Guild Wars 2

Status of native OSX client: nonexistent, not in development

This is not a communication issue, they are well aware of our unhappiness about the situation, it just seems the numbers don’t justify making the investment into developing a native client. It’s nothing personal, just business. And as we all know, business sucks.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Oh wow, I thought it was 3 (it is on windows 32bit I think) but went with 4 just in case :S but two, that’s pretty shocking and could explain a lot of the issues.

Well, that’s note entirely wrong, there is a posibility to expand the limit to 3GB, but as this comes with it’s own set of incompatibility issues, it’s appearantly not commonly used. It’s not used by the GW2 client.
Sorry for the off-topic

Entaurrus, when was the last time you deleted the GW2 folder in the user library/application support/ directory? The thing they talk about in point 4) in this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Basic-Mac-Beta-Client-Troubleshooting/first#post2480238
It’s usually causing crash problems, but can have an effect on performance as well.

You mentioned you’ve got a lot of space on your harddrive. Would a Bootcamp’d Windows installation be an option for you? The client runs much more efficiently under Windows.

Also, Foxx, for 32bit processes, the limitation is 2GB RAM, not 4GB. That’s for adressable memory for OSes

Unfortunately the GW2 OSX client does not benefit from either more CPU cores nor more RAM, but the speedbump to 3 GHz should help a little.
SSD doesn’t help with the framerate, but due to how the game world is split up into seperate maps, cutting down the loading times of those will improve your overall experience quite a bit.

Michael Walker.8150:

I have 16gb ram as mentioned, what are the settings that make most use of this?

None, really. Even at highest settings the game uses 2GB RAM at most. The gw2.exe is a 32bit process, therefore it can’t use more RAM, no matter how much you actually have in the system.

Someone gives sensible advice, and you guys dole out personal attacks? This is a tech support forum, not tumbler or reddit.

If someone says something wrong, point it out, correct it, job done. Anything else does not belong in here.

Not to drive this even more off-topic, but if you’re genuinely interested in things like dark matter, higgs fields etc, have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvBqzzvUBLCs8Y7Axb-jZew
And say goodbye to the rest of your week …

The hex core has a slightly larger cache, and it boosts to the same clock speed as the quad core. Therefore, it should perform just as well on apps that run mostly on one core, like GW2.
You’re paying a lot more for it though, and performance likely won’t be better for most apps, only ‘as good’ as the cheaper quad core model.
So unless you’re doing video editing where slightly faster performance translates directly into more income, I’d go with the more affordable version

Dangus.6572:

new slim iMac owners, how about heating? my older iMac GPU heats up to 80, cpu ±60 celsius when I run Gw2. Does cooling works well on slim iMacs?

No problems at all on my late 2012 slim iMac. I don’t actively monitor the temps, but when they do climb, the normally silent cooler actually becomes audible, so I have a rough idea how often the system really heats up. The cooler kicks in about a quarter of the time, runs for a few minutes, then goes quiet again. I’ve never had it run for an extended amount of time.

alccode.1297:

I have to say, it is remarkable seeing the contrast between ArenaNet (wrapping the game in a Windows emulator and marketing it as a “native client” with a straight face) and companies such as Blizzard, which make it a priority to develop actual native ports for OS X – and have them available on release. I’ll keep Diablo 3 on OS X since it’ll be nice to alt-tab to browsers and such. If as a result of sticking GW2 onto a separate partition I don’t end up booting into it as much since otherwise my entire environment is in OS X, so be it.

Unfortunately, Blizzard is the exception, not the rule. The majority of recent OSX releases of big PC-titles is done with a Cider port or other similar wrapper solutions, and the associated performance hits.

Unless the Mac-gaming market grows enough to provide a real monetary incentive for companies to invest into a native OpenGL port, that’s what we’re stuck with. That’s one of the reasons why Mac gamers should root for SteamOS to actually take hold. Another OpenGL plattform will make native development for OSX a much easier decision for developers.

That’s not exactly a point that needs further proof

Welcome Lacey.

If you’re looking for a tip to get on peoples good side, any mention of a native OSX port or general improvements on the tech side of things would go a long way. No promises, of course, we’re still all waiting for our ponies. Just a little hope here and there

That’s brilliant? Why didn’t Arenanet think of that?

It’s fascinationg how many people are almost begging for more options to give Arenanet money. Why aren’t they just buying more gems?

It appears there were several bugs that gave initial introduction of the Story Journal a rocky start.

I love the jumping content, but I’d be totally fine with it being optional and not required to play through the story instances.

Using the previous model (late 2012/early 2013) i5, GTX680MX.
Performance is … good enough. Not great. My first iMac, and most likely my last.

The graphics card is bare minimum for a display of this resolution. In GW2, performance is more limited by the CPU, and since you can’t really overclock an iMac, you’re pretty much out of options here. A poorly realized OSX version of the game doesn’t help here either. At least there’s Bootcamp to play the game under Windows with better performance. Take note though that Fusion Drive doesn’t work with Bootcamp, it will only use the regular hard drive, not the SSD.

From a gamers point of view, price-performance ratio of the iMac is lousy. In order to get acceptable performance, costly upgrades are mandatory. But that’s why you get a Mac for productivity, so it actually pays for itself, and not for gaming.

Sunday.8953:

Max out all the RAM you can afford, it can’t be upgraded later, and do get a i7 processor if you plan to keep it for some years

The 27 inch models do have user-upgradable RAM. Apples build-to-order RAM upgrades are obscenely overpriced. Go with the minimum RAM and upgrade it yourself if neccessary. You’re not going to need an upgrade for a while unless you go heavily into photo/video editing. Same for an i7 upgrade, little to no benefit unless you’re insisting on keeping a dozen apps opened at once while gaming, or using applications that are heavily multithreaded. Hint: The majority of games stilll aren’t.

I don’t know why so many people ask for dueling instead if just using the custom arenas to do that, but if going to sPVP is too obscure or too much of a hassle, you could always designate some areas in the game as duel arenas. There are already places themed like that all over the world, just keep it restricted to those and let the kids hang out there.

HandOfKane.5409:

Like the chakrams from KoAR?

That would be an idea for professions with physical damage, you could use chakrams as a new weapon type.
In TERA, casters use the discs as a magic focus. So we kinda already have that in GW2, just with a different shape. It’s not really new weapon type for them.

You uninstall the game like every other app too, drag the file into the trash. If you insist, you can also delete the GW2 folder in your user libraries application support folder the same way. Those two folders contain everything the game puts on your system.

Yes, corrected it. Couldn’t you have read this after I edited it…?

Xyonon.3987:

for example. each rune adds new stats, it’s not a total.

That wasn’t the question.

The 6/6 effect is likely the base duration. Since it can’t account for possible other duration effects you might have from other sources, it would be more confusing to have the duration from the rune set already baked in, but ignore other duration effects.

So in your example, it would be 6 sec burn/bleed from the runeset alone, plus whatever other extra duration you have.

BossBattle has to be this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWB8P4jbsAA

Purple Miku.7032:

You will hit MONSTROUS damage.

In PvE, yes. In PvP, not a chance.

Taygus.4571:

Many people here dislike other mmo’s for that exact reason. Things take too long to get to what people actually want to play.

This illusion is very persistent, that it’s ok to do unfun repetitive chores for the promise of something fun later which then turns out to not be anymore fun either. It’s baffling how many players are dismissing like 90% of an MMOs content for some perceived reward that doesn’t exist in the first place.

Do you think you could assemble a PC by yourself? That would allow you to stretch your budget much further.

Belenus.9132:

I’m sure this has been covered already, and if this is the case, forgive me. But re: 25. Option to change “hold right key for camera” into “click right key to toggle camera usage” (I’m running with right key pressed 90% of time). — did it not occur to you at all to use the autorun feature? On my machine it is keyed to R and remains running (or swimming) in the direction you are facing unless you happen to change course or wish to stop. Very handy for crossing vast areas of land or water.

You’re entirely missing the point of that option. It’s not at all about running, it’s about camera control.

You can absolutely build a healing focused Elementalist if that’s what you want to play, but as Grimezy pointed out, the only place in PvE where having such a specialized build is of any consequence is in dungeons, and because of how players chose to run dungeons, a healing build is not in demand.

In the open world, it pretty much doesn’t matter what build you have, so you can go to town with your crazy healz!

10% total damage loss, not 10% crit damage loss?

Elrey.5472:

No zerg trains = more players learning how to not just press skill 1.

Your optimism is refreshing

TiF.6589:

How do you lost 35% of your dmg output?

I run full Ascended Berserker set and I only notice my damage lower by around 10% in total.

That’s because you can do math, and he can’t

They only tripled the charges if you’re silly enough to use transmutation on a low level character who will inevitably change its gear all the time. That was a rather silly way to burn through your transmutations before the patch, and it still is now.

Everyone else just got a lot of extra transmute charges for his level 80 characters from all the unused transmute stones.

Krion.5986:

Do you think that the Megaserver system and all these new panels and UI that make things super simple as well as other changes that were implemented a while ago like LFG and such break all immersion when playing an MMO?

No, don’t think so.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

The dye’s that the character has, that your other character’s don’t, will be deleted. The rest will stay. If that means deleting all but basic dye’s, you basically killed all your dye’s.

What on earth are you even talking about?

Today all dyes players have unlocked become account bound, meaning they are no longer associated with any specific character. You can delete and create characters at will, and they will all have access to your dyes. Changing your home world does not affect this.

Svarty.8019:

Is it this?
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1078544-GW2-official-Blogpost-about-the-Holy-Trinity-must-read?p=15397283&viewfull=1

That would be the second part. The first part is mentioned in there, but not included, the blog post about death& healing.

Dusty Moon.4382:

They are adding a lot – having to redo how the servers get addressed, etc is big – plus they will have to patch the servers.

None of that is a lot of DATA though. No new items, textures, maps, sound, music …

tigirius.9014:

I prefer the term Ginormous myself.

Humongdiqulous!

They explained their reasoning in two combat-themed blog posts that went up on the pre-release blog site. I’m not sure those are still accessible.

Hey Danica,

I don’t have much to add to Michael Walkers post. One year after launch, the Beta tag on the client is just misleading. Lose it, decide on a communication on the state of the Mac client that is decisive.

If’ we’re stuck with the Cider port, tell us. If you have concrete plans to move to OpenGL (for Linux, SteamOS, or just to finally get a better performance option than Dx9 that also works in the Chinese market), that’d of course be the prefered solution.

Every other day. Thought I’d use the time between updates to play through all the personal stories.

tweeve.3782:

Personally I would prefer it on Linux before SteamOS.

SteamOS is Linux.

Kioshi.6597:

They always say “we really do read all your topics”. I just can’t believe this though.
If they ignore us while most are just crying out for a reaction (Anet, not a patch but a reaction!), I know they can’t think, “ah I can’t really say anything new about this so I will just say nothing for now”. For me this proves they look at this max once per week.

That is pretty much exactly what happens though. This is best-practice of how to manage forum discussions (not just here, in any managed online community). Do not communicate unless you can provide a satisfactory answer, as anything else will just provoke more inappropriate reactions, and as a result cause the need of spending more resources on management that could be used more productively elsewhere.

Look at the posts in this thread. Does that look like an audience that is even trying to comprehend the reality of developing a game as complex as this within the confinements of available resources? Do they look like they even care about any of the dozens of reasons that can cause unforseen delays in deployment of a patch?

Unless you can provide them with exactly what they want, it’s better to just not communicate at all. That is sad as hell, but it’s the only kind of reaction this community allows.

maddoctor.2738:

I doubt level scaling takes into account gear tier, it’s the same if you use Ascended and if you use White gear.

You’re right, scaling currently doesn’t seem to properly account for different gear levels. That would have to be included in order to scale high-level players properly into the starter zones.

digiowl.9620:

The more i think about the subject the more i suspect this is a carryover from PVP tuning, where they didn’t want to see someone get a ton of conditions dumped on him quickly and melt before he could respond.

Nope, it’s a ‘carryover’ from actual technical limitations, namely bandwidth and processing. Conditions produce a relatively large amount of additional information that has to be broadcasted, this very quickly causes immense traffic when having large-scale encounters with lots of players. This is not a problem unique to GW2, nearly every MMO has some kind of hard cap on buffs/debuffs on entities. It’s also a problem that is not at all trivial to solve, which is why we’re still seeing it in MMOs today despite developers trying to find solutions for it for more than 10 years.

digiowl.9620:

but champions and worldbosses are a different story. Thanks to how crit heavy the game can be, and that direct damage scales with the number of people without any hard cap present, i suggest borrowing a page from their anti-CC feature for champs.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

This scales with the number of people present, so that the more people there are, the more CCs are needed for one of them to bite.

What i am suggesting is the inverse of this. That with large groups, given that the overall encounter scales with the numbers present, the bleed cap (the major issue here) is raised.

As it stands, at 25 the bleed is likely to do as much DPS as perhaps 2-3 people doing direct damage, depending on the latter’s crit chance and damage multiplier.

So once we start to see 10+ people the cap can readily be raised to match, especially as the mob will be scaled to the group anyways.

For champs , maybe. World bosses are considered ‘objects’ and cannot be critically hit, so most of this doesn’t apply to them.

Well, you can’t do GW1-style personal hard mode in an open world map, so the only other avenue here is to tweak the level scaling so that max level characters (or rather: their stats) are scaled down even more.

Maps are still going to be separated by portals. That has nothing to do with the megaserver.

Asmodeus.5782:

Direk, are we supposed to be overjoyed with the fact that …

You have a seriously warped definition of the word ‘fact’.

The new system is designed to do exactly what you need. Put all your guildies on the same map to fight the dragon. As a bonus, you can now actually trigger him on demand. And it’s not a hidden overflow, so you’re not separated from the rest of the community either.

Was there any particular reason you thought this thread about the megaserver, that covers the same topic as what’s already discussed in the main thread, had to be made into it’s own thread?

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

It might make world bosses harder. Knowing anet and the +225% population increase, they’ll make event scale so bad that when 50 people of 300 total on a map afk/play superior casual, superior bad geared, they will cause the other 250 people to fail

That’s not what that number means. For grenths sake, at least know what you’re talking about before you start rambling! Population caps per map are not changing. Event scaling doesn’t work like that either.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Glorified server mergers. Good to stabilize the free fall population drop, pretty much bad for everything else.

Uhm, the population drop was 1.5 years ago. Talk about slow reaction time …

I heard that if you fold your arms in front of your chest and hold your breath, you’ll get a response even faster!