Guild Wars 2

When you link a GW1 and GW2 account, the GW1 account by itself no longer exists as it becomes a part of the GW2 account. The login credentials (email/password) you use to access GW2 are now used to access GW1.

Rename Gw2Setup.exe to Gw2.exe and place it where you want to install the game, such as C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe

Gw2Setup.exe bugs on some systems, showing the login box instead of the install button. You can’t actually login when it’s like that.

You can’t. You can however change the music if you want.

Hooglese.4860:

While I’m not opposed to the grind, HoT is one hell of a grind. I probably did Dragon’s Stand two dozen times just to get a mastery to progress the story.

For comparison, I had most masteries (leyline gliding and the 3rd tier of everything else) unlocked by playing normally and before I even got to Dragon’s Stand, which was about 10 days after launch. I however did all gold medal adventures -1 and legitimately explored each zone, earning most achievements without even looking at what was available.

Heller.8961:

only to find out that this file is required by my computer to have network access.

One does not simply delete system files. It’s hooked in, so you needed to run the above winsock reset command and reboot to fix it. It should have came with an uninstaller however to do it properly.

A few things you could try:

For all of the following cases of Gw2.exe, either rename Gw2Setup.exe to Gw2.exe or use Gw2-64.exe instead, which you may also simply rename to Gw2.exe. Place either one in the folder where you’d like to install the game, such as C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe.

Compatibility mode. Right click Gw2.exe, select properties, select the compatibility tab, enable it and select Windows 7.

Open the folder containing Gw2.exe and in the address bar, append the following to the folder’s path:
\Gw2.exe -image -assetsrv 174.35.52.87

Enable safe mode with networking as a lazy way to check for software conflicts. Press WindowsKey+R, open msconfig and under the boot tab check safe boot and select network. Click OK and reboot to boot into safe mode where all non-essential programs will be disabled, then run Gw2.exe. Undo this by opening msconfig again and unchecking safe boot.

If you still have access to your old installation, you can simply copy Gw2.dat from the old to the new folder containing Gw2.exe.

Probably because moving and jumping is considered a basic skill that everyone should be capable of.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

If the developers actually played their own game, they would know which consumables should have the consume all option.

Probably use macros.

jarieleledan.8249:

Didn’t Anet get away from NCsoft some time ago?

ArenaNet is owned by NCSoft and NCSoft has always had a hands-off approach on ArenaNet’s development. NCSoft was the publisher, but now ArenaNet’s doing it themselves. Scroll down for example and you can still see NCSoft listed.

I’m assuming you included a few keywords that made it sound like you were attempting to buy, trade or be given someone else’s account, all of which are against the rules. A friend giving you a serial key is fine, however if you give them compensation within GW2, that’s the equivalent of buying gold.

Neither GW1 or 2 are region locked, except for the Chinese version which is basically a different game.

More options will always have the potential to make you more powerful due to the possibility of better optimizing your character. An elite spec could be weaker in comparison to other options for example, but if it provides what you were lacking, it makes you stronger, potentially countering your counter. It doesn’t matter how balanced they are, those without access will always complain unless no one wants it.

Dueling can be done in custom arenas and the guild hall. You can inspect a player with their permission by using the API. It’s unlikely that they’ll ever go beyond that, though back in beta they did say that open world dueling was something they’d like to do.

The cap is more to combat hacked accounts than sellers. There’s plenty of other options for sellers to transfer wealth.

Granrey.8920:

Well, I guess I wait until price is about $25 or next expansion comes in.

Directly from ArenaNet, it’ll likely never happen. They may drop the price by $10-20, but once season 3 is over, they could easily bundle it and raise the price back to $50.

From other retailers however, HoT was on sale for around $22 on Amazon (FR) a little over a week ago. Other retailers commonly have it on sale for around 20-30%.

Alin.2468:

It was much easier to simply remove those achivements with 10k drinks and food since day 1 of Wintersday.

The shoulders are now a 0.001% drop from a chest at the end of Tixx’s Infinirarium.

In a lot of cases, crashing while downloading is caused by other (usually security) software trying to manipulate GW2’s connection. If GW2’s error reporting window pops up, see the details as to why it crashed. The log can alternatively be accessed at
%appdata%/Guild Wars 2/ArenaNet.log.

If GW2 hangs however and crashes due to being unresponsive, press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to bring up the task manager, then run GW2 again. Under the task manager/processes, right click Gw2.exe, select affinity and choose only CPU 0. The launcher may encounter problems with certain CPUs.

As sort of a catch-all, you can also try safe mode with networking enabled. This will disable most non-essential programs that may be interfering. (WindowsKey+R > msconfig > Boot tab > Safe boot + network, ok and reboot)

Also, the launcher’s download progress is relative due to being based on the amount of files remaining. It’s not actually restarting from 0%.

Lastly, refunds are requested through support.

Minx.7521:

Also, the crash problem has now spread to Tequatl and core Tyria content.

Crashing has always been a problem if you zerged on high settings for extended periods. If I did Tequatl and Jormag for example, I would crash 100% of the time. This was easily avoided however by restarting the game after completing the event. With the 64-bit client, this isn’t an issue, though at times GW2 will use a lot of memory (in HoT), so you’ll want at least 8 GB dedicated to GW2 if you intend to play on higher settings in zergs and for extended periods.

It’s easy to blame ArenaNet, but that’s not going to magically fix the problem. More information on why they’re crashing could potentially solve the problem.

Blude.6812:

I can’t see why they wouldn’t restore your core game though and only remove the gems and HoT.

ArenaNet’s policy is to immediately terminate the account. Chargebacks are considered fraud, the merchant has to pay a small penalty fee and the card used is blacklisted. They recently changed this policy however, but only for people that tried to exploit a cheap deal and bought the game from one of the unofficial retailers that were selling stolen copies. For single cases like this though, ArenaNet doesn’t like to budge. To prevent this problem, it’s much safer to buy HoT from a 3rd party (or use an unrefundable payment option), since any chargebacks won’t be directly aimed at ArenaNet.

For comparison, some other MMOs handle chargebacks by adding a negative balance to your account. Access is restricted until that balance is paid off.

Gold medal adventures are worth ~53k daily and an additional ~146k your first time. If you sync up with the meta events so you don’t have to wait (ie, show up at VB halfway through the day), it takes about an hour to do ~13 of them for ~700k experience daily.

Personally, I started each day by doing what adventures I had found and by the time I explored my way to the end of TD (about a week in), I had leyline gliding and the first 3 of everything else.

Ensure that you have a main hand weapon equipped and re-equip it.

Wasted.9675:

Whatever happened to the old philosophy of “play the way you want to play”?

It never applied to the extras. Vertical progression is required whereas masteries (horizontal progression) are mostly optional. Notice how the required masteries are trivial to acquire.

You can occasionally find HoT on sale at other official retailers. DLGamer.us currently has it for $37, though unfortunately that’s ~$51 CAD.

Daniel.4763:

The whole Xpac feels geared towards group play, which is a huge shift from the vanilla game which was much more casual.

ArenaNet simply did something that most MMOs are afraid of doing. The content was designed for the average gamer instead of the average (casual) player.

The difficulty of HoT is actually somewhat similar to the first beta of GW2. Back then, the game was tuned for action gamers, but after finding that the average player was unable to attack and move at the same time (traditional MMO players), everything was basically nerfed by 50%. For a sample, if you didn’t dodge one of the telegraphed attacks back then (ie, an ettin’s club smash or a moa’s peck), you would have been downed.

When it comes to the larger meta events, GW2 was never casual in terms of play time. I remember people AFKing for hours waiting for the world bosses to spawn and if you wanted to join in and hit an overflow, you simply missed it. Even now, you have to play on their schedule. HoT’s meta events are just that – scheduled world bosses – and you’re now made more aware of the completion rewards, whereas you probably haven’t bothered to complete all the smaller metas in Tyria. What is missing however is the smaller events/chains that aren’t really linked to anything else to make it more dynamic.

Like the original beta however, I fully expect HoT to receive major nerfs, otherwise the farther ArenaNet goes, the more of a niche it’ll become. The reason being your first line. HoT basically feels like they increased the level cap, but forgot to increase it for the players. If they want to appeal to both groups however, they’ll nerf it once it’s no longer current.

AzureSky.3175:

That’s about 80 hours… or 4 hours a day, every day.

Once you’ve done it several times, it’s effortless. Watch or listen to something else while doing it. Personally, I manage 16 runs per match, running it daily for the duration of an episode or movie. Moving up to 80 hours would be like fully watching one of the longer running shows.

Griever.7480:

Doesn’t show HOW he did it, could have used hacks.

Bots run it all day every day every ~1.2 minutes and likely in private instances because they never quit. That’s over 100x more than this.

Juanpierre.8913:

So I’m not logging in anymore. Shame they got my money upfront, because I’m a disappointed customer.

If you liked gear grinds, quests, fractals/dungeons/raids and easy open world content, it sounds like you were wanting a WoW-clone.

hijinx.9768:

So basically what I want to know is do I have to download every single update/bug fix in order?

It only downloads the difference. HoT wasn’t very large, though a portion of it was released over time in the months prior to launch. 6 months is probably around 7 GB. View the properties of Gw2.dat. It should be around 27 GB by the end.

If you have 92k files remaining after 14 hours though, you’re either downloading extremely slowly, or it’s redownloading the entire game at around 400 KB/s. The full game is 342k files. The game should however be playable using the streaming option once a chunk of it has been downloaded.

On these forums (en) there are 172887 posters, 53608 of which were active in the last year, 8501 in the last 30 days and 2551 in the last 7 days.

The most posts of 2015 goes to:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

That’s interesting, of course it only shows forum activity but still.

… with a total of 7802.

All time stats:

Tiger Ashante.1792:

I have a feeling if u die at all, that’s when the problems start.

If you wipe during the gliding phase for example, the encounter will reset to the next phase with the ground smashed, which is why rifts will spawn outside of the area. In this case, you have to die again to reset it.

Vayne.8563:

Aside from that, bait and switch is the wrong term anyway.

When ArenaNet talks about the game and how it’s B2P, they usually say something like pay once and play for free forever. Some people thought that meant they only had to pay once, expecting the content to be free. To add to the confusion, that was true prior to HoT as there were no plans for an expansion and the living story was free.

In other words, they think B2P is F2P except you need to pay to create an account. The bait and switch is in the misunderstanding.

Albadaran.1283:

Simply because over a year it won’t sell anymore for real money.

You won’t be able to unlock the living story for free without HoT. Unless there’s a major drop in population, in which case they’ll likely make it free, there’s really no reason to offer it for gems. HoT will probably still be $50 in ~1.5 years, except it’ll be bundled with season 3.

New accounts can’t see map completion until one character has unlocked it at level 14.

It will kind of be available for gems. You’ll just need to wait until the next expansion, then you’ll get HoT for free and be able to buy whatever seasons you missed during HoT.

Their new single box model will make more sense next expansion. You basically pay $50 now and get HoT’s living story for free, or get HoT for free in ~2 years and pay ~$40 for HoT’s living story.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com

Login, select the achievements category and filter by your friends. Mouse over the achievement points to see when it was last updated (when they were last online). If you want to add more people, the list is updated when you logout of the game.

If you have a guild however, you simply need to invite them. Their pending invite will appear in the roster.

You still earn them, you simply can’t spend them.

It’s safer (for the person you give the key to) and cheaper to buy it through an official retailer than it is to go directly through ArenaNet. That way if the payment fails, the account won’t be immediately banned. Giving an unopened physical box is the safest option.

GW2’s new business model is to offer a single package. When a new expansion comes out, the previous one is made free. The catch however is that only those with the expansion will be given the opportunity to unlock the living story for free. Assuming 2-3 years per expansion and a $20 cost per season (-20% at the end), buying the living story will end up costing roughly the same as buying the expansion and unlocking it for free.

As for a better deal, veteran accounts are the clear winners, unless you bought the game and never played it.

You can copy the bin folders if you want, everything else other than Gw2.exe/dat is only temporary. If you don’t, they’ll simply be recreated on the first run.

Gw2.dat contains all the game’s data. Combine it with Gw2.exe and that’s all you need. GW2 doesn’t need to be installed in the traditional sense, so you can simply copy the entire GW2 folder.

The 4 GB file size limit is due to a FAT32 format. If it’s an option, reformat to NTFS, though doing so will wipe the drive. You can format a drive by right clicking it under Computer and selecting format (or Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management).

If you are limited in how much you can transfer at a time however, split Gw2.dat into multiple parts. Most compression software can do this. If you don’t have any, download 7-zip. Compress Gw2.dat and split the volume by the desired size.

Amazon (FR) has it for €20 (also the boxed version). It’s really not that odd considering some places had it down to $34 in the months prior to launch. The $20 range however seems like a possible mix-up considering the core game was around that price just a few months ago.

DLGamer.us has the digital version on sale for $37.

The ones I’ve seen stay at the spawn for a minute, then teleport to the end, run over to loot the chest, go through the portal and repeat.

I’m guessing you’re trying Arah story mode? It was converted to a personal story step. You have to complete either the personal story or the explorable mode to unlock it.

MrNumnut.2635:

Why are 8 mastery points hidden behind a paywall, named Living story 2?

Season 2 was the original implementation of their paid expansion model. The idea was to deliver an expansion over time, rather than breaking for several years and then releasing an expansion all at once. Active players got it for free, whereas new players paid a lower entry fee but had to pay extra for the “expansion” content.

In short, it’s locked for the same reason every point is locked without HoT.

The base karma reward is shown on the event completion popup. A level 80 gold contribution should be 378 karma (321 silver, 284 bronze).

I doubt they’d nerf it while giving away ridiculous amounts of it through Wintersday activities.

You’d have to contact support to get the actual reason. It means your details were rejected, either because they were wrong, the bank/card rejected it or because they think you’re a risk.

Some alternatives (that are on sale):

http://www.dlgamer.us/download-guild_wars_2_heart_of_thorns-pc_games-p-29808.html
http://www.amazon.fr/Guild-Wars-2-heart-thorns/dp/B0140RS8RK/

IndigoSundown.5419:

I’d like the see those claiming HoT is not challenging link videos of themselves soloing stuff like, say, some of the Hero Challenges

To solo group content is to create a challenge where none existed. That doesn’t make the content itself challenging and only shows the opposite, that it’s not challenging for the intended amount of players.

There is a problem that affects certain multi-core CPUs that you may be encountering. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to bring up the task manager, find Gw2.exe (open GW2 first) under processes, right click it and select set affinity. Under the available CPUs, select only 1, like CPU 0.

Assuming you have a 64-bit OS, you may want to try the 64-bit client instead. Simply swap it with your existing Gw2.exe.

In the past they really haven’t cared. The most they’ve done about things like that is fix them months/years later. It is considered an exploit however and ArenaNet can ban an account for any reason they want.

The player most likely lied because they didn’t want to use the exploit themselves. Even if ArenaNet had banned them, it would have only been for like 72 hours as a warning.

HoT was meant to be explored. If you take your time to do so and participate in all the content available, masteries are trivial. Only the first few masteries are actually needed, with leyline gliding being the one exception and only actually required at the end of TD and beyond. Adventures are an easy source of daily experience (~700k), or ~3 million your first time. Personally, that’s what I did and had everything before I needed it – no grinding at all for the ~1.5 weeks it took me to travel to Dragon’s Stand and finish up. I however spent ~24 hours just exploring each map, while participating in the events.

LastHope.8127:

That is STILL 40 HOURS OF JP!

That’s only ~1.5 hours a day on average from the start to the end. Once you’ve done it several times, it’s effortless. I personally run it just because, usually manage 14-16 runs a match and all while watching a TV episode. I prefer Bell Choir, but wish it had an alternative harder option.

Solid Gold.9310:

Why would they block IP addresses and stop another member of a family playing just because your mother/son/dog (Insert family member here) cheated and got banned.

That is exactly what they do – they don’t permanently ban actual IPs, they ban everyone that’s associated with it. If you cheat, everyone will be banned because they’ll assume it’s all you. In the past, they’ve banned everyone using a certain WTFast server for example due to botters, though only temporarily as they sorted out who was who. In this case, if you borrow someone’s account and they later get banned, your account will be associated with theirs due to their account once logging in from your account’s IP, resulting in a ban of your account. It happened to someone else fairly recently, though after admitting to account sharing, ArenaNet unbanned their account.

If you want to safely borrow an account, login from their IP. Setup a tunnel with them acting as the host. Alternatively, use a VPN service to mask yourself.

Personally, I played through HoT exploration style. I probably spent 24 hours of play time per zone, witnessed every event and completed most achievements without even looking at what was available. Each day, I would do the adventures I had already found, which was a large source of experience. By the time I got to the end of Tangled Depths, which was a little over a week in, I was basically done with masteries. I had leyline gliding and the first 2-3 of everything else. About 2 weeks later, continuing to do the daily adventures, I was actually finished. I however wanted to play the adventures, so the experience was just a bonus.

HoT was designed to be explored. What it lacks however is the randomness of dynamic events to make the world seem more alive.