Guild Wars 2

Xandror.2356:

…Unfortunately when I logged him today the mystic forge was destroyed and for some reason I was kicked out of LA and not able to waypoint back.

So I take it they are thinking outside the MMO box by not only never releasing any new zones to explore, they are now removing the existing ones?

Did you miss the large patch, patch notes on the launcher client, and people likely discussing it in chat (not to mention, it was already announced maybe a few days to a week before)? Oh, and how about that video that was played as soon as you logged in (if you’re using the forge and completing dailies, I’ll assume you were over level 30)?

Seeing as it’s near-impossible to of missed all of that, and the general tone of your posts, I’ll assume this is just general trolling. I’d suggest not trying again, but if you really must, try harder next time.

Ayrilana.1396:

What’s so difficult about writing it down?

Or even remembering. I did LA about 3 times before I cared about achievements (I didn’t even look at them prior to that point), and knew what I did and didn’t do.

But I will agree, some better reporting would be convenient.

LiveSpartan.8206:

People do realize there are other cities in the game that have crafting stations and laurel vendors right?

This. I use Divinity’s Reach primarily, and have no real issue with the way crafting is spread out. Sure, I’d love for it to be all conveniently placed right next to each other, but I manage fine without it. The Airship is really nice though. No idea how LA was (only really passed through it for quests and exploration).

Learn some patience with walking is all I can suggest.

Edit: Just read the above situation a bit more. Since I haven’t really used LA, I have no idea how conveniently things were placed before, but services moved over to the keep can be seen as good or bad I guess depending on how you look at it.

Note I haven’t been to the keep yet, or even know if there is a forge there, but my understanding of this disapproval is because the services now offered in the keep aren’t set in a convenient way like they were in LA. This could be looked at at two different ways:

- ArenaNet wants people to buy the pass

- Due to cosmetic-reasons, the LA chaos, and the rush of having to move services, NPCs in the keep had to make due with what they had, and quickly set-up shop in a non-convenient way.

I prefer to believe the latter for lore.

Was wondering if anyone else managed to fully explore the zone?

There is a vista above Lion’s Court that I had quite a bit of trouble getting to. I eventually was able to get it, but only after a Mesmer who happened to be up there at the time (he claims he logged out there before the update, but wasn’t everyone teleported to a nearby zone?) teleported me up.

The completion rewards is kind of disappointing though, just some transmutation stones and experience. It’s the right amount for a non-combat city, but one that’s under full-scale attack should probably receive a bit more for the trouble I’d figure (the reward probably wasn’t changed).

I’ve had 0 graphics artifacting on my 7850 with GW2, with drivers as old as 12.11 as far as I can recall. I’m using 14.1 Beta currently without problem too.

Are you overclocking your card, and/or have a factory overclocked card?

http://puu.sh/70P9o.jpg

It’s hard to see, but my normal Greatsword isn’t being shown in the reflection in the water. My character and armor on the other hand are.

I recall trying Eyefinity a little while back with either 13.12, or the Kaveri beta drivers (13.35) on Windows 7, and all was fine. This probably doesn’t help though.

Did you clean install 13.12, or install them over-top another driver? I might recommend also just cleanly reinstalling the drivers. I left some info on a useful uninstall tool and my uninstall procedure here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Problems-and-Issues-with-Win8-1/3650971

Ashabhi.1365:

I have heard that there are a few known problems with 8.1, but I am having serious issues trying to find any concrete information about what those problems are and how to fix them or at least mitigate their impact.

Can someone point me to a place where I can try to fix some of the inconveniences I am experiencing?

If it means anything, my experience has been nothing but flawless in 8.1. Most issues usually stem from drivers (for example; upgrading from 8 to 8.1 with NVIDIA graphics drivers results in 3D stereoscopic being enabled for some weird reason in GW2).

What’s your graphics hardware and driver? Also, how did you go about a clean driver install? I have no idea about NVIDIA, but AMD’s uninstaller tends to leave some stuff behind. There’s a fantastic tool by Wagnard called Display Driver Uninstaller that cleans up drivers really well, and quickly (for both AMD and NVIDIA): http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=379505

My choice of uninstall (for AMD) goes: CIM Express Uninstall > DDU > CCleaner + CCEnhancer; probably overkill though.

GW2 afaik doesn’t care. You drag the large .dat file and Gw2.exe to a new folder, anywhere, and run Gw2.exe, and all should be well.

In the event it does care, you’d just download GW2’s installer, run it, allow it to install to your new specified location, close it when it starts the actual game download, and then transfer your old, large .dat over to the new folder.

Silberfisch.3046:

…At least the zerker/meta-playstyle (the bullies, remember) are socially aware enough to communicate what they expect from their fellow group members.

During the first few dungeons I did, I thought “why is everyone stacking in one spot”. I wasn’t told anything, and just followed it (I figured it was a rare occurrence).

There was one dungeon where somebody explained in-detail where to stack and run. That run also had plenty of partial and full-group wipes due to trying to run past stuff, along with taking over an hour to do (want to say close to two hours).

And note, I was also joining non-speed run groups too (so I wasn’t even aware ahead of time that there would be stacking nor skipping, aside from what to expect from previous experience). The social aspect you speak of is hardly there, except for a few rare instances, that I’ve seen anyway.

Seems like my kind of guild

Personal opinion here, but I"m tired of the cheesy stack/skip methods most people use in dungeons, that sometimes even result in more time wasted than just killing stuff (5+ partial/full group wipes trying to run past trash that you as a group are fully capable of killing is plain silly; yes, I’ve personally witnessed this a few times).

They need to optimize the PC version first. Why pull a Diablo III :p

If they did bring GW2 over to consoles though, I would hope they would also bring controller support over as well. Once again, why pull a Diablo III…

But in any case, you need to pay for an internet connection, as you probably also need to pay for electricity to power the console too. You “hardly” play GW2 for free :p

With that in mind though, most console owners would probably already have a subscription for the respective service (XBL, PS+) for other games, so it probably isn’t limited too many people anyway (I don’t know XBL’s policy for F2P games).

Harper.4173:

…ALSO
" If you really don’t want to go through long dungeons, why do them at all?"

Because I need the gold. I couldn’t care less about the dungeons that I do at the moment – i’ve done them so many times I can draw them from memory complete with encounters and dialogue.
I want to go in -get the gold – get out asap. And I’m not the only one.

As a side question : how many hours of gametime do you have and how many times have you run AC?

I have a feeling after you’ll have done the dungeons a couple hundred times your views on this will change.

Isn’t this what fractals are for though (forgive me if I’m far off with that assumption though; never actually did any yet)? From my “very” limited understanding of them, aren’t they like mini-version variants of dungeons you should be familiar with?

Also, I’m pretty sure either fully clearing dungeons, or skipping through them 400 times will end up pretty boring either way.

As for your reasoning why you want to quickly clear dungeons; that’s like stating you should be able to insta-boost to level 80 in full exotics because you’ve leveled plenty (plenty being different for every person) of other characters to 80 in the past.

I haven’t tried making a group requesting full-clears/no stacks, mostly because I just assumed most people rather “take the easy way”. I’ve never seen any group advertised that stated no stacking and/or no skipping, so with that in mind, I didn’t really assume anyone to be interested in such a thing.

Sins.4782:

Maybe the mods are as tired of seeing the daily “skipping/stacking exploiting” thread in the dungeon forum as we are?

I honestly didn’t figure this to be a popular issue at all, mainly because… everyone seemed to of done it, without question. But I guess it’s interesting to know it is at least discussed.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Don’t like it? Make your own LFG stating you don’t want to stack and want to kill all foes. Let other people play the way they want to play.

I don’t buy that argument at all. That’s like stating that everyone who wants to should use an exploit (that’s not intended for use by ArenaNet) to easily gain level 80 in an hour and get full exotics for free, and that said exploit should remain in the game because “people want to do it”.

I may be letting personal bias show, but I really don’t understand why people would want to use cheesy tactics like this. If you really don’t want to go through long dungeons, why do them at all?

If ArenaNet intentionally implemented ways to run past enemies in dungeons and stated such (just because you can do it doesn’t mean it’s intentional), then I guess I don’t really have any argument… But I’m assuming it’s not intended.

Clivar.3176:

The fix itself is pretty easy and I dont get why this wasnt there since launch.
Dont let mobs lose agro in dungeons.
But for this to work there have to be a few changes:

I feel like some mobs (arah elites) hit too much. Im guessing this was implemented to avoid major skipping. You might aswell reduce the damage by 10%? as players will have to kill those mobs anyway..

The mechanic of stealth in dungeons has to be reworked. Thiefs will become very powerful if they manage to avoid agro in stealth and others dont. Thief will become the new meta in dungeons like arah/TA/etc. Players will specifically ask for thiefs in dungeons and the skipping will still happen.
If anet decides to remove stealth from dungeons then thiefs will be useless in dungeons.
They dont have anything to support their party or other classes are just better at that.

AI of mobs: Mobs cant jump up or down so if we use the terrain to our advantage mobs will be unable to reach us. So far the game fixed this by losing agro once we do that. But what will happen if they remove the losing agro mechanic? They get stuck and free for us to kill? They ignore obstacles and glitch up or down to attack us?

Some elements would need to be re-worked. Perhaps some monsters should just have their HP/damage slightly reduced just so it isn’t as-annoying to kill them?

As for stealth, one or some enemies in a pack should have some form of stealth detection. And for an interesting twist, upon seeing a stealthed player, that enemy should throw something that both exposes the player, and binds them to that spot for a short period of time, along with alerting nearby enemies of their group to attack said player and/or the player group if nearby.

The terrain point is a bit trickier. I’m not really too sure what to suggest for this (specific examples might help). Perhaps certain exploit areas should just be blocked off, or maybe for another interesting twist, humanoid-like enemies in dungeons should be aware of such spots, and have traps placed. Maybe even put a turret to watch certain areas too.

Almost every dungeon I’ve ran so far (after coming back from a few week break), everyone seems to just ignore certain enemies, and LoS others with stacking (the spider queen in AC is a popular one).

Quite frankly, I find it pretty annoying and cheesy. Not to mention, really time wasting too if mistakes are made (such as one person not making it, having to run back, or somebody not stacking properly, getting downed, and causing subsequent downs and death, etc). You didn’t make it to the stack zone through waves of enemies? Either try again by yourself, leave, or get an escort (all wasting the time of those who made it through already), and lose some coin for repair bills. I’ve seen repeated partial and even full-group wipes resulting from just trying to run past enemies.

I spoke up about it on a few occasions, and nobody really cared, which really surprises me. How on earth is that better than to just kill enemies and not have to worry about them later, and even get a bit of loot, gold, and experience in the process? Is killing non-essential enemies really that detrimental?

If I had to have a suggestion to fix this, it would be to have enemies chase you down to the death; like how they do in instances on WoW (if I recall right anyway). I can understand the open PvE space; enemies might not want to chase you to the ends of the earth. A dungeon on the other hand is a finite-space, and I’m sure the enemies there should know this.

I’m wondering whether I’m just unlucky, or if this is a normal thing? I can understand intentional speedrun groups doing this (to an extent; I still find it really cheesy), but this seems to be done in any dungeon that allows for it, story or exp, 80-only or any level.

Most people in groups just explain the concept of stacking and running past enemies as if it was a legitimate mechanic, but surely this couldn’t be the case right? I could also imagine this being somewhat off-putting to newer players too.

I was able to download the installer about an hour ago.

Can confirm the same happening on my end (just did a fresh Windows install). I imagine it’ll be fixed at some point though.

KlaviersPsilocybinVein.4821:

is this a good idea?

Depends on what you do. If you have 100+ tabs open in a browser and play demanding games like GTA IV at the same time, you really don’t want to do that…

With that in mind though, I’ve ran without a page file for a few months with 8GB of RAM, and was fine. At the most though I only had around 10 tabs open in a browser at a time, and closed the browser when playing games. GW2 on its own ran fine without a paging file.

If I had around 16GB of RAM, I’d definitely feel confident running without a paging file (based on my usage). 8GB was fine for me too, but explorer crashed (out-of-memory) one time when I was playing GTA IV with nothing else (memory demanding) open.

I suggest checking memory usage when you do normal tasks (with Resource Monitor). Keep an eye on Free and Standby memory.

NeedCoffee.1402:

Mantle wont happen at all, just look at CUDA. It came out 7 years ago and we have yet to see a game engine programed entirely in CUDA.

CUDA only applies to NVIDIA GPUs, with no chance of it being used on Intel or AMD GPUs. Mantle on the other hand is said to be an API that can be modified for other vendors to use (NVIDIA could essentially make their own bare-metal API that has compatibility with Mantle).

Mantle also already has some pretty strong backers starting out. Generally speaking, if the engine supports Mantle, end-developers don’t really have to do too much to take advantage of it. Not sure how likely it is it’ll happen, but if Source Engine, Unreal Engine, and/or CryEngine gained Mantle compatibility, that’ll lead to a large number of future games with Mantle.

Plus, I’m pretty sure Mantle and computational languages (CUDA, OpenCL, DirectCompute) function far differently (or at the very least, there are scenarios where one or the other would be far easier and sane to implement; ex: you probably wouldn’t throw audio processing on OpenCL).

XFlyingBeeX.2836:

Maybe in the future (about 0.0001%)
Physx + Mantle (AMD or NVIDIA) – THE BEST for costumers

PhysX is nothing more than some blob jello liquid physics, and some cloth simulation (which Havok does just as well if not better, without the hardware bias). Plus with it being restricted and (likely intentionally) having terrible performance on CPU acceleration (imagine GW2’s level of optimization at its worst, then make it even worse)… it is nowhere near “the best” for customers.

Havok would be a better choice for cloth simulation. But in any case, I doubt anything would change that drastically engine-wise.

Avelos.6798:

No more CPU for AM3+ is what they should do. AM3+ is too old and needs to be retired. USB 3.0, SATA 6GB/s and all that other good stuff that comes natively supported by Intel now is made to be half supported on AM3+ by software bridging and changes it into some Frankenstein platform.

Is there a source on that?

sirsquishy.8531:

If you use an APU+Switchable Graphics on your Laptop you cannot use the AMD supplied Drivers, it will break the switchable graphics. You have to download modded Drivers to fix the Broken Switchable Graphic DLL Link

Break how?

I’ve heard that owners of 6xxx (labeled) GPUs in a switchable graphics setup will want to use a modified driver just because their switchable graphics menu on AMD’s drivers won’t work. My 7660G+7670M laptop has been fine in that regard though with all of AMD’s drivers.

In any case, I’d suggest trying out AMD’s driver first to be sure though.

Meep.1724:

Espionage.3685:

I have a X3 720 BE currently, but my motherboard allows for core unlocking. So I took my X3 @ 2.8GHz and put it at X4 @ 3.4GHz.

Core unlocking is a bit of a gamble though; might be better off getting a X4 or X6 BE processor.

Tried core unlock once. Entered an unending cycle of reboots ^^"
Not gonna try that again

Interesting; the two motherboards I have (BIOSTAR A880g+ and ASRock 970 Extreme3) both have a safeguard to turn core unlocking off if it causes any boot problems.

If voltage was set properly before enabling core unlocking (and given the PSU could handle the little bit of extra load), it could just be possible that processor has a bad unlockable core(s). Or the motherboard itself doesn’t properly implement core unlocking (may want to make sure you have the latest BIOS available and see other people’s feedback on core unlocking with your particular board and CPU).

CursedShaitan.9720:

…Finally. When I say targeted I mean I snapped the frame at the lowest frame I saw. The situation itself was not targeted in any sense. . Its not ment as conclusive evidence just the best I could come up with on short notice. I’ll show you can scrape above 30 with most settings maxed in world events and wvw tomorrow but I don’t expect anyone to believe or hold their breath till then. Have a good one.

I might also suggest getting framerate numbers from a SB event. There’s usually a lot of people at that event.

I have a X3 720 BE currently, but my motherboard allows for core unlocking. So I took my X3 @ 2.8GHz and put it at X4 @ 3.4GHz.

Core unlocking is a bit of a gamble though; might be better off getting a X4 or X6 BE processor.

You mainly want the Gw2.dat file. For a clean install on multiple computers, you’d want to run GW2’s installer (can be found on your account page) let the launcher run for a very short period of time, close it, then transfer over the completed Gw2.dat file.

Installing GW2 first ensures the proper registry entries and folder(s) are available (but probably isn’t mandatory).

Sounds like it could be QoS; I’d check the router/modem settings and see if such a setting is enabled.

Mantle would benefit GW2 more than DX11 on a performance-level, but DX11 would be more compatible (and probably not offer any benefit unless other aspects are addressed).

I vote for Mantle; but I expect DX11 to have higher priority. If I understand right too, GW2 and NVIDIA have a thing, so Mantle is probably even less likely :/

So, now that more information about Mantle is out there, I still believe this would be really beneficial for GW2.

Ideally, the processor would be less strained, and the GPU would be able to process more work, leading to overall better framerates on a lot of systems, both low and high-end.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

Espionage.3685:

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

Server side will never impact fps

The removal of server-side culling begs to differ…

Optimizations server side have no impact, all they did was move the settings and make them controllable by the client, if you run the same settings the performance stays the same. That was a change to culling and not a server side optimization.

Ah, I suppose you’re right.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

Server side will never impact fps

The removal of server-side culling begs to differ…

Spork.2375:

azizul.8469:

try this :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkfIFP0g2xY

http://www.tweakhound.com/2013/07/15/bad-tweak-core-parking/

It’s a bad tweak, do not suggest it please. It doesn’t really help. Placebo effect is strong with this one.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet :p I learned not to even trust TweakHound after their description of HPET and also calling it a “bad tweak” (both were wrong)…

The only reason that tweak is bad is because it affects mobile device battery life (only slightly at that). If you need all the battery power you can get, then yeah, don’t mess with core parking. Otherwise, it has had some proven good effects on performance.

Edit: Even his reasoning for it being a bad tweak holds little ground:

“IMHO this tweak is completely useless.
This tweak can also be detrimental for laptop users who do not understand the impact this can have on battery life.”

I don’t care about his opinion, I want facts… I think it’s pretty common knowledge that stopping CPU cores from powering down will increase power usage slightly.

CursedShaitan.9720:

ive got a phenom II 965 running at 4.4ghz and terrible fps

Define terrible and in what kind of situations. I have a Phenom II X4 @ 3.4Ghz (unlocked X3), and I get 40-60+ in most PvE situations excluding group events which can drop down to 20-ish I believe, maybe a bit lower, but in any case, I find that pretty reasonable.

SolarNova.1052:

You can but a single 7970 powering triple monitors, ur asking a bit much there i think.

I’ve ran GW2 just fine on highest settings on a 7850 with 3-screen (1600×900) Eyefinity. GPU usage rarely ever hit 99%. I expect a 7970 with 3 1080p screens to be a similar experience.

abomally.2694:

Norseman.4280:

I started having this problem in a win7 64 bit desktop moderate gaming rig after the last patch also. I mostly wvw and that’s when I have the problem. It might be a half hour in, or 3 hours in but my computer just shuts off, no reboot or anything. Everything else runs fine, even other games. I’ve cleaned everything up and did a fresh install of gw2 and it hasn’t fixed it.

Shutting down is a good indicator that your power supply is failing – provided that this isn’t a temperature issue.

The motherboard itself can also cause a shutdown if temperatures reach a certain point. The BIOSTAR A880G+ motherboard I had did just that (CPU temp hit 65C, a second later the computer powered down without warning).

Avelos.6798:

Beta drivers will not work the same for everyone. For Tarvaln, his hardware configuration and software configuration were unfortunately right enough that they didn’t work.

Fair enough, although this is the first and only report I’ve seen of GW2 not working. It’s leading me to believe there’s some other issue interfering instead of just the driver itself.

@Tarvaln, how did you remove previous drivers? What OS are you on? What card do you have?

I recommend using DDU from Wagnard for uninstalling the previous driver: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=379505

Tarvaln.6298:

Just so people know, AMD beta drivers up to AMD Beta Drivers 13.11beta 9.2 do not work with GW2. I tested beta 2 and beta 6. The game will simply crash to your desktop and give you an error.

Strange… I installed those very drivers yesterday, and GW2 works fine. I have a Radeon HD 7850 on Windows 8.1.

One person’s experience =/= everyone else’s.

Behellagh.1468:

Since GW2 is a 32-bit app running on a 64-bit OS if it tries to use more than 4GB of memory you will bet an OOM error. Since everyone isn’t getting it I’m assuming it’s something that is unique to players experiencing it. A combination of game settings, device drivers and activity I’m guessing.

I’m curious as to what kind of settings and scenarios. I’ve had max settings going at 5040×900 resolution for I believe 10+ hours one time recently (throw in a SB event and plenty of other smaller events), and had no OOM crash (never had one ever even since beta), yet I hear of people managing to get it at lowest settings at like 1/3rd that resolution after a while…

I heard there was some known issue with NVIDIA drivers on 32-bit operating systems that might affect some people. I can’t imagine this problem specifically affecting the majority of OOM scenarios though…

RainbowSyrup.4130:

Why do people ask questions that has nothing at all to do with the theme of the livestream…

Because it doesn’t state the questions have to be about the theme?

People can ask what they want. It’ll be up to ArenaNet to choose what they want to answer…

Server =/= Clients. Your typical server executable probably isn’t using any specific API to output audio and graphics locally…

There would be two options to bring GW2 to Linux:

1. Re-code major/vast parts of the game to work natively on Linux (would include going from DirectX to OpenGL, and that alone is some serious work)

2. Wrap the current version of GW2 with Wine and offer it (like the Mac port), performance in such a scenario would be less-than-ideal for most people, and from a business standpoint, probably wouldn’t make much sense.

There’s a Wiki page about getting GW2 to run on Wine, but obviously it’s unsupported by them.

Sabor.6935:

Are you sure you’re running the latest drivers? The latest Catalyst drivers for the HD 7xxx series is 13.9

Yikes, didn’t even notice the driver version in the first post lol.

For clarification purposes though, Graath probably has an AMD Radeon HD 7770 (no such thing as a “ATI 7770”). The newest WHQL-signed driver is 13.9, but the latest beta driver is 13.11 currently.

Not too sure if he really is using 10.12 drivers though, since they don’t seem to support any of the 7xxx series (those drivers are from 2010, and the 7xxx series arrived in 2011 I think). But in any case, make sure to grab updated drivers from AMD directly (don’t use the OEM’s drivers as they’re likely old).

sobe.4157:

…Or were you referring to 1GB of memory on GW2 being your video memory? If you meant video memory then that would be your issue, your vid card is a 1GB card, it can’t perform higher than that.

From my experience, it’s pretty impossible to hit anywhere near 1GB of video memory usage with GW2 unless you’re pushing extreme resolutions (Eyefinity with 3 1080p screens) with Supersampling and using an operating system without optimized video memory usage (Vista).

I think the highest I’ve seen was close to or slightly over 500MB, with 3-screen (5040×900) Eyefinity on Windows 8.

Don.6510:

i use crossfire i don’t have any problems i use two radeon hd 6770 one running at x16 and x4 i get 60 standing in the open world and 40 in big group cpu is amd fx 8320

I believe the discussion is about the desktop gaming client called Xfire.

Wouldn’t be surprising though, Xfire has some really “weird” ways of hooking into games. I use Evolve though and can confirm it works fine.

Have you observed GPU and CPU usage?

Regardless of whether or not GW2 is unoptimized, something is holding it back, or is being utilized far more than it should be.

If I had to guess, during low-framerate situations, I would say the processor usage is around 80%+ on either most of your CPU cores, or one specific core, and GPU usage is below 40%.

Go to the Cave Troll cave in Queensdale with Vsync disabled (and without any events going on nearby; or use any small enclosed unpopulated area), and stare at a wall; framerate should be pretty good, and GPU usage should either be around or at 99%, which would indicate the GPU load shouldn’t be a problem.

Just to backup Avelos’s statement, my 7850 can also max out GW2, even on 5040×900 Eyefinity. My Phenom II X4 @ 3.3Ghz however struggles a bit, which leads to overall lower framerate.

Other games use totally different engines. Java-based Runescape (which barely uses my GPU) runs better on my computer at max quality than Crysis 3 (which kills my GPU with usage), but does that indicate Java on its own is really more-optimized than CryEngine 3? :p

Other parts of a computer have to be able to handle the content. Having the highest-end processor and GPU isn’t going to mean much in games if you have 1GB of the slowest RAM possible…

With that said though, it’s likely your processor holding you back. Need to know more specs though.

shimmerless.4560:

Is there a way to possibly clear out this dust without voiding the warranty? (i.e. Disassembly)

I just use a vacuum. Can’t say it’s caused me any problems with the laptops (and other various devices and things) I’ve used it on, but there are some risks associated with it.

I hear it could build up static. No idea if this is true, but you’ll want that static discharged in a safe manner, or you might end up frying something. Vacuuming a fan and causing it to spin also cause power to be generated. I’ve seen no issue with this, but just something to note.

But yeah, I’ve done it numerous times in the past on laptops and desktops, game consoles, etc. and have had no problem.

80+ FPS is pretty impressive. What’s your processor and GPU, along with host and guest OS?

Last time I tried GW2 under VMware Player, framerate was pretty unideal (10 or less I think) on lowest settings; on Windows I could get 30 FPS (outside WvW) most of the time on highest settings. This was on a Ubuntu Host OS + Windows XP Guest OS. I’ll have to give it another try in the near future though.

As for the mouse, I’ve heard of VMware Workstation having some setting for a “gaming-optimized” cursor. I haven’t heard of this setting existing in Player for some reason though… I’m almost certain this mouse mode is needed for any game that has a 3D camera though, but I think I heard someone use a trick like plugging in 2 physical mice or something like that.

Hmm, I take it you’re using Windows 7 as the Guest OS? Did you install VMWare Tools?

Some other things to try are:
- Updating the Guest OS fully (Windows 7 takes like 4-5 WU runs and reboots to be complete; keep repeating till no updates are found)
- Update DirectX on the Guest OS via dxwebsetup (or June 2010 of a redist)
- Verify/Enable 3D acceleration (have to shutdown the Guest OS and toggle an experimental setting I believe)

The launcher afaik requires some form of hardware-acceleration to proceed past a certain point, but I could be wrong about this.

Oceangrave.9657:

Espionage.3685:

A game on its own should not be causing any kind of system-wide reboot. The game however could expose weakness in a driver (likely graphics) that could cause the reboot though.

I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone else claiming spontaneous reboots though without reason. I would have to say such an issue is very isolated, and system-specific, possibly due to either faulty hardware or driver(s).

So out of the dozens and dozens of games i play and not crashing like this in any of those games, and the only time i crash is when i do guild wars 2 and when i do certain abilities (and i cant stress enough that it will ONLY happen when i do certain skills). It HAS to be my computer and there is no possible way that its just guild wars?

Obviously you have not read the forum very much as a LOT of other people have this issue and a lot more threads about it , some have had it for months, others since the latest update. But its always the same type of crash.

What operating system are you on? What GPU do you have? What driver version are you using and where did you get the driver? What other non-stock drivers are you using (mouse, chipset, etc)?

I still can’t just imagine GW2 being able to cause a system reboot, without it being the fault of something else.

A game on its own should not be causing any kind of system-wide reboot. The game however could expose weakness in a driver (likely graphics) that could cause the reboot though.

I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone else claiming spontaneous reboots though without reason. I would have to say such an issue is very isolated, and system-specific, possibly due to either faulty hardware or driver(s).

A Radeon HD 5570 (probably no more than $50 now) played GW2 nicely for me about a year ago with acceptable FPS.

And all of you are positive there’s nothing heat-related going on?

When components get to a certain thermal limit, they downclock to reduce heat. This downclock will reduce performance. Once temperatures are lower, the clock speed goes back to normal. And this process can repeat too.

I’ve had a GPU that exhibited the same exact behavior (performance would be fine, then drop for a few seconds, go back to being fine, and then drop again for a few seconds, repeating consistently). Later found out it was heating-related.

The only way to know for sure is to have a way to monitor temperatures (either physically, or via a program like HWMonitor) and CPU and GPU clock speeds.

I made a suggestion about it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Support-for-AMD-Mantle

Not too sure if I foresee it happening, but it would be pretty nice.