Guild Wars 2

This is an engine bug overall. Only way to fix it is to press the key that is repeating again.

Just a note, that terminal command is incorrect due to the forum formatting it weird. The real command is:

/applications/guild\ wars\ 2.app/contents/MacOS/cider --use-dos-cwd C:Gw2 -- C:\\GW2\\GW2.exe -repair

This sounds more like an ISP issue and could be a coincidence that it happened around the time of the feature patch. Are they all in the same local area on the same ISP?

Guys, they can’t just pull an OpenGL engine out of thin air. The problem here stems all the way back to when GW1 was in development. Yes, GW1. The engine was made with Windows in mind, not portability. Yes, that was a short sited move but it was one that many many developers made.

Blizzard was one of the few developers that designed with portability from the start and even then their engines still have problems (e.g., the starcraft engine can run on about anything but run well on essentially no machine in existence). So pointing to Blizzard as an example is nice but it isn’t applicable when you try to make an argument for a port after launch. Blizzard didn’t port their games after launch, they built them at the same time with Windows and Mac in mind (the only game they ported recently was D3 for Playstation and that basically turned it into a completely different game).

As far as Apple’s share of the blame, yes Apple deserves a bit of the blame here. Apple has been very very lazy when it comes to updating drivers and OpenGL in their OS (and those things are linked to OS updates so you can’t update them separately). Additionally, they continually made references to supporting game developers but in reality they usually did nothing. This has only turned around recently but only seems applicable to iOS (e.g., at WWDC they have panels for iOS game devs, there are no such panels l for OS X game devs).

That doesn’t mean that Anet is faultless. They’ve been amazingly bad at communicating anything to us. It has somewhat improved recently but this was likely a burst due to the the Mac user base becoming enraged over months of game breaking patch day bugs that would not be resolved for weeks. The decrease in communication is happening again. And I fully expect for the patch day bugs to make an appearance again (it is almost like they did Mac QA for the feature patch). They need to come up with a more permanent plan instead of occasionally noticing that the mac community is on fire and running in with a tiny fire extinguisher.

Yes, the mac community should be better behaved (compared to some communities I think we’re handling this fairly well but there is room for improvement such as not using personal attacks against devs). But Anet needs to start being honest with us about the long-term plans for the mac client and actually follow through with their announced plans.

It is a bit humorous that I intentionally posted very achievable goals for their list some stuff for us to fix thread and they managed to still do nothing. Admittedly, I was surprised I even got a response (i.e., the creation of this thread). But yeah, nothing. They haven’t even fixed the thread with the bad CLI command.

Sigh. Well, Anet, I appreciate how the feature patch wasn’t insanely bug filled for us Mac users. That is an accomplishment (sadly) so things aren’t continuing to deteriorate, at least. But I have to say, I will not trust a thing you say from here on out. Sorry.

Well I guess I’ll just stop playing the game for a week again. They’ll hopefully have it sorted out by then.

Sooo, hate to bump but any update on this?

So is the your transactions tab never working for anyone else (even when the rest of it works?)

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the champ train was nerfed because it created a toxic environment in one of the most populated starter zones. What if you’re a new player fresh to the game and have no idea what is going on. The map chat trolling caused by the train is another reason.

Reinstalling GW2 will not upgrade your OS. See the this thread

Yeah, it is back working for me again. Took about 10 relaunches, though.

Hopefully they fix this chat problem that everyone is having.

Okay, you can use custom emotes to talk to people near you at least. Just do /me blah blah blah

Okay, windows user in my guild just had this problem when they came to me in the grove (I was standing on the bl armor exchanger they were looking for). So this is looking like their chat servers blew up in general.

I can’t use chat at all.

Well you unfixed the BLTC for me. It will not load since the patch.

Edit and now guild chat doesn’t work. id say i was surprised but of course I’m not, well see you in a week, ante

Edit 2: chat doesn’t work at all period the end. whispers say the person isn’t online when they are

Yeah, if you’re having account issues it is best to submit a support ticket. No one can really help you here (not even Anet employees).

Thats the forum login. Yeah, I ran into it a while ago to. It shouldn’t be a problem, just a bug with the security system.

Saraphina.6930:

JustTrogdor.7892:

Saraphina.6930:

I’m skeptical of the work around due to download time. How long does the work around process take? I have less than ideal internet so it takes me forever to download a single patch, and I fear having to download the entire game again.

You don’t download the entire game again. You download the installer which isn’t that big of a file then run the installer. Then as per the instructions after that you open the new Guild Wars 2 file it creates in your applications folder. As soon as it starts to patch you can close it and that’s it. No more downloading. Then delete the new file it created and use the old one you renamed. If you are already updated on recent patches there shouldn’t be anymore to download.

I apologize, I don’t think I quite understand? You download this new launcher, let it make a new folder, and then delete that folder and just go back to using the old one? What does that solve, exactly?

The game has a significant number of files not located in the app. You’re effectively patching those files without having to redownload the big stuff like art work that is located inside the app.

Luak.8941:

I realise for some this suggestion comes after the horse has bolted, and I hope this doesn’t come across as preaching, but instead of attempting to create another partition on a boot disk, install the older system on an external drive.

HDs and even SSDs are incredibly cheap nowadays if you don’t already own one for backup purposes it begs the question why not?! If you’d had a backup you’d be able to rewind the GW2 update.

What if your machine fails completely today, say you dropped or spilt coffee over it? How would you cope with that situation? If you don’t already own a backup drive ask yourself that question. It’s unfortunate that for so many computer users they have to experience a catastrophic loss before they finally realise just how important backups are.

If you have invested a lot of money in professional software it is also essential to keep it up to date so that you don’t get caught out like this. Granted, hardware and software is updated so rapidly these day it can be expensive, but there are often cheaper alternatives that are worth trying and often there are student versions too.

And systems that need to remain static it is actually better to virtualize them unless the performance hit is too much. That way you can always completely reset if something really bad happens and breaks your workflow without too much hassle.

They changed it shortly after launch, the sticky up there is basically when they decided that they needed to up the requirement.

10.7.x was always the minimum requirement, they just decided to enforce it. I agree they should have given notice before enforcing it, though.

Yeah the game engine is buggy.

There is no fix other than running the game at minimal settings in WvW. This problem has been in the game for a very very long time (it also happens on Windows but to a lesser degree).

Yeah, waiting won’t help if the cider instance is crashing like you’re describing. Have you tried repairing your disk?

Ravnak.4096:

Nageth.5648:

Ravnak.4096:

noor.7960:

Can you tell us more, what kind of error you are getting now !? So people here can help you “hopefully”. We can’t alway depend on ANET to help us. So we are doing our best to help eachother

Still blank TP screen. iMac 27’’ mid 2011 OSX 10.8.5
I (unfortunately) have some experience in fixing mac beta problems, so beside tryin the quick fix, plus redownloading the whole thing, I already deleted several times the applications folder’s Guild Wars 2, cleaned cache, etc. etc.

edit: think I’m just in the “you poor player are in the 1% fix-didn’t-work”. I’ll just go play some other game ; )

Did you try the relaunch trick without deleting any of the caches? I’m almost wondering if people doing more than the list of instructions say might be the cause of some of the issues.

Sir yes sir!

Nuts. Yeah, I think no one can help you then. I’d recommend you file a support ticket (note, the protocol for posting your system specs is out of date, I believe, follow the instructions of the support person instead of the thread) and let them know you followed these instructions without it working. They won’t be able to help you but it will at least give them a better of idea of who is still having problems with the BLTC.

Edit: Other than that best option might be to keep trying to open the BLTC occasionally. My guild mates running windows have complained about the BLTC being unresponsive since the heartbleed fix, so maybe it is just being really super slow and looks unresponsive.

Ravnak.4096:

noor.7960:

Can you tell us more, what kind of error you are getting now !? So people here can help you “hopefully”. We can’t alway depend on ANET to help us. So we are doing our best to help eachother

Still blank TP screen. iMac 27’’ mid 2011 OSX 10.8.5
I (unfortunately) have some experience in fixing mac beta problems, so beside tryin the quick fix, plus redownloading the whole thing, I already deleted several times the applications folder’s Guild Wars 2, cleaned cache, etc. etc.

edit: think I’m just in the “you poor player are in the 1% fix-didn’t-work”. I’ll just go play some other game ; )

Did you try the relaunch trick without deleting any of the caches? I’m almost wondering if people doing more than the list of instructions say might be the cause of some of the issues.

Dothl Lai.5829:

So, there is proof that they are not purposely deceiving us about their support of the mac client? And You got it right, they MIGHT be trying to turn, according to you, the “blatant cash grab impression”. It’s their chance now to convince us by making things more transparent than they were.

I’ll reiterate this one time just because you might have missed it in the middle of my post. If you truly want Anet to give us information the best way to do that is not call them liars the instant they start talking again. No one has come across any proof that Anet lied to us in the past. They stopped supporting us for a year, true. But that is not a lie. Those are two completely different levels of accusation.

For instance if you know a journalist ask him first why he didn’t cover a topic, then ask him why he lied. I’d like to think we can all be reasonable here.

Anyway, lets get back to talking about the real problem here and not Anet’s communication issues (we have lots of threads for that).

Edit: Also make sure when you use quotes you use them in the correct context. Subjects matter. For instance, you just agreed with me when you said “You got it right”. There, we’re all in agreement and we can stop with this useless line of conversation and get back to important things.

Are you experiencing the gray screen?

Yeah, thats an overall bug (i.e., happens on windows too). I wouldn’t leave the game running in the background for long periods of time (it also isn’t very environmentally friendly either).

I believe that set of instruction is out of date. I recommend you follow the instructions here instead.

Edit: Bah, anet and your nonstandard markup language. Make Markdown an option so I can stop brain farting every time I try to post a link. :p

Okay lets stop that right here. There is absolutely no proof that Anet is purposely deceiving us about their support of the mac client. No, that doesn’t mean I am okay with their support. Historically, the mac client support has been minimal to non-existent as far as well can tell.

I say as far as we call tell because we have very little information as far as what is going on. Everyone knew the mac client was a kluge that would break if anything significant happened to the windows client. At least we all seemed to believe that at launch. We even received relatively regular communication for the first 3 months. Then the communication stopped. Bugs started piling up and taking forever to fix. Thankfully they were mostly of the laser hawks forever variety and not the you have three minutes to play the game before a crash variety.

I think we’re all aware of the history especially the part where Anet seemingly forgot that the mac client was a kluge and started making huge changes to the engine without ever testing if the mac client would still function with all these huge changes. Again, I say seemingly because we have no idea what is actually going on. All we know is that there is no mac specific QA and that the overall QA department has either failed to catch, failed to communicate, or the developers have ignored the QA department due to one reason or another.

So what? Well Anet is finally starting to talk again. They’re actually telling us what is going on. For instance, we know that the bug here was due to heartbleed. Every other break they never told us what was going on, we were just left to wildly speculate. I understand that wild speculation can be seductive. We’ve been doing it for over a year now. But now we have actual people involved in the dev process publicly treating this client like it is an actual client and not just some toy to check up on every 3 months. A good way to stop all this is to great them with vitriol and outright calling them liars.

If you think they’re lying, honestly the best course of action would be to leave. I know that if enough evidence was presented to me to show that Anet was consistent and willfully lying that I would leave. I’m not happy with how Anet has handled the mac client. I think it is shameful and I am sad that I was wrong when I said that the mac client didn’t look like a blatant cash grab at launch. I was obviously wrong, for the last year and a half the game was been a blatant cash grab on mac users. But they’re trying to turn that around now. I wouldn’t recommend anyone who left over the last year come back yet. They haven’t proved themselves that much yet. But I’m willing to give them a second chance to earn my trust again. Maybe I’ll buy gems with money again, who knows. I hope Anet can impress me, and to do that I’m willing to meet them half way. I hope we can all be a bit more understanding even when we have been hurt in the past.

FYI, OS and Firmware are not interchangeable words.

Also, running any software below min specs is a bad idea.

Aazo.2841:

You can still purchase Lion, and Mountain Lion at the Apple Store (19.99 each) FYI.

Ah, I was only looking at the Mac App Store. They pulled it off there.

Yeah, a heads up before they make 10.7.5 mandatory instead of just suggested would have been a good thing. I can see how this could have been a mistake due to the rush to get a patch out.

For the record, they’ve requested you run 10.7.5 for at least a year. I can understand your frustration, but due to the way Apple releases graphics driver updates by updating the OS is the only way to ensure compatibility with applications such as games that heavily rely on such things.

As an alternative you can create a partition with 10.9.2 installed and keep your current 10.6.8 system intact (or use something like VMWare but you might take a bit of a performance hit…haven’t tried to do that for something like games but works great for Matlab).

I don’t believe Mountain Lion is for sale anymore. But Mavericks if free. What are your system specs?

KarateKid.5648:

If any of you are not being ALLOWED to run the installer – check your security settings – by default it will refuse to run Internet-originated downloads. You can change that in preferences (there’s also a key combination which I can’t recall right now to let you override on the fly).

I didn’t need to change the security setting in 10.9.2 (I’m set to allow approved developers).

Additionally, if you do run into this problem with an app in the future you do not need to change the setting system wide. Right clicking and using the contextual menu to open the app the first time will allow it to bypass the check and it will run without prompt after the first launch.

Yeah, it seems it doesn’t fix it immediately for the first launch, there must be something loading or changing in the background on first launch.

Have the people having problems relaunched a few times?

Also, they seemed to have upped the system requirement to 10.7.5 (it seems people were able to use 10.6.8 before…dunno, I’ve been on 10.9.2 for a while now). Not sure if the OS version might be preventing some people from using the BLTC or patching correctly but it is something to consider.

So first thing I did was try to sell some stuff in my inventory using the contextual menu. The TP failed to load. I tried to open various tabs in the BLTC and the tab either failed to load or displayed the loading icon forever.

I relaunched the game client and this time opened the BLTC using the hotkey. The main BLTC page loaded fine. I then tried to use the various other tabs. The TP tabs failed to load anything but the main BLTC page and the gem exchange. I closed the BLTC again and reopened and went to the TP tab again. It eventually loaded and selling from the inventory window using contextual menus work.

Every time I reboot Guild Wars 2 the BLTC instantly works. I’m not sure if anything I did fixed anything or if the BLTC just takes a long time to load. But thanks for your efforts over the weekend. I appreciate time and energy you guys are taking to fix this problem and ensure the BLTC is secure.

Moving your GW2 data file from your mac or windows client is a way to save you from having to redownload the entire game again. Frankly, you can ignore the step. It is one of those steps where if you don’t know what it means you’re more likely to mess something up and redownloading shouldn’t be an issue (unless you have a data cap).

Malernasam.4327:

This is pretty ridiculous. 4 days, no information, no updates.

Whoa whoa. We have received information and updates. It wasn’t all in this forum (some of it came from the reddit thread about this). But we know this is a heart bleed issue. So it was important that they fix that vulnerability as fast as possible. Yes, that meant our client got screwed up. I’m not happy about that either. We also know they’re working on a fix and were working on a build but that it didn’t fix it by the end of Friday so they didn’t release it.

So we actually know a lot compared to the previous times we’ve had a game breaking bug (remember the patcher bug where we knew nothing for weeks?). Yes, I’m disappointed that Anet continues to treat us like second class citizens but this is hardly a great example of that beyond the fact that cider ports suck in general.

Yeah, some ISPs route GW2 traffic funny. For instance I have basically 50 ms latency and 90 mb/s up an down but if I try to connect to a server in austin my down suddenly craters to 5 mb/s.

Was it confirmed that crossover will work? It is almost the same exact thing Anet is using (which is the problem, we’re basically using IE6 for the TP, I believe).

Don’t hold your breath, the build will likely come next week. Oh well.

This is a good example of why we need better communication. It is pretty clear that this, while sucky for us, wasn’t really avoidable. Hopefully in the future they can be a bit faster to fix such problems but I think explaining what is going on will help us understand what is going on and be less likely to think Anet is just being dumb.

CC Danicia.1394:

MageIanBorthwick.3054:

CC Danicia.1394:

Hello all,

I talked to the Mac team this morning. A fix for the most recent TP issue is going in today. Regarding the on-going issues in this thread, they tell me that it it actually spans across more than the Mac client. And they’ll have more information on those fixes later.

This sounds an awful lot like:

“This is only being addressed because it affects the NON-Mac community”

The one issue is very specific to you. The ongoing ones are not. Hope that helps clarify.

That is what I thought was going on. Appreciate the update regarding our issue.

I do find it weird that they seem to completely break the BLTC with such regularity. It can be fine for months then it is like, “Wait, Bob, it is time to break the BLTC for mac again!” Hopefully it doesn’t take until the 15th for them to fix it (or introduce even more game breaking bugs, but whatever, I’m totally not cyclical at all about QA).

Thanks for putting in the html code, didn’t know the forum supported that. Neat. Anyway, as far as cleaning up the rest of the threads, we have 4 threads reporting trading post bugs (all likely the same bug) up in this forum currently. There should be a better way to organize.

Well first off thank you for the update notes. Small question, are those updates that have been implemented or are planned to be? I ask because the function key override doesn’t seem to be working if that was implemented (I still have to use third party software to swap function keys per app). I also still get the crazy flickering on certain plants (although this is happening less often than around launch).

Okay, now I’m going to go through the current stickies.

Basic Mac Beta Client Troubleshooting
Is there a way to fix CLI command or make the instructions as far as changing the em dash to two hyphens more readable? We have to help people with the dashes in the CLI a lot. For instance, can you do: (I’m using the pre tag)

/applications/guild\ wars\ 2.app/contents/MacOS/cider --use-dos-cwd C:Gw2 -- C:\\GW2\\GW2.exe -repair

Also the special apple/command symbol next to the word “command” was replaced with a (?) on step 2 of the PRAM reset instructions.

About This Sub-Forum
This page is pretty much incorrect from my observations (that and the bbcode is broken). Any post mention macs at all is automatically moved to the mac beta client forum even if the involvement of a Mac isn’t the problem. Also, maybe if you could put an explanation as far as what this beta is might be good (i.e., explain how long we can expect it to be in beta, what your standards are, how we can help you guys in general, etc…).

Known Issues: Guild Wars 2 Mac Beta Client
Is almost completely out of date. Maybe just merge this with the update thread. Here is an example of how you could format it. This way you can inform us of what is going on and warn us if you think something might glitch out (and you could also merge like 3 of your current stickies into one). I’m not expecting the level of notes in my example, just using it to illustrate how you can present the information to us (fancy icons not necessary).

Submitting a Support Ticket for the Mac Beta Client and Technical Problems? Post Your System Specs should be merged as you have to post your specs to submit a ticket anyway. Also, I believe your support guys want us to use a third party app these days to give them the system specs and they will not take images (or maybe it was another game…dunno something to check at the very least).

Keep Your Mac OS X Updated
Kind of a no duh statement. Almost every Mac gamer knows that the only way to get new drivers is through OS updates. It takes up sticky space and really is redundant. If the info is needed it could be put into the troubleshooting thread instead.

Mouse Wheel and Camera Zoom
Should probably also mention the crazy mouse bug that is fixed by command tabbing out and back into the game.

Performance Issues: MacBook Pro with Retina Display
I don’t have a MacBook Pro so no comment.

Mac Beta Client Installer
This thread is kind of funny. Can someone fix the background image to put the typical huge arrow pointing at the icon that we’re used to? (Actually we’re mostly used to drag and drop installs but not sure if that is something you can fix.)

Yeah, I’m assuming we’re stuck with cider here too (so I’m not going to ask for high textures and whatnot since cider pretends to be 32 bit windows).

1. The level of communication. Essentially, I’d like the stickies in this forum to be updated to be current. This includes updates for frequent issues to address how we pretty much get the same handful of threads in this forum over and over and over again. And some sort of patch notes for us. I’m completely 100% okay if they’re kind of gibberish. Having a general idea of what is going on is good and can potentially help us talk to you if we have an inkling of what got changed. At the moment we have no idea what is going on so we do blind guessing at best (raging rants at worse). Oh and maybe remove/condense some of the stickies since there are a lot of them right now.

2. On a somewhat related note, clean up this sub forum. Related crashes should be lumped together in the same thread/bug report. It will hopefully help people find answers more quickly (due to the your thread was merged/moved feature the forums has).

3. Fix all the random WvW crashing. I’m betting this is an issue that will never go away just due to how cider is kind of buggy. To avoid the crashing I’ve just been throwing all my settings down to minimum (I’m on a new top of the line iMac with the latest OS) because I can’t bother myself to figure out how to avoid the crashing. Maybe a “don’t crash in WvW” preset would be a nice solution here so we can quickly swap to that graphics setting instead of meticulously playing with the settings every time we go to WvW.

4. Have some sort of way to reset the BLTC beyond rebooting the game. Give us a button to flush the cache or whatever it is that fixes the problem by rebooting. I’m completely making stuff up here because I don’t know the cause of the BLTC randomly not working (it has gotten better recently, though so you’re on the right track).

5. You’re getting better at communicating with us. I really do appreciate how you guys are talking to us again. You have a ways to go to restore my trust (I won’t speak for others). But you’re on the right track and I will be happy to spend money to buy gems when I feel that my trust has been sufficiently restored. I obviously like GW2 over all other fantasy MMOs right now otherwise I wouldn’t be here so I do want to make sure you guys can eat. Basically, the trust gap still exists but I have hope it can be fixed.