Guild Wars 2

You can contact support to ask them to switch it.

There is a problem involving Windows 10 on some laptops where GW2 will get stuck on loading screens. I believe the workaround is disabling vsync/not running in fullscreen mode and/or setting Gw2.exe/Gw2-64.exe to Windows 7 compatibility mode.

General Health.9678:

I don’t think it’s technically possible whilst it’s a great idea.

If GW2 supported addons like other MMOs, this problem would have already been solved. All of your what ifs are solved by setting up rules, the complexity of which are up to the author. GW2 will likely never support addons however nor implement something like this themselves. A program could do it by recognizing icons, you can even verify them by pulling your inventory through the API, but the automation would be against the rules.

If your main interest is the story, it’s been nerfed so many times that really gliding, updrafts and nuhoch hunting is all you need.

If you just want to play through the game, all the needed masteries are basically the first half, which are easier to get. If you essentially just play the game, you’ll have more than enough mastery points to unlock them. Specifically, doing some adventures, playing through the story, playing through the event chains/meta and exploring the map (see the zone achievements, like finding strongboxes) should get you enough. It’s only when you’re almost done with masteries that you’ll find yourself really out of points, which will require you to do stuff like gold adventures or the more challenging achievements.

The masteries you’ll want to start with are gliding and bouncing mushrooms, then updrafts, wallows and exalted markings. After that, advanced gliding will make it much easier to glide around. From there you can go for either ley line gliding or itzel poison lore to reach a few inaccessible areas, or stealth detection to make the stealthing enemies easier to deal with. That’s really all you need to just play through the game.

It doesn’t matter where you buy it. The boost is a basic feature of HoT while the extra slot is included with the deluxe edition. If you were thinking of the free veteran slot, that offer expired at launch.

As an alternative to getting good, you can simply play a ranger or necromancer, the two easiest professions in the game. Rangers can effectively play turret style as their pet will tank for them and practically never die if you rotate tanks. Just having a pet can make a huge difference as not everything is directed at you, however, you may also never learn that that one attack can wreck you. A low defense profession can easily be destroyed by the jump shot of a veteran shadow leaper, the slap of a blade dancer, the assault of a veteran smokescale, the leap spam of a devastator or the faceroll of an ancient golem. All of those can however be skipped for the most part.

The super casuals will never get good. They’re only playing for fun and if it’s too difficult, they’ll simply quit. Surely there’s a reason why almost every MMO is faceroll when it comes to solo content. Personally, the casuals I know that only play solo could barely manage Orr, couldn’t finish season 2, haven’t touched HoT and are going back to WoW.

You can see their home server on the achievements leaderboard if you want. Simply login and filter it by your guild.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Map taxi isn’t bad, just something that is is the easiest most successful way of doing the events. And on the other hand makes the empty maps feel very much like wastelands where people don’t attempt the event as it’s much more likely to fail, thus a waste of time in many peoples eyes.

It’s good for the few, but bad for everyone else as it further fuels the zerg mindset and potentially kills off the other maps as people leave or continue to try to. That full map could easily split in two and still have more than enough people to complete the meta. People become accustomed to the ease of zerging however and anything less is unacceptable. Why bother with a lesser populated map when the average player can practically AFK through a full one for a guaranteed win. Meanwhile, the people that don’t taxi and always find themselves in dead maps eventually stop showing up.

Even if the maps were populated however, people’s perception can be a major problem. If people don’t know where others are, they see no commanders for example, they’ll assume the map is dead. The UI should help with that by showing all events, how many people they’re actually scaled for, how many people are nearby and there should be an easy way to request help (ping chat and show an icon on the map for example).

FrizzFreston.5290:

What could potentially fix it, is scaling these events better or so that when there are less people they become slightly easier or equally hard to do than when there is alot of people.

Group events generally begin scaling at 3 people. Scaling isn’t 1:1 however, because when it is, the zerg fails hard, like Shatterer’s pre-nerf impossible breakbar. The average player simply isn’t good, so it needs to get easier with more, otherwise you will get into that situation where people don’t just want you to leave, you’ll have to. There’s really no reason however to not make it easier with less, except that that was meant to be the normal difficulty.

Season 1 was the glory days. New stuff every other week with hundreds of new achievement points. I recall getting a achievement chest nearly every month, and with free wardrobe skins.

Transactions fees become an issue the lower you go since they charge a flat fee and take a percentage, then there’s also DigitalRiver’s cut. That should only be an issue when going below $1 however.

They’ve likely determined that it’s more profitable this way. You may refuse to spend more than $5, but imagine how many simply spend $10. More people would likely buy gems if they were only $1 to $5, but in the end, it ends up being less.

SMS or an authenticator is required to send mail attachments. It also takes a few days to fully unlock after upgrading from a free account, which I think you’re already passed, though it may be another day.

Daddicus.6128:

There’s gate after gate after gate

When it comes to the story, you really shouldn’t be hitting any gates unless you’re attempting to rush through it. Since the buff to experience, gaining the basic masteries is trivial. Now on your first journey into VB for example, doing the meta once and exploring the map is enough to unlock gliding, bouncing mushrooms and updrafts. More specifically, doing the events up to the salvage pit, then doing the salvage pit is enough to unlock your first mastery, which should be bouncing mushrooms in order to go back and do tendril torchers and bugs in the branches to unlock gliding. There is truly no grinding whatsoever if you simply play through the content. Fun fact: you’ll gain enough experience to unlock all of the required masteries just by doing each adventure once at a gold rank. If you can at least manage some gold adventures, park an alt and do them daily for 100k each.

Park alts at adventures and do them daily. They take maybe 2 minutes each and are worth 100k exp.

scerevisiae.1972:

Whether the limit is 250 or 1 million it consumes the exact same amount of space on the server, so this arbitrarily low limit is clearly all about adding tedium in order to make a few extra bucks.

1 million would takes 3 bytes to store, whereas 250 takes 1. Since the expanders break the 1 byte limit however, the actual limitation is likely either 16 or 12 bits (65k or 4k).

The limitation does serve a purpose other than wasting your space and making you want to buy more. If there was no limit, the trading supply would dry up as most people would simply deposit and forget. If you’re having a problem with excess materials, dump your storage and return to depositing them.

As for the problem with excess loot, it’s the downside of the casual design. Personal loot was supposed to make you feel more rewarded, but since everyone gets something, the downside is the value of the loot. In comparison, you’d probably be getting no loot in an older MMO in WvW-like content.

The trick about masteries is that they were never a grind when it came to playing through the game. They were however balanced on the assumption that the player would actually play through all the content. If you legitimately explore the maps and participate in the content, you’ll find that most achievements are naturally obtained, along with the mastery points and experience required to unlock your masteries as you need them. Adventures are however a huge chunk of experience, and can easily make the difference between a casual experience and a grind. After the nerf for example, unlocking one of the first tier masteries (500k exp) is as simple as doing 2 adventures for the first time.

What they do need to do however is force a specific mastery path at the start, so that players don’t unlock the useless stuff first, only to find that they’re stuck. The mastery level should also be dropped as it’ll only turn out like achievement points and people get hung up on it as they see it as a level cap, turning a casual experience into an impossible task.

Colin defined grinding as doing a repetitive task over and over again. Just because you’re failing the achievements doesn’t mean the content is a grind, and all of the S2 achievements are soloable as they are solo content. Furthermore, he only said that grinding wouldn’t be required to play through the game, which it’s not. Almost all of the masteries are optional and the ones that aren’t, the few HoT masteries, are nearly handed to you. If you don’t want a legendary or don’t do fractals, simply don’t bother with those masteries.

The crash is caused by LavasoftTcpService64.dll interfering with GW2, which is likely Ad-Aware. Disable/uninstall it.

Moyayuki.3619:

I was always under the impression that the “hearts” were GW2’s version of quests that you find in other MMOs (WoW, ESO, etc.), which essentially act as a way to level up your character and keep you busy.

Events were meant to be the usual quests whereas the personal story was meant to be the storyline quests. Usually there are only a few main story quests per zone in MMOs, surrounded by the multitudes of the generic fetch/kill quests. ArenaNet wanted to separate that, allowing you to play through just the core story while doing whatever else you wanted to level.

Under the original design, GW2 was actually meant to be quite heavy on the side of exploration, and as shown by the original beta, was balanced for gamers much like HoT. If you haven’t noticed, a lot of the original events have NPCs calling for help to direct you. Back in alpha, they didn’t plan on having much of a UI. PoIs weren’t originally visible for example, but that was found to be tedious, going back to the map scraping of GW1. More importantly, there was no event tracker or even markers for them, but they found that people wouldn’t bother with them if they weren’t told to. The conditioning from other MMOs was likely too strong, where all that stuff is faked and no matter what you do, it doesn’t change; but here, it was real. Similarly, people would skip events and attempt to play through the only quest line available, the personal story. Hearts were added for the sole reason to get people to move throughout the world. They were meant to act like quest hubs, but for events, and they essentially only exist for the traditional MMO players. At the same time, scouts were added to direct people towards hearts. Also, they were very early on planning on having no levels, but it just felt odd.

You can also /join an offline player, giving you access to party chat.

When it comes to patching, it’s all or nothing, so you actually already have HoT installed if your client is fully patched.

If you’re not 80, there’s really no point in buying HoT unless you wanted to play a revenant. If you don’t want to pay extra for season 3 of the living world, you will want to buy HoT by the time it starts however, which is in a couple of months.

Lastly, HoT is always on sale somewhere. DLGamer.us for example has had it on sale since pre-purchasing began, which is currently at $39.

They should implement an AFK flag, like how most MMOs do it. If you haven’t had any physical (keyboard/mouse) input within the last few minutes, an AFK icon should be displayed next to your name and any contribution you do should be ignored, meaning no loot. They should also use this when factoring scaling, though it could be exploited much like the old system.

Even if they fixed it, there’s always going to potentially be that last dead map. Just the mindset around these events, including taxi’ing, can be a major problem. Despite popular belief, you don’t need a full map to do these events. You don’t even need half of that. To truly prevent dead maps, they need to volunteer in reverse, where new instances are only created by splitting a full map into two identical copies. One map would potentially die out however if suddenly all the leaders were lost and no one bothered to do anything. If they wanted to be fair to everyone, all maps would be linked together and every single person would be fighting the same boss. It would never fail however, but why should you fail just because you’re not in the main map? The other way is to separate the big events from the map, where people would queue into and join them with the sole intention of doing the event – think activities.

Quin.9740:

It be just nice to progress through the story without hitting roadblocks all the time.

Masteries are the alternative to increasing the level cap. You’ve always had to grind if you tried to rush through the story. If you legitimately explore however and participate in the content available, you shouldn’t have any problems obtaining what is required – no grinding whatsoever.

If you’re skipping adventures, note that your first gold through each one is a major chunk of experience and they can be completed daily for ~100k each, making the experience portion of masteries trivial. Mastery points in comparison shouldn’t be a problem until much later on, but that later half isn’t required to progress.

The standard client (Gw2) and the installer (Gw2Setup) are actually the same thing. The name of the file changes its functionality, where Gw2Setup.exe is the equivalent of Gw2.exe -allowInstall.

The installer doesn’t work on some systems and will either do nothing or simply begin downloading to your %temp% folder. GW2 doesn’t need to be installed in the traditional sense, so you can move the files wherever you want. To manually install the game, simply rename Gw2Setup.exe to Gw2.exe and put it wherever you want to install it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

Try playing as a keyboard turning clicker – WASD to move (no strafing) and only clicking skills, including dodge to be fair. Only use 1 hand at a time (keyboard/mouse) and delay all your actions by a second to simulate a slow reaction time. Limit yourself to random rare gear, clear your traits, choose whichever profession you play the least and base your weapon/skill choices on whatever looks the coolest. You’re now almost at the level of the average MMO player, which is why nearly all MMOs are below easy.

Take solace and find peace in the knowledge that the Unseen Ones watch all that you do.

Your Gw2.exe is corrupted. Open your GW2 folder and look for a Gw2.tmp file or something like Gw2.00#. If it’s around 25 MB, rename it to Gw2.exe. Alternatively, download Gw2Setup.exe, rename it to Gw2.exe and overwrite your current one.

misterman.1530:

The only way you can convince me to preorder would be to offer something of immense value

Within a month of pre-purchasing going live, HoT was already on sale for $34. If you factor the free $10 slot, that was one of the better deals to this day. Months later, a few weeks after launch, it was down to $25 if you wanted to go with the boxed edition. Now it can be commonly found for around $38. (official retailers only)

As a simple test, rename Gw2.exe, then rename Gw2-64.exe to Gw2.exe. If no change, confirm that your dedicated GPU is actually activating or alternatively, disable the integrated one.

“3rd party software” is basically a generic reason for, we saw you do something that isn’t possible through normal play. It doesn’t actually mean you are using any cheat software. There have been cases in the past where people have been banned for simply playing, because it was ArenaNet’s automated detection that was flawed, such as the one jumping puzzle a while back where falling flagged your account for an automatic ban.

Alternatively, your account was hacked and someone else is botting/etc on it or you’re sharing an IP, or once shared an IP with someone who is botting/etc.

DoctorDing.5890:

After the Chaos Gloves there were a few other desirable things on promo but for the last week or so I’ve been wondering what the store is offering that is keeping that price high.

They could stop all additions to the store and the price could still continue to rise. For the price to lower, people buying gold need to outweigh those buying gems, so why do people need to buy gold? As hot gem store items increase the cost of gems, new gold sinks lower them. At this point, older players are likely losing the need to buy gold, so it’s down to the newer players.

You know where to go because it tells you. In both cases, you simply need to find an item to start the quest. For the ley lines, it’s a leystone dropped from dragon minions and for the bandits, it’s orders, from bandits. If you do world bosses for example, you’d likely find these items during the Megadestroyer/Shatterer/Jormag (minions) and Taidha Covington (bandits).

It’s still possible by simply killing the mutex. If you were running Gw2.exe (32-bit) and relying on a program to handle it for you, note that the launcher is now downloading and running Gw2-64.exe on a 64-bit OS. If you were running a 32-bit multi-client program, it won’t be able to touch the 64-bit process.

It would have been cleaner to just overwrite Gw2.exe or rename it to Gw2-32.exe instead of creating a new Gw2-64.exe. The name change is going to trigger security software, drop any custom executable settings, cause your graphics settings to change due to it being based on the exe’s name (GFXSettings.Gw2.exe.xml) and add overhead to old shortcuts.

For anyone with suddenly low FPS, it’s because software like NVidia’s control panel is looking for Gw2.exe. Some laptops for example will switch their GPU based on this. Simply rename Gw2-64.exe to Gw2.exe, or go through the trouble of creating a new profile.

Donari.5237:

Is there any way to make sure I actually am using the 64 bit client, ie, that it has in fact switched me?

When running Gw2.exe 32-bit on a 64-bit OS, it will check for Gw2-64.exe. If it exists, it will switch to it, otherwise it will download it, then run it. You can verify you’re running the 64-bit client by looking at the list of processes under the task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC). 32-bit applications will be listed with a *32 after their name. The 64-bit client is however forced on you, unless you use the -32 command line option, so you’re definitely using it.

I’m guessing you’re using a hardcoded program to launch GW2? There’s no simple solution. The easiest would be to use another program to basically act as a shortcut in order to append -32 to the arguments. That however won’t work if the program is expecting to hook into what it’s launching.

Simply move it. The files are Gw2.dat, the .exe and optionally the bin folder.

Haleydawn.3764:

This is an MMO, if we had tutorials on absolutely everything the game would be incredibly cluttered.

Tutorials can be easily built right in. For example, the first story boss in HoT could go invulnerable at 50% and begin casting a ~30s everyone dies, which requires breaking the bar to interrupt. The NPCs could shout to use stuns/etc to break it.

Don’t expect the majority of players to read patch notes or bother to research the game. They’re just going to jump in and play, doing whatever they want. They’re just playing a game.

The alternative is using an authenticator instead. Using one of the options is actually required to fully unlock newer accounts, so don’t count on there ever being a way to disable it permanently. Assuming you have the default email authentication, using an authenticator is faster.

Alternatively, you can simply bypass the launcher and login directly. You’ll need to run the game normally for patches however. The command line options are:

Gw2.exe -email example@email.com -password "1234password" -nopatchui

It actually is possible to disable the SMS notice, however it can only be done by directly modify your settings file. If you happened to have an old Local.dat file from before SMS for example, it has it disabled as long as it’s kept read-only.

Simply re-download Gw2-64.exe or Gw2Setup.exe (rename to Gw2.exe) and put it back.

There has been a few cases where Microsoft has pushed bad updates or updates have conflicted with other software, causing various problems. Automatically updating drivers can also cause problems. In both cases, you simply roll back the update.

Disabling updates should not be done as it carries a high risk due to potential security vulnerabilities.

Belenwyn.8674:

It is more intriguing for me that NCsoft told two times that the 2nd expansion will be launched “soon/as soon as possible”. It is a quite concrete statement for the company and will create certain expectation among the analysts and players.

NCSoft has always said something about an expansion coming, even back when ArenaNet had no plans to do one. In this case, they’re probably referring to season 3, which was ArenaNet’s original alternative to expansions. Expansions will however likely be on a 2-3 year cycle. With season 3 starting nearly a year after, and assuming it’s still the same, running for a year, the next expansion won’t feel that far off. They need to work on their flow however, with all these year long breaks, pre and post expansion.

Personally, I simply explored while trying to see everything, like every event. I always had more than enough mastery points as I naturally obtained them as well as most of the available achievements. Experience was also never a problem because I started each day by doing the daily adventures I had found. I only spent a few hours a day for maybe 3 or 4 days per zone and was finished with masteries by the end of TD, only having the later, more useless ones left.

HoT is played just like the core game. Simply play the game and explore. GW2 was always meant to be explored, HoT even more so.

They should make it a gold sink at 100x the price. Don’t have that waypoint? Pay ~5g. World completion could be required to make it an easy account unlock, or it could just be a standard feature.

Danikat.8537:

But thankfully that’s not something I, or anyone else, has to worry about with Guild Wars 2 (or GW1) because as Gaile said in that post you quoted it’s not something Anet will ever do.

They have actually purged names once before in GW1 in order to release the names from invalid accounts, which were from trials/betas or something like that.

Megaservers were probably built on top of the old overflow system and as such, fill linearly in a chain. When prompted to volunteer, you’re sent to the map ahead of you. The problem however is that people constantly joining, leaving and especially taxi’ing, which allows people to skip the chain, creates chaos for the system. The map ahead of you should have been more populated for example, but people taxied into the map after you. The entire chain tries to collapse down, which causes multiple partially filled instances.

Alternatively, when prompted to volunteer, everyone is actually sent to a more populated instance, but it filled up, causing you to be redirected to the next available one which may have even been newly created. Additionally, the idea could have been that they could close down multiple smaller instances to create a bigger one or even shave a little from the more populated instances to create another one. If you split a full instance in two for example, there should be enough people to actively do 2 maps, even 3 if they’re good.

If all events simply scaled down for 3 people like they used to, this wouldn’t even be a problem. Trying to split the zerg up is what killed the less active maps, whereas, for example, I used to be able to solo world bosses. Now it’s choose 1, but there’s no point in even trying as the others are a guaranteed failure. If they want to keep up with this design, they should simply split the larger events from the maps. Instead of having the assault on Tarir in the open world for example, put it in its own sectioned off instance like the personal story. Similar to volunteering, when the event is about to start, people are prompted to join. That way, everyone who joins is there to participate and the population can even be controlled if they wanted to, like a 40 person limit rather than the ~100 it currently is.

If you login from the same IP, the accounts are linked. That also means however that if one gets banned, they’re all banned.

If you’re not causing them, then your login credentials are compromised. Someone knows your email and password. If you’re being spammed with codes, they’re probably trying to RNG it.

CharmedWitchery.1750:

Where did you know about ~17k people? And the guy above said anet sold 1 mil of hot copies, so who to believe?

I cache the english forums, which allows me to pull information such as there being ~178k users that have once posted here.

I don’t think ArenaNet ever revealed HoT’s sales numbers. They certainly would have however if it was something special, like over a million. The HoT figures were estimated based on the profits earned during the last quarter. Keep in mind that these numbers don’t include the last few months, though sales tend to drop after a month anyways. The profits were around 15 million USD after subtracting the average profits from the prior months in order to get an idea of what HoT generated. The problem is, you have to guess what HoT was being sold at, which was $50 by ArenaNet but official 3rd parties pay reduced prices. At say $30 each, that would have only been 500k. ArenaNet did however reveal that when HoT launched, there were 7 million registered accounts and prior to the free accounts, the figure was at 5 million copies sold. Only a fraction of that is of course active, say 25%, which is almost 2 million, or if you’d like to go by the percentage of active forum users, 10%, 700k, but keep in mind that cuts out free accounts.

CharmedWitchery.1750:

Or does lfg mean nothing and majority of players don’t use it at all?

Basically. In general, the majority in MMOs tend to play solo. Also, unlike other MMOs, GW2 doesn’t revolve around dungeons/fractals/raids and there are alternatives for the skins, so there’s going to be naturally less people looking for groups. Additionally, those in active guilds likely won’t be using LFG.

For some random stats, ~17k people have posted on these (en) forums this year. In the past, they’ve said that less than 10% use the forums, so you can assume a bare minimum of ~200k players. GW2’s reddit has ~1k active people during the day, which is a little more than BDO and 3x less than WoW, which has a population of ~5 million. Based on the quarterly sales, HoT sold around 250k copies. Based on a report by SuperData Research several months ago, they estimated GW2’s monthly active population at 3.1 million.

He’s saying that they’re not saying “yes you can bot” but he’s also saying that if you’re only using the in-game mechanics, they’re not going to stop you. I remember back at launch when they simply considered it botting and people would come here and whine about being banned for it. I doubt they’ve banned anyone for doing it since then.

If they were actually going to ban for it, surely they would have further clarified, rather than letting people continue on quoting his post, saying that AFK farming is now okay in these various threads.