Guild Wars 2

Ashley, I’m currently running Win7-32bit, Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz, 4 gig RAM and 550 Ti video card with every … and I mean EVERY … GW2 graphics parameter set to the very lowest setting and I still regularly get out-of-memory crashes. Clearly a 64-bit OS and more RAM would provide more margin, but I would like to point out that the official GW2 minimum recommended hardware calls for much less capable hardware and only 2 gig of RAM. Apparently regular crashes to desktop don’t fall under ArenaNet’s criteria for minimum acceptable performance.

gilren.7192:

I’m having the same issue. I was running fine until the last patch, and now I’ll go from normal (30-50 fps) to sudden drops down to 3-5 fps. Inconsistently, so it’s not dependent on number of people near me or anything. I’ll be standing still and it will happen with no one around and then go back to normal in a minute, or it will persist until I’m forced to log out since it makes the game unplayable.

I’ve also noticed that drops in GW2 FPS don’t always coincide with bursts of activity near me. Rift had that same problem before so many people gave up on that game … you could be fishing all by yourself with absolutely nothing going on nearby and your monitor would suddenly turn to a PowerPoint slide show for a while. It would happen to EVERYONE in the game at the same time and it would always coincide with some major event going on elsewhere in that server (chat would light up like a Christmas tree) … clearly a server-side network bandwidth limitation in their case.

I suspect that something similar is the situation here. In other threads players have posted their path pings to the ArenaNet servers and the packet delays are fine right up until they hit the game server, at which point they go to a few hundred msec. Why it seems to have gotten worse after the recent patches is not clear to me, but they seem to have buggered something up somewhere.

Not that we’ll ever know for sure, of course. ArenaNet hasn’t been forthcoming at all for any of these problems, and I’m sure they think it is to their advantage for us to be second guessing our systems instead of going after them with pitchforks and torches like they deserve.

In the absence of an official position from ArenaNet, and after carefully reading the link above posted by the Moderator, my opinion is that Teamspeak with the overlay does not give anyone undue advantage simply because it is freely available to everyone. It’s not like Teamspeak is some custom app designed to give an advantage to a few players … it’s a free adjunct to the game that enhances the overall experience for the players.

I think I could probably make the argument that my gaming keyboard (which actually costs extra money) is more unfair, or that the people who have spent enough money to have a MUCH better computer than the one ArenaNet says will run this game so they can play it with fewer crashes have an undue advantage. But Teamspeak is readily available to all, and in fact even with the overlay doesn’t do anything that text chat doesn’t do.

Zeke Minus.5720:

It seems like a lot of us are getting strange lag. I’m curious as to what’s causing it on their end.

Don’t expect to ever find out. I’ve never once seen ArenaNet explain a problem from their end … and only very rarely will they even admit to one.

The thing that really ticks me off is that ArenaNet has already admitted that the game won’t run for kitten even at absolute low settings when using the minimum recommended hardware, but there has not been a single word from them regarding what hardware WOULD run the game without crashes, disconnects, crummy FPS, and lag. There are all kinds of comments here on these forums from people who are willing to spend fairly significant money to upgrade their systems if that’s what it would take, but what do we get from ArenaNet in terms of guidance?? Nothing!!

You would think they could at least pretend to have some tiny little bit of regard for their customer base. At this point I’m resigned to waiting for Elder Scrolls Online and hoping that they aren’t as clueless.

Zagerus, thanks for that bit of advice. Her sound card was set for 5.1 and not 7.1, but that indeed was the problem. I set it to 2-channel stereo and now she can suddenly hear her own character’s voice/emotes.

I had actually tried to set it to stereo before starting this thread, but it turns out that GW2 was still running at the time and apparently wouldn’t release the driver so that the change would stick.

Anyway, thanks a ton for the help … my wife wanted you to know how much she appreciates it.

LOTS of unhappy customers here and not a single response from ArenaNet ….

She has a Turtle Beach Montego DDL … admittedly not much of a sound card but it’s running the latest drivers for Win7 and the normal game sounds are fine. In response to your second question, though, she says that the audio in the cut scenes for the personal story work fine as well.

What DOESN’T work so well is the character audio during the personal story that is NOT in the cut scenes … such as when you walk up to a group of characters and hear them talking outside of the cut scene. In that situation, only one channel is audible and she has to turn her character sideways to hear the discussion. She didn’t remember whether it was left or right off the top of her head because she hasn’t done her personal story for a while. That’s all very weird, because I’ve checked the balance from both her headphones and her speakers and the left and right volumes are equal for every other situation, so it is pretty unlikely that there is a cabling or soundcard in/out defect.

But here’s something even weirder. She doesn’t hear the NPC voices, such as the greeting when you talk to a merchant or the goodbye when you leave them. She’s never heard them so didn’t realize they actually spoke, and I never thought to ask her until just now.

We just did another repair and it didn’t make any difference. She did point out one difference between our two installations, though, and maybe it is the problem. On my machine we installed the game to the default directory (Program Files), but on hers we installed it to a separate directory called GW2 (both are on the same drive as the operating system). I’m wondering if the game treats the various sound files differently, and if maybe the voice files somehow happen to assume the default Program Files directory path. I guess the only way to know for sure would be to uninstall the game and reinstall it.

How exactly did you purchase your game?

Why is it pointless? It seems to me that the whole idea of open world PvP is that you are always vulnerable.

My wife and I both run GW2 on similar machines. When she logs on to her account using my computer, all the sound volumes (music, environment, battle, character effects … including voice) sound normal. When she logs on to her account from her own machine, all the sound volumes (including her own armor effects) are fine EXCEPT for her character emotes and voice effects. We’ve cranked up the Effects volume (also the overall volume) in the options and cranked everything else down, but her character voice effects (and ONLY her voice effects) are still almost imperceptible. She has both human and Asura characters and the same low voice volume occurs for both.

It’s not a repair issue because this situation has existed since game launch and she’s had repairs since then. It’s not a sound card issue because everything else in the game sounds great.

Various Google searching hasn’t come up with anything on this …. any ideas out there?

Sebek.5379:

Work in progress? Did they even see this post? People CAN’T play this game by disconnecting every 10-20 minutes(my problem)…

Look through any of the other hundreds of posts in the Tech Support forum dealing with lag, crashes, or disconnects. You won’t find either an acknowledgement or answer from ANET to any of them. I’m not kidding.

MibuGenjuro.2365:

What really amazes me is the lack of response from Anet, I don expect the problem to b fixed over night, although it has been around for at least a week or 2, but how hard is it to jus let us know ur guys are either looking into it or working on it? I wouldve expected this kind of behaviour from Blizzard, but never from ur guys, seriously wat is going on?

I started a thread on that very subject a couple of days ago, but it quickly was deleted for “calling out ArenaNet using their name in the title.” In it I pointed out that the greatest degree customer dissatisfaction in any commercial arena comes not from bad products, but from bad responsiveness. I even used this thread with it’s 620+ post for reference, since it has not gotten one single reply yet from Anet.

So apparently they can respond quickly to criticism much better than they can to problems.

It seems to me that botting requires two-way action … i.e., capturing information from the game and responding to it, or vice versa. Anything you can do with a single-ended macro (or in your case putting a weight on a key) wouldn’t be botting in my mind. As Winespring says, even the game lets you set up any key for autoattack, but I can also chain abilities with one key from my gaming keyboard and I’m pretty certain that is not considered botting.

Personally, I’d settle for Anet simply responding once in a while to the problems expressed on these forums instead of simply ignoring everything. The only viable tech support I’ve EVER seen here has come from other players … that’s pretty sad. I started a thread here on that exact topic a couple of days ago and Anet deleted it … the stated reason being that I called them out using their name in the title of the thread. How hilarious is that?

ArenaNET, why aren’t you posting comments on technical problems to this official forum instead of to places like Twitter and Facebook?

“It bugs me that they gave up instead of continuing to find this issue that plagues many people; instead of continuing the pass it off to you telling you its something on your end. With many people suffering, you would think that just MAYBE it’s their end.”

Especially since I’d bet that the great majority of people who are experiencing crashes and disconnects are using hardware equivalent or better than that officially recommended by ArenaNET for optimum performance.

So … once again I will ask, when will we see a serious response from ArenaNET regarding the causes and proposed fixes for these problems?? It’s stupid for them to keep pumping out new content when the old content can’t be enjoyably played for so many people.

It’s really sad that ArenaNet keeps refusing to accept responsibility for all these disconnects and crashes, or even offer serious comments about them. I’ve had crashes and disconnects since the game was released, and I have a decent system without overclocking and up-to-date drivers for the 570 Ti video card. In fact, GW2 was the ONLY application installed along with a brand new copy of Windows 7 on the SSD when I first started playing the game.

The problems happen with the same regularity whether I have just “repaired” the GW2 install or not. They always happen under similar game conditions that require a lot of data transfer and real time coordination between the game engine and my computer … i.e., when traveling through a portal or when in a large group of other players, such as in a really large event or in a WvW zerg. The FPS does not significantly change, although the ability lag does sometimes increase in zergs. The game just locks up or kicks me back to the desktop.

The top five most obvious root causes for these crashes and disconnects are:

1. really poor handling of process race condition errors
2. really poor handling of process race condition errors
3. really poor handling of process race condition errors
4. really poor handling of process race condition errors
5. really poor handling of process race condition errors

I guarantee that ArenaNet knows this … they just won’t admit it and they apparently aren’t willing to fix enough of the code to make the problems go away. The fact that I have a fast SSD possibly exacerbates the problem, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place and we shouldn’t have to swap out hardware to tune for some combination of computer speed, internet latency, and game engine response time that minimizes the crashes. Some people are apparently lucky enough to have been in the sweet spot by default, but the rest of us are being screwed … we bought a game that doesn’t work.

This whole thing just sucks, and while I fully bought into the promise this game offered, the implementation is so bad that I am already ready to abandon it. If Elder Scrolls Online was released I’d be gone.

The crash/disconnect issue for the rest of us is NOT due to bad graphics cards, but I’m sure that ArenaNET loves to see posts like yours so they can pretend it isn’t their fault. In fact, some people have had to drop back to older, slower graphics cards in order to supposedly minimize the problem. Many of us have built our computers from scratch and know exactly what a bad video card looks like … and this isn’t it.

The problem is definitely not on the user side. ArenaNET knows there is a problem on their end but the fact that they haven’t done (or even said) anything about it for months tells me they either can’t or won’t fix it. It’s pretty sad, because playing WvW is incredibly frustrating due to all the disconnects anytime there is any significant population in the same close area (i.e., when the game engine needs to tell everyone what everyone else is doing). Rift had a similar issue but at least in their case it mostly just added to lag. With GW2 we get bounced out to the desktop.

You don’t need a corrupted file for GW2 to crash. It happens all the time due to server-side issues with the game engine and/or the server in/out bandwidth, and a sparkly clean GW2.dat file won’t save you from it. The game tends to crash at fairly predictable (not "unspecified) times, particularly when large data updates are required, such as when porting or when you find yourself in the middle of a lot of players (or even a lot of NPCs).

Did your IP address change? If it did, you won’t be able to log in until you read the email that allows you to authorize again.

I get lock/disconnects/crashes all the time. I’m convinced that they are due to some sort of race condition between my computer and the server that the game engine doesn’t handle properly. I used to get DC’d about half the time when I ported but that seems to have mostly been addressed, but any activity with lots of players nearby is almost guaranteed to kick me out before long. I would really like WvW but it is HUGELY frustrating to get kicked back to PvE and then have to travel half way across the WvW map to get back to my group.

I have a wireless ISP with about 70 msec latency and I have a solid state hard drive so maybe the combination of the fast drive and not-so-fast link to the game engine causes problems, but there is absolutely no way that ArenaNET should expect us to have to tune our systems to their engine … especially when we have no frigging idea what the target parameters would be.

In any case, there is something way out of whack here on ArenaNET’s end. As the post above points out, some people have greatly improved their results by going back to older, slower video cards. A guy who plays in my wife’s guild almost never experiences crashes, and get this … he’s playing with an ancient Pentium 4 computer.

By the way … I thought this portion of the forum was where we could get answers to technical problems, but has anybody ever seen ArenaNET tell us what the causes for these crashes are and what they plan to do about it? You can’t tell me that they don’t internally acknowledge the problem.

I absolutely hate downed state. I think it’s a stupid mechanism that serves no useful purpose. When I get killed I’d rather just be dead and have to respawn, and on those few occasions when I actually kill someone I’d like them to stay dead so that I can go deal with someone else. Can anyone tell me what value downed state has for anyone in PvP? From my point of view, it’s just a nonsensical distraction from PvP play.

The disjointed plot of the male Norn story aside, the dialogue is simply so bad that it is ridiculous. As I stated in a different thread, if you submitted that dialogue as a script to any high school creative writing teacher you’d be lucky not to get an F on it. It’s cheesy and mindlessly blustery beyond reason, and if you heard characters talk like that in any play or movie you’d walk out on it. Which is pretty much exactly what I’ve done. I hit level 80 weeks ago, but I stopped chasing my story line at level 59 and simply cannot stomach the idea of listening to that garbage anymore. Saturday afternoon cartoons for kids put the Norn dialogue to shame.

In stark contrast, though, the great majority of the voiced NPC dialogue you come across in the open world is clever and very well done, and much of it is hilarious. You’d never … ever … imagine that the story lines and the open world voices were written by the same company.

The Norn dialogue is just horrible. I’ve been a level 80 for weeks but gave up the story at level 59 because the dialogue is so simple minded and cheesy that I simply cannot stand to do it anymore. I also have a Charr and the dialogue there isn’t bad, and I’ve occasionally helped my wife do her Asura story line and it seems pretty good. But if you submitted the Norn dialogue as a script to any high school creative writing teacher I’d be surprised if it got a grade higher than a D minus. Whoever got paid for writing that mess stole their salary.

“These are all players who are leaching off the efforts of others and then being rewarded heavily at the end. If this were a raid group, they’d be kicked out, but that’s obviously not how GW2 works. And that’s fine, but I wish the game was smarter about detecting this when it comes time to distribute rewards.”

You expect the devs to come up with a game smart enough to weed out slackers when the devs can’t even figure out how to avoid the lag, bugs, disconnects, and crashes? Good luck with that …

The only thing about this event that lived up to its billing was that it was indeed “epic” … just not in the way most of us had hoped and probably not in the way that ANet intended.

How in heck can you call it “immersive” when you get DC’d every few minutes and sent to a different overflow server when you log back in?? Read the forums and you’ll see that happened to a huge percentage of the players, and that your experience represents such a small percentage of the total to be inconsequential.

Yup. This was the most pathetic activity I’ve done in any MMO in a very long time. Horrible design, HORRIBLY structured, horribly communicated, and horribly executed. Did ANet outsource this thing or what?

Events like this that assemble 100’s of players together in the same area are doomed to failure unless some kind of steps are taken to mitigate the traffic the servers have to handle. These problems have NOTHING to do with the performance of our computers … this is a server side traffic handling problem, either with the game engine itself or with the in/out bandwidth the ANet has leased.

For a VERY simplistic description, consider what happens when two of us are in the same area. Let’s say it takes a data packet from my computer to the server to tell the server what action I just took, and another packet from the other person to the server to tell the server what he/she just did. Then a data packet is needed to tell me what the other person did and a 4th packet from the server to tell them what I did. In this simplistic model (which by the way even ignores acknowledgement packets), the total number of data packets flying around is a quadratic function of the number of players in close enough proximity that they all need updates on what each is doing. Two players generates four packets, three players generates nine packets, 10 players generate 100 packets, and 200 players generate 40,000 packets.

The same thing happened in Rift, and in spite of similar comments from the devs that “we’re working on it”, the reality there was that Trion simply waited until enough people got fed up and stopped doing those events that the problem took care of itself … but not in a good way. I’m not expecting a significantly different result here.

What stumps me to no end is that ANet didn’t see this coming. I saw posts on these forums days ago from players predicting that server lag was going to be a huge issue with Lost Shores, and SOMEBODY at ANet should have been able to do the math that guaranteed it. Yet they went ahead and dropped this kitten on everyone anyway. Astounding …