a lot of PC games these days are console ports and while a PC with 32-bit OS has severe memory restrictions, the memory limitations on the current set of extremely aged consoles are even worse (because they have practically no memory at all). As a result a lot of console games use tricks to reduce the memory requirements to the point where the 32-bit restrictions become irrelevant because the games have been purposely designed to never even get CLOSE to the 2gb limit. The downside with those games however is that it often limits what these games can do, both graphically and in terms of level design.

Games like Guild Wars 2 – which have been exclusively designed for the PC platform and are built from the ground up to take full advantage of what modern PC hardware can do – simply don’t have these kinds of restrictions. What they do tend to have is larger levels, higher resolution textures and just more variety in textures and objects in general.

Now for a long time even PC developers still tried to support 32-bit OS’s to the best of their ability by trying to keep games working well enough within a 2gb memory limitation, however I would say that most of that was probably due to the fact that Vista turned out so poorly and many PC gamers still stuck with Windows XP for a long time (and since Windows XP 64-bit was rather iffy, most of those users were running the 32-bit version of XP). However as the adoption rates of Windows 7 and 64-bit along with it have risen over the past 2 years, more PC developers are slowly starting to push the boundaries of what is possible with a larger amount of memory at their disposal.

This does present a problem for players still running a 32-bit OS, however if you aren’t running an older or lower end system (in which case the high end graphics option won’t be your primary concern anyway), then you simply shouldn’t be running a 32-bit OS anymore. YES, there was a time when 64-bit was still terrible when it came to support for drivers and such, but that time has long since come and gone – 64-bit has been completely viable for gaming since the introduction of Vista and there is no reason to run a 32-bit version of either Vista, 7 or 8 on a gaming PC these days.

There are a lot of myths circulating around 32-bit, 64-bit and gaming in general, but one of the most persistent is “you don’t need a 64-bit OS if you have 4gb or less of system memory” – WRONG – as I pointed out early 32-bit limits you to 4gb physical memory and 2gb virtual memory per application, but the 4gb physical limit includes things like VRAM on your graphics card – if you have a 1-2gb graphics card and 3-4gb of system memor you ARE missing out on precious useable memory (not to mention addressable virtual memory) by running a 32-bit OS.

What I hope you will take away from reading this is that having a 64-bit OS isn’t just window-dressing, but a real serious investment in your system that matters as much as having a fast and powerful CPU, a high end graphics card and lots of RAM… An OS isn’t just window-dressing, it doesn’t just determine whether your game installs get dumped into the Program Files folder or the Program Files (x86) folder, it actually has a huge impact on how games and other applications are able to use the resources on your system. Simply put, a 64-bit OS is something that’s really worth investing in and the devs are not merely trying to be mean to you by restricting you from using certain graphics options – there is a very solid technical reason why some of those options cannot be used on a 32-bit system.

Graphical artifacting this bad is usually either a sign of bad drivers or overheating.

Even though you’ve checked that your drivers are uptodate, I would suggest reinstalling them just to make sure nothing has become corrupted (the best way to do this is to uninstall the drivers manually, then run driver sweeper and then reinstall the same drivers, preferably from a fresh download).

Since you’re on a laptop, I would also urge you to make sure nothing is overheating. I don’t know what the best utilities are to monitor temperatures on laptops, but you could try general utilities like realtemp or HWmonitor and see what sort of temperatures you get for the CPU and GPU in particular.

In rarer cases this kind of glitching can also indicate that the graphics card has sustained some kind of permanent damage (usually from prolonged heat exposure) or that it is slowly failing for whatever reason.

I think it’s most likely to be either corrupted driver files or just a case of current overheating. Laptops get hot very easily when all their components are pushed to high or maximum useage because of the small space and poor airflow. If components are getting too hot even when the laptop is on a hard flat surface you might need to look into a cooling pad, as well as cleaning out the fans.

One other thing you could look at besides graphics drivers and temperatures is DX9. GW2 doesn’t use DX11, only DX9, which is an entirely seperate package – sometimes DX9 can get corrupted, so it can be good to make sure you have not just the latest DX9 version installed but also that the files are 100% present and working. The best way to do that is to download and run the latest (June 2010) redistributable version from Microsoft, which can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109
If you use the DX9 websetup it will only check for updates, but not fix possibly corrupted files, while the redistributable file will.

No guarantees it will do anything, but it never hurts to double check.

Your best bet is trying to get newer drivers for your Intel HD 3000. If those aren’t available for your laptop model then you’re sort of SOL.

I’ve seen this issue crop up several times with Intel HD 3000 cards specifically and it’s usually on laptops with proprietary video drivers that are out of date compared to the general driver releases from Intel themselves. The problem is that most of the time you can’t install the general drivers directly from Intel as it’ll tell you you need the drivers supplied by your own laptop manufacturer.

One thing you could try is setting GW2’s Render Sampling option to Native. It will likely make your already low performance even worse, but there’s a small chance it may resolve the graphical glitching. If it doesn’t help though, I’m not sure what else you can try. This is unfortunately often the way with Intel graphics cards, their support and drivers are a far cry from AMD/Nvidia.

It sounds like you were able to play the game previously, but haven’t been able to since one of the recent patches to the game? Is that correct?

If so have you tried deleting the local.dat and gw2.tmp files or have you tried running a repair on the game client in case something has become corrupted in the patching process?

The first thing I would suggest is deleting or renaming your local.dat file in your -> (My) Documents/Guild Wars2 folder. You may lose some of your game settings if you delete this file, so I would suggest renaming it (for example to local.dat.backup) so you can always restore it if needed by renaming it back to its original name.
Also go to your GW2 install folder (the one with your GW2.exe file) and delete the GW2.tmp file.

If neither of these do the trick, I would suggest trying a repair on the game client. To repair the GW2 client you have to use the -repair commandline, since there is currently no option to start a repair from within the launcher itself. To do this the safest way is to create a new shortcut to GW2 (navigate to your GW2 install folder, r-click on GW2.exe and click “create shortcut”), then r-click on the shortcut and choose “properties”.
In the Properties menu simply add -repair at the end of the Target: line and make sure there is a space between the path for GW2.exe and the -repair command.

The final result should look something like this (this is just an example, your path where GW2 is installed might look slightly different):
“C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -repair
or
C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe -repair

Now press Apply and then OK, and then run your new shortcut and the client should start scanning the GW2.dat file for errors and correcting anything it finds. If the repair is succesful, you can discard the -repair shortcut and continue to run GW2 from your regular shortcut.

If the repair doesn’t work either, it might be a problem with the GW2.exe file itself. In that case you can keep your gw2.dat file that you tried repairing earlier in a safe location (move it out of the original install folder so it doesn’t get deleted when you uninstall the game), then uninstall GW2, reinstall it from the link on your GW2 account page, then run the GW2.exe file until it is done with “updating launcher”, then close the launcher and move the GW2.dat file back to your new GW2 install folder and click yes to overwrite. Doing so should avoid you have to repatch the entire game (which at 15gb orso could take a while).

I got tired of waiting for the “can’t join the instance as a group” problem to fix itself, so I figured I’d give it a try on my own. Once I got past all the immobilize-spamming ads at the start, it actually wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be given the full group recommendation.

Having a ranger pet is a big help though – since the pet took most of the fears I didn’t have to worry about being run off the edge too much.

Well according to this page https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/events/halloween-2012 the Black Lion Trading Company stuff runs from October 22nd til November 5th, so I would assume that includes the costumes since they’re mentioned in that segment as well.

Reaper’s Rumble is the third area. To get there just talk to the NPC in Lion’s Arch (in a nook and cranny next to the bank) and you should get the 3/4 on the achievement when you leave.

It’s correct, 3/4 is all you can get right now. The 4th area is expected to unlock during Act 3 or 4.

It’s definitely not a bug that affects everyone equally – I’ve completed all that’s completable upto this point and my Emissary title track is on 3/5 as it should be. Those who have the same completion rate but only have 1/5 or 2/5 on their title track are clearly being affected by some random bug that prevents the counter on the title track from updating.

If relogging or restarting the game client doesn’t fix this, I would advise bug reporting it and sending a ticket into support.

Thankfully since this is a meta-achievement it means it should be fixeable even after halloween ends, since as long as you have the 5 prerequisite achievements completed before the end of halloween the proof that you should have completed the meta-achievement and received the title is right there in your log (and in the server logs as well).

Pumpkin Carving and the Clocktower don’t count towards the title track, but the other 3 achievements do, so with ToT Bags, Halloween Hunting and Halloween Events completed you should be on 3/5 by now. Have you tried relogging in case it’s just a display bug?

I too love this puzzle and think the developers did a great job with it, both in terms of visual design and music, as well as the actual jumping in a race against the clock element.

The “decoy” reward chest halfway up was also sheer brilliance – the first time I got that high up in the puzzle I saw the chest and made straight for it, thinking that was the end of the puzzle… as I fell to my death in the green goop below I could almost feel some scumbag dev snickering at me. xD

But what I love most of all about this jumping puzzle is that I really felt a sense of progress, because not only was I getting a little bit higher up the tower with every few tries, I was also getting a lot more efficient at each of the jumps, which led to a real sense of steady progress. And ofcourse eventually reaching the top with my heart hammering in my chest was simply euphoric.

PS: I agree that larger characters blocking your view is a bit of a problem at the start, but I don’t believe making the puzzle a solo instance would be the way to go. Someone else came up with the idea of making other players see-through (sort of like the ghostly form), so that they don’t obscure the view of your own character, but you can still watch their progress through the puzzle and follow them. I really like that idea and think it would be a good compromise.

YES! Thank you for testing this and looking into increased FOV options.

I personally am not part of the category of people who feel actual physical discomfort from a narrow FOV, but I do find low FOV highly annoying as I’m very attached to my spatial awareness and dislike too much of my character taking up space on the screen in MMO’s. So at launch playing a Norn was a rather claustrophobic experience, something that was partially relieved by the increase in max camera distance that you implemented earlier, but I still didn’t quite have the “screen space real estate” that I would have liked to have.

With this new proper FOV for widescreen monitors I find myself with a much more comfortable view. Some people might look at the screenshots and go, “meh, what’s the big deal, it’s only a small change in view,” but for me the difference in experience is huge.

I haven’t played around with it long enough yet to properly see if there are any glitches that result from this change, but if I find any I will update my post about it. I just wanted to post how happy I am about this change first.

Hmm this sounds like quite an out of the ordinary problem to me, so I have to ask if you can give more details on your exact PC setup – in particular what monitor model are you using? What’s your exact graphics card + motherboard? And what type of cable are you using to connect the two together? (including any VGA → DVI convertor plugs you might be using)

Without knowing these sorts of details it’s hard to say what the problem might be here, but my initial suspicions would be on you using a VGA → VGI conversion somewhere.

Your graphics card is definitely the thing that’s holding you back the most, since it’s only a lower end card and you’re running at 1080p resolution, which is a pretty demanding resolution to game at. I too would recommend at least a 660 or better for a decent increase in performance (and settings).

Before buying a new graphics card however always make sure your power supply can handle the upgrade, since a higher end card will have higher requirements (not just in terms of wattage, but also amps on the 12v rail). If your current setup is a prebuilt system, then the PSU is more likely to be of lower wattage and/or a low quality brand, so it’s extra important to check the PSU specs and replace it if necessary.

There are various sites on the internet that can tell you what brands + models of PSU’s are good/decent and which should be avoided – if you find your PSU is the latter, then I would not recommend upgrading your GPU without also replacing the PSU.

With a better graphics card your CPU will still be a limiting factor – it’s not a bad CPU, but it’s only a hyper-threaded dual core, so it will be more of a limiting factor than a firstgen i5 of the 700 series would be, since it has only half the physical cores. The areas where you will notice this CPU limitation the most will be in busy areas, like WvW, cities, large dynamic events, etc. You could upgrade the CPU to a 700 model if your motherboard supports it, possibly even an i7 800, but upgrading any further would require a new motherboard as well, since they changed the socket for sandy and ivy bridge. Personally though I would upgrade the GPU first and then go from there.

It’s not a problem with your GPU – as pointed out already it’s more likely your CPU that’s holding you back in certain parts of the game. The reason you see the GPU useage drop is because something other than the graphics card (usually the CPU) is limiting the FPS, which in turn limits the number of frames the graphics card has to draw, which in turns leads to lower GPU useage since the card suddenly doesn’t have to work as hard.

Mind you that even with a high end overclocked CPU you will still be limited in certain parts of the game because GW2 is just that heavy. I cap out at about 45-50 fps in LA even with an i5 2500k @ 4.2ghz and in really heavy battles like the dragon fights I get lower than that, sometimes as low as 25-30fps with the CPU useage at > 90% across all 4 cores, which is a pretty clear indication of where the bottleneck is (it might not even be raw CPU power that is lacking, but rather the architecture that is at its limits).

One thing you may want to check is that Nvidia’s new GPU boost feature isn’t screwing you over and causing the card to underclock itself at the wrong moments, since some people have reported this happening with these higher end 600 series cards. I can’t verify any of this, since it’s never happened to me so far – I’ve been playing a dozen different games on this card, even some really simple indie games and my card always stays > 1006mhz while gaming.

PS: the best way to check your clockspeeds while gaming if you don’t have dual monitors is to use the Onscreen Display function of tools like MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision – you can customize the information to be display and then turn the overlay on and off ingame at the press of a button.

Stricky.4681:

Just purchased the game and having the same issue as many folks here are having.

When I insert the cd, the startup screen pops up, and starts downloading. Once it reaches 10213 Kb it stops. The Kb/s slowly decreases until it hits 0. The screen then disappears. A few moments later the same screen pops of with 0 kb downloaded and disappears right away. Please help !

Unfortunately your graphics card doesn’t meet the minimum requirements – the minimum card supported from the AMD Radeon series is the X1800, while yours is a Radeon 1150, which is a much lower end integrated card from that same series. Not only is it severely underpowered, it also has no support for Shader Model 3.0, which is an absolute necessity to run most of the graphically demanding games released these days. Without SM3 support on your graphics card it’s pretty much a no-go and the only way to ever get the game to run is replacing the graphics card.

Like with the other person I just replied to you do have the option to upgrade since it’s a desktop PC, however your case is a bit more particular because your PC seems to be a “small form factor” or “slimline” model, which means the case is a lot smaller and narrower and the backplate slots will also be narrower – this means the only type of dedicated graphics card that will fit in your case is a so-called “low profile” card. The problem with these is that their availability and range of models is more limited than with full-sized cards and they also have the habit of selling a lot of horribly outdated models. So while it’s not impossible to pick up a decent low profile card for a fair price, you have to be really careful about what you buy (which may require some reading up on graphics card models and performance to make sure you don’t end up an ancient card that’s 6 generations out of date).

The other option with small form factor cases is to replace the case with a regular sized one. This does require a bit more work since you have to move the components over from one case to another, however it opens up a lot more in the way of upgrade options, especially on graphics cards, but also power supplies. While this advice is a bit late now perhaps, if you ever plan on buying a new PC again in the future, just keep in mind that if you might at some point want to play on games on it, it tends to be a good idea to avoid slimline or small form factor cases, simply because that way you have an easier time upgrading if you ever need to.

InfamousILL.7851:

same! I get no error messages.. and when I run Gw2Setup.exe it just closes after the second download pops up, when I run Gw2.exe it stays at 0kb and the .dat file gets bigger but it doesn’t do anything! I can’t install it! I get these error messages:
—> Error Logs <—
VerifyAccess failed or denied access with 0xc00ce556 – 1
Shader model 3.0 is required
I’ve tried everything, disc download, online download EVERYTHING ON THESE FORUMS! And I’m pretty sure that I don’t have to get a new video card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher to download…
Game Advisor:

As I’ve said previously in this thread, I’m not convinced some of these older Intel GMA chips actually do support Shader Model 3.0 properly, but even if they do they still don’t have the raw horsepower required to handle this game. Even if you bypass the installation process somehow, you’re just going to run into the same problem again when you actually try to play the game.

In your case there is no quick fix, because this ‘launcher shutting down’ thing isn’t your main issue – your bigger issue is that you need a better graphics card for GW2. The advantage you have is that your system is a desktop, which means you should have the option to just buy a dedicated graphics card and slot it in.

The two main things you need to check before upgrading the graphics card are:
1. Does your motherboard have a PCI-express 16x slot? – it should do, since pretty much all of the not too ancient motherboards have at least 1 of these.
2. What is the wattage of your Power Supply? – this will limit how powerful a graphics card you can install without danger of frying your system. Most stock Dell PSU’s can handle any of the lower end cards that draw power through the motherboard, since their power requirements tend to be fairly low. Higher end cards tend to require more power and connect straight to the power supply and if you go that route you’re better off replacing the power supply as well with a better quality + higher wattage one.

Ouch. I’m afraid that card isn’t sufficient to properly run this game, since it’s far below the official minimum requirements. The minimum for intel cards is the new HD3000 that come with Intel Sandy Bridge chipsets, whereas your card is from the old core2 chipset era and those intel GMA’s were significantly less powerful, usually only running more graphical games by the bare skin of their teeth.

Since you already bought the game you might as well try to install it, but you’ll probably run into the same problem a lot of other players with these old intel GMA chips have, which is that the game launcher will refuse to run or constantly shutdown/freeze, thus preventing proper installation of the game. This seems to be a case of the game preventing you from wasting time updating/downloading the game if your hardware specs are insufficient.

Unfortunately since your machine is a laptop you won’t be able to really upgrade it to a point where the graphics card will play GW2, so if it doesn’t work, the only options you have are getting a different better system to play it on or attempting to get a refund for the game.

QUOTE "A Human named Clint Eastwood might have to get changed (liability and all that)

But a Charr named Clint Beastwood? I really hope that can stay." QUOTE

I’d hope so too. Sure most people will get that it’s a reference to Clint Eastwood, but it’s not direct use of the name itself, so unless Anet are being overly cautious I don’t see why they’d change these names, since they’re not inherently offensive (at least I don’t see how).

Also apparently more people thought of the Clint Beastwood one, because I a Charr spelled “Clynt Beastwood” the other day. It made me smile.

It’ll run the game, but I wouldn’t have too high expectations when it comes to performance.

The AMD-A series are APU’s designed to provide better integrated graphics support, but it comes at the cost of CPU performance, which means these laptops do ok in games that aren’t very CPU dependant, but they tend to fall flat on their face in games that are CPU heavier like GW2 is.

As said, the laptop should be able to run it (as in, the game should start), but performance maybe be quite low due to the CPU bottlenecking the hell out of everything.

I agree fully with the OP’s criticisms and suggestions.

I’ve gotten used to the lackluster rewards from the personal story instances and so my expectations for a reward at the end were low, but I still wanted to complete the story just to see the ending.

So imagine my surprise when after 80 levels and countless hours of solo instances I’m suddenly forced to group up with 4 other people and complete a dungeon in order to finish what is supposed to be MY story.

sigh

Beyond not making any sense, it’s also the return of my pet peeve “forced grouping” – I really don’t like being shoehorned into content I don’t want to do because I’ve been through enough of that in other MMO’s. I was really expecting better from a game like GW2, which prides itself on choice and “play the way you want to play”.

I really hope that Arenanet will reconsider their design choices here and add a soloable option for this step of the story in the future. As people have pointed out being able to complete this dungeon and thus the personal storyline is heavily dependant on the availability of other players and population decline in the future will not make this any easier.

It shouldn’t be a problem. They changed the regional restrictions so you only have to be in the correct region to activate the key initially (essentially prevent us europeans from buying cheaper US copies), but once the account is active you can play on it anywhere in the world.

You’ll probably still have some performance issues because of your Core2Duo processor, at least in larger fights and WvW, but you’re running a very low resolution monitor, so the 8500GT should be able to keep up with the processor on lower settings.

I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of money on a graphics card upgrade, since your processor is limiting the max fps you’ll be able to get, but a slightly faster graphics card might allow you to run higher settings without losing framerate. If it’s better fps you want then a GPU upgrade alone probably won’t cut it.

Bandithaunt Caverns is infamous for causing low FPS. Something about the design of that cave is seriously messed up and causing FPS drops similar to those that most people experience during large fights.

I get only 25-35 fps in there, instead of the 60-120 FPS I normally get.

I just want to point out that the game has an “Invisible” option for exactly these situations.

You can turn it on by opening the contacts panel (either ingame or in the character selection screen) and changing your status at the top to “Invisible” – doing so will prevent you from showing as online on any contact and guild lists and make it impossible for people to whisper you (they will be told you are offline).

A lot of people don’t seem to be aware that the game has this option, but it’s perfect for those days when you just want to play solo for a bit and not be bothered by anyone.

Not all the information we need to properly assess your laptop is shown there (the crucial thing that’s missing is the graphics chip). However from the specs that are shown there I can tell you that your processor is definitely below the minimum requirements and your Memory + OS are the bare minimum (2gb is the minimum and on Windows 7 that 2gb is even tighter than it would be on XP).

I think your main problem with getting the game to install is probably your graphics card though. I’ve done a bit of googling around and it seems these laptops generally don’t come with a discrete graphics card, so they only have the basic Intel GMA chip. Since the chipset is from the early Core2Duo days, that means you’re running an older Intel GMA version, somewhere around the old 3000 series (like a 3100 or X3100) and those are way below the minimum requirements.

They also seem to have known issues with being able to get GW2.exe to even run without freezing or crashing, which I think is most likely due to lacking drivers or possibly lack of proper Shader Model 3 support. A lot of other MMO’s have a seperate launcher process, but with GW2 the game’s launcher is integrated into the same EXE file that the game itself runs on, so in theory the launcher has the same requirements to “work” as the rest of the game does, which means if you fail the specifications to run the rest of the game, the launcher is very likely to have trouble running as well, which is why I think your download keeps disappearing.

In short, your laptop is too weak to run the game – both the processor and the graphics chip are below the minimum requirements in terms of power and even if you could get the game to install and run somehow, it still wouldn’t be very playable. Unfortunately since it’s a laptop, you don’t have much in the way of useful upgrade options, so if you want to play the game you’re going to have to get a better computer, preferably something with a dedicated (non-intel) graphics card.

Ah, I didn’t realize the laptop also has a dedicated GPU – that’s one of the issues with laptops that have switcheable graphics, they tend to show only the integrated chip in the dxdiag because that’s the chip that is active when you’re at the desktop.

So my first question would be, what is the Nvidia GPU you have in that laptop?

And secondly, have you made sure GW2 actually uses that Nvidia card and not the HD 3000? Laptops with switcheable graphics can be a bit temperamental sometimes and not switch over to 3d graphics mode when they should, thus causing games to run on the Intel integrated chip by mistake. The blue artifacting seems to happen a lot with those Intel chips, hence why I thought this might be a possibility.

If the Nvidia drivers are on 306 already then that should be fine, those should generally be the best-working drivers with GW2. If it is the Nvidia GPUing running the game, then all I can suggest is try slightly older drivers (304 or even 301, crappy performance though they may have) or wait for newer drivers.

Only the first application is included, after that you need to use transmutation stones to transfer the look over to other armor pieces.

This is why I won’t buy any of the armor skins from the GW2 store, because IMHO they’re just not good value. In GW1 costumes were nearly the same price (cheaper even if you bought them in bundles) and they were infinitely reuseable on multiple characters simultaneously and didn’t require bank space to store since you could delete and recreate them as much as you wanted. While I know it’s not the same game, it’s still run by the same companies and they purposely chose to go with a costume system that is less convenient for the player and requires them to spend more time/effort to reuse what they already purchased – I hate sneaky business practices like that, so it really puts me off spending any money on fluff this time around (despite buying a lot of this stuff in GW1).

As Zaxan said, if you are talking about actual screen tearing turning on Vsync should fix it.

However if you’re talking about something different with artifacts or blue boxes / lines / triangles as some other HD 3000 users have experienced with GW2 then I would suggest checking your graphics driver, because that is a known issue when running outdated Intel graphics drivers.

You’re still running a driver from 2011, but according to Intel their most recent release on 64-bit was may 2012. Those drivers need to be adapted for your laptop model by Packard Bell, so check if PB have any newer drivers available for your laptop. If PB have stopped support beyond 2011 then you may have a bit of a problem.

I think they phrased it rather poorly because they tried to be brief, but what they mean isn’t that each password will be completely unique to one user, but rather that the password will be unique in that it’s not currently known (yet) to account thieves.

Of course this doesn’t guarantee that the new passwords will remain unknown to account thieves, but it makes their existing list of harvested account details far less useful, since any password on that list that they already tried was either 1. not in use yet and thus immediately blacklisted from further use or 2. already in use, but blacklisted as soon as the player changed his password.

It means they have to start from scratch with compiling a list of useable account details. (It also forces all of the people who use just 1 password for absolutely everything to come up with another password and if they are lazy and leave all of their other logins unchanged, it means they now actually have a unique password just for GW2! At least for a while… You can’t really cure stupidity if it doesn’t want to be cured. xD).

CPU dependant though the game engine may be, this doesn’t sounds more like a straight-up random bug to me. There are well-known and consistent performance problems with certain parts of the game where fps can get really low (big DE’s and WvW battles), but what I’ve noticed that those drops always seem to be paired with an overal lowering of the CPU and GPU useage on my system, as if the game engine is choking on itself rather than on a lack of resources available from the hardware. The fact that your CPU gets completely maxed out while your FPS drops so low at the same time sounds like you’re hitting some random bug rather than a consistent performance issue.

Your situation actually seems vaguely reminiscent of a game bug I ran into myself a while ago. I was in Queensdale on the bridge to the ford where the centaurs keep attacking and in the middle of the event my game totally spazzed out for a few seconds – the CPU useage maxed out, while my GPU useage and FPS flatlined, making it almost impossible to move. A few seconds later useage levels and FPS returned to normal and it hasn’t happened to me since.

This occurrence didn’t feel similar in any way to the other performance drops in the game – it felt like some part of the engine got stuck in an infinite loop, overworking the CPU to the point where it could barely process anything else. As you can see in my sig I’m running an Intel / Nvidia system, so AMD systems aren’t the only ones having random problems. Also at the time this happened I was running stock settings, so it wasn’t OC related either.

Same problem here. Reloading the page sometimes fixes it, but at other times I can reload all I want but it’s like the forum is just laughing at me and going “you’re not editing this post, hahaha”.

Using Firefox 15.0.1.

Just to further put your mind at ease, my main character is also a Ranger. I have played that character for well over 150 hours and I am one of the worst serial AFKers you can imagine.

My pet is always on aggressive and will kill anything that tries to go near me. As a result I’ve gotten credit for a lot of events I never even saw the start nor finish of and many times returned to find some lootable corpses around me.

Obviously I don’t do it on purpose – it’s just that I’m easily distracted and multitask a lot, not to mention frequently walking away from my computer to make tea or lunch and just abandoning my character wherever she happens to be at the time. Sometimes that’s in the middle of a busy area with lots of other people and events spawning.

I haven’t been banned and I’m not worried that I will be. It would require some pretty high level of incompetence to ban me for botting, since 1 look at the logs would tell them my playing behaviour doesn’t remotely fit the pattern of a bot.

PS: As always when reading stuff on online forums it’s a good idea to maintain a high level of skepticism and not take everything at face value. If nothing else forums like these are usually filled to the brim with the bad stories and most of them are only told from a single perspective – that of the player. And sometimes that perspective isn’t entirely truthful because people like to exagerate or leave things out to make their position look more favourable. Without knowing the other side of the story, it always helps to take a grain of salt with everything you read. And yeah that includes my post as well.

The OP didn’t even give a proper description of his problem. Lag could mean anything from hardware lag (low fps / stuttering) to connection lag (high ping, rubberbanding, etc) and he didn’t mention when and where it occurs.

Assuming it’s hardware lag he is talking about, then I don’t know what the issue is, unless he’s specifically talking about the known performance issues in giant WvWvW and DE battles, or specific areas within the cities, where the game engine seems to choke on itself regardless of graphics settings, specs or overclocks…

Outside of those situations the game should be running really well on his specs, unless he’s running some really high resolution with Supersampling turned on, or he has Reflections set to max (which some people have found may cause stuttering for no apparent reason) or there’s something else going on like his GPU downclocking to 2d levels when it shouldn’t be.

As an example I run this game @ 1680×1050 with the specs in my sig – my settings are on full, except for FXAA / Depth Blur off (because I don’t like their effect) and Reflections set to Terrain & Sky (becuase of the aforementioned stutter issue when using “All”). With Supersampling on, I get between 70-120 fps most of the time. There are only a few areas in the game, usually with a lot of fog and/or heavy shadow and lighting effects, where the GPU has to work so hard that it only manages around 50-60fps. Without Supersampling the fps is between 100-200fps depending on whatever the CPU can keep up with. Even though I’m running at sub-1080p I think these FPS values are perfectly acceptable – Supersampling was never meant to be used lightly (there is a reason they recommend it only with beastly GPU’s) and without it seems like a GTX680 should have no problem pushing high-digit FPS even at 1920×1080 or 1900×1200.

The bottomline is that the game by itself is not broken when it comes to performance. Yes, there ARE areas where improvement is needed, like in big battles and cities – I fully support the drive to try and get those issues sorted out – but the rest of the game is more than capable of taking advantage of high end hardware and running at high and steady fps. The situations where the poor performance is across the board on high end rigs are out of the ordinary cases that usually turn out to be the result of specific other factors, such as drivers, downclocking or heat / power. Especially the downclocking seems to be a sporadic issue with a variety of both AMD and Nvidia GPU’s – it seems in some cases the GPU’s don’t properly clock up to 3d levels while running GW2 and people found that something as silly as running youtube in the background kicked their GPU into gear.

The performance on high settings is pretty much as expected – your laptop just isn’t upto that. Regarding your performance on low, is that with all settings on the absolute lowest, including Render Sampling set to Subsample? If not, give that a try. I know it won’t look pretty, but it’s the only way the game is playable on low end setups like yours.

I would expect that on bare minimum settings you might be able to squeeze out about 15-20 fps if you’re running at 1366×768 and assuming that your laptop isn’t downclocking itself for power or heat reasons (when gaming always have your laptop plugged in and on a flat hard surface and check that power options are set to best performance / cooling under those circumstances).

That’s about as much performance as you can expect from it though and the reason for that is mainly your graphics chip. Your 310m is essentially a rebranded 210m, which is a 4 generations old chip that is at the bottom of the performance scale – what this means is that while it may be able to run more graphically intensive games, it struggles when it comes to the performance, especially on games that are not very forgiving even on minimum settings and resolutions (like GW2).

I don’t understand either why the downleveling system is so skewed. I think you should just be scaled down to a point where you’re no more powerful than you would be if you played the area on-level. Then the rewards could also be made fully equal to your level no matter where you are and we could do away with this stupid song and dance of having to balance out difficulty + time vs. rewards because of the highly imperfect scaling system they went for.

The only problem that would be left then would the issue of loot drops – if you make those fully equal to the players’ level it would make it difficult to acquire certain crafting materials from lower tiers.

I think the best solution to this might be something similar to the normal mode / hard mode toggle in GW1… in GW1 the world wasn’t equally difficult everywhere either, even between the max level areas themselves, but the entire world was raised to the highest difficulty in Hardmode. Perhaps in GW2 upon reaching max level we could have something similar, like a “max level mode” that we can toggle on to make the downleveling more balanced so that the entire world is of an equivalent difficulty to playing in a natural lvl 80 zone and we get full level 80 rewards. If players wanted to farm a specific tier of crafting materials they could turn the max level mode off and they’d just get the same difficulty and rewards scaling they currently do.

I don’t know how feasible it is to implement something like the above, but I do think we need at least something better than the current system. Due to the imperfect scaling of rewards in the lower level areas, I really feel pigeonholed into the lvl 75+ parts of the map, since when I go anywhere else I make substantially less money and karma, not to mention that I have a significantly reduced chance of getting lvl 70+ rare / exotic items to dismantle for the ecto’s I still need to finish crafting my lvl 80 exotic set.

Bluestone.7106:

I have a macro. When I press a single button it types: ‘/s thanks’ then presses enter. I use it to quickly say thank you to anyone who revives my character (because I want to thank them but I am also too lazy to type it, especially mid-event).

I assume this type of macro is ok lol.

I don’t think they would purposely try to ban people for using macro’s like yours, but the bigger issue may be that you run the risk of getting hit by a false positive (like the OP did it would appear) and it may then be harder to get unbanned because you were in fact using a macro (even if it wasn’t a macro to fully automate play).

In your shoes I would probably err on the side of caution and disable any macro’s until we get a breakdown of what is and isn’t allowed in regard to macro’s.

Yeah, that message is just outdated. When Anet realized the 301.42 drivers in particular caused low performance they advised Nvidia users to upgrade to the latest beta driver, which at that time was the 304.79 driver.

Since then they’ve released the 306.02 drivers, which contained a lot more improvements to GW2 performance and the 306.23 WHQL drivers, which afaik don’t contain any more improvements for GW2 specifically than 306.02 did, but it did contain some stuff for other games. In general you’re best off running the latest driver and since that’s also the current WHQL there’s no reason not to.

I would however advise you to install the new driver in custom / advanced mode and only install the driver features you actually need (for most regular users that means only PhysX and the Graphics Driver itself) – the other stuff is only useful for specific setups and I would recommend not installing it if you don’t have need of it, since it can lead to conflicts sometimes. To elaborate, the HD audio driver is only needed if you use the HDMI port on your graphics card (if you use DVI or VGA only, you can skip this) – the 3d vision drivers are only needed if you use a 3d monitor for 3d gaming (if not you can skip this) – Nvidia Updater is purely an automatic driver updating tool, I would advise skipping it and doing driver updates manually.

Tachenon.5270:

About the Diminishing Returns thing: by altering the game to make it more difficult and/or tedious for players to acquire the things they want has Anet created a situation in which players are more or less likely to seek alternative means of acquiring the things they want?

I see this is as one of the main problems – there are quite a lot of things in GW2 which are relatively expensive in proportion to the rate of income during regular play, which means the demand for gold is almost always high.

While players can buy gems directly from Anet to swap for gold with other players, this doesn’t prevent people from still buying from goldsellers because they offer a much better deal. Goldsellers have a big advantage in this situation, because they use bots, which don’t get sleepy, hungry or bored. The bots also don’t care about their time investment, so aside from basic operating costs there isn’t a very high price tag on the time spent acquiring the gold, unlike there is for real players who are fueling the official gold <→ gem trade.

No, I think you did the right thing in RMAing the card. As Suzuka said, short of trying the card in a different computer I’m not sure what else you could have done.

Your PSU is more than sufficient to power the configuration and by testing the old card in your new setup you ruled out the motherboard as a potential cause. And aside from hooking up the power cables incorrectly or putting it in the wrong slot there isn’t a whole lot you could do wrong here – generally when you install a graphics card it should just work, there isn’t much to configure until you get to Windows and start installing drivers and other software for it.

Mine hasn’t reset, so it’s not gamewide, but it does sound like a bug. Resets are indeed only supposed to happen at the changeover of the month.

Keep in mind that the town/location listed is just an approximation, so it may not be very accurate or uptodate.

The best way to figure out whether or not the authentication email is from own login attempt is to check that the IP address listed in the email matches up with your new public IP address – to see what your public IP is just type my IP address into Google and hit enter (shouldn’t need to click any links as google itself should tell you your IP).

If the IP’s match then you can safely whitelist it, since it’s your own IP address. It’s only when you get an email with an IP that is not and has never been yours that you need to worry.