Guild Wars 2

Likely not directly related to this problem, but since many of the people in here seem to be using a 2011 iMac with a Radeon graphics card, have a look at this:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/16/apple-initiates-graphic-card-replacement-program-for-mid-2011-27-inch-imac/

There’s a function in the keybind settings called “lock auto target”. It would be exceptionally useful if that function could be bound to the right mouse button, in addition to controlling your characters direction.

Alternatively, please fix the function “promote skill targets” in the general settings to actually do what the tooltip implies it should do. Right now it doesn’t seem to work at all.

Had this happen for the first time yesterday. Flickering skills and map, with the specific flickering changing when zoning or fast traveling. After changing the zone several times it went back to normal again. Haven’t seen this happening before on either OSX or Windows.

late 2012 27" iMac, i5 3.2GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 680MX 2048 MB, Fusion Drive.

Hello Luis, glad to have you here in our little corner of the GW2 community.

Don’t make plans for the weekend, mountain of work coming very soon

First post: excellent. Second post: almost, but not quite.

The design philosophy for the game is not to adapt one’s playstyle on the fly so that you can shift focus between multiple roles in one build. The design goal is to allow for focusing on different roles through shifting builds. The Elementalist is an exception in this regard, not the rule or design goal.

Having players learn early how to play their class to survive, instead of allowing them to just waltz through cannon fodder enemies seems the better choice to me tbh. And I can’t say I noticed much of a difference in difficulty when leveling a Thief compared to a Guardian, just had to by more mindful of my skills’ secondary effects. If anything, playing Thief was actually more interesting.

Acotje.5689:

With a 50% crit chance, what will do more damage

10% crit dmg
or
100 Power

That depends on how much Power and crit damage you already have. There’s no general answer to this.

In the graphic options, there’s a setting called ‘Frame Limiter’. Set it to 30, that should help with keeping temperatures a bit lower.

You can follow your progress through your achievements. There’s a special category for Living Story, which can be used as a guideline.

Jemmi.6058:

Interesting. I came to almost the opposite realization yesterday. I was gone for the long weekend and when I came back, I was not eagerly waiting to get back in the game. However, before that I was on almost every spare hour I had. The reason? Because I realized I had to reason. I was logging on before for Laurels and Dailies. Then, when I did not get a few, I realized I didn’t need them. I then checked out SAB and saw that you had to farm it over and over to get a skin. You can’t just log in for fun and get something cool.

Basically the style of play is either = log in for hours and hours and let it consume you, so that you can get Laurels/Legendaries/Super skins etc.. or you can log in casually and get nothing. (and by nothing i mean you can get a few laurels and a few baubles, but not enough to do anything with).

This game is too heavily focused on farming imo.

I don’t agree the game is focused on farming. Players are. Because after years of playing games that have nothing else to offer, they kind of adopted the idea that that’s the only thing an MMO can offer.
You said you could log in casually and get nothing. Then the problem is you, not the game.
I log in casually and get an hour of two of fun, doing some cool event chains, flipping a few keeps and depots in WvW, or a quick dungeon run with some friends.

I agree with you that I don’t eagerly wait to get back in the game anymore, not the way I used to in previous MMOs. But to me, that’s a good thing. It means I play when I want to, not because of compulsion.

Again, why are you trying to launch the app with a terminal command? Why not just launch the app?

Why are you running the game this way? Is there anything preventing you from just running the GW2.app?

What are your system specs? What Mac are you running this on?

What is this supposed to do?

VOLKON.1290:

Screw that. I’m having my rocking chair be manufactured by Alienware.

Pfft! A true gamer would build it himself!

Aeonblade.8709:

It’s actually 26, so he isn’t far off. Us video gamers will be a dying breed eventually at this rate!

Quite the opposite, the audience is growing steadily. The constant marketing focus on the male, white late teens/early 20ies gamer is just utterly disproportionate to the actual distribution of demographics. Take a minute or two to read through http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp for some interesting numbers.

Well, this escalated quickly … Guess that’s par for the course on these forums. Can’t really find anything wrong with the OPs observation, he’s pretty much correct. 10 years ago I had plenty of time, and still believed that pushing pixels really hard for 8 hours a day is an accomplishment to be proud of. Back then I probably wouldn’t have liked GW2 either.

Calae.1738:

I’m not sure how long they will be able to sustain this though. Their Achilles heel is a AAA MMO targeted to a mature audience. The Disney stuff might be tolerable for awhile but; it’ll get dumped really fast. Your average MMO gamers is over 30 and is demanding mature content.

Considering that ‘mature content’ in video games is usually targeted at, and most successful with teenage boys, I sure as hell wouldn’t base an MMO around it.

Aegis.9724:

Yes, gw2 makes an effort to make everything available to everyone. Thats a great thing, especially if you have little time to play.
Buuut there is a downside
A psychological one. The easiest is something to obtain/see, the lesser is the perceived payback, or sense of accomplishment.

I consider it long overdue to move away from that trick. This whole genre is essentially based on making the players believe they achieve something to lure them back long after the tedious gameplay has gone stale. This has done MMOs more harm then good, it stalled development of new game mechanics and designs for over a decade now.

cinderdave.7469:

mine does this periodically also. However my friend that plays with me happens every time. The only way he can fix it is to reinstall the game which takes so much time to DL. Seriously pay for a game and can’t fix this issue? Highly frustrating. fix it please.

Is your friend aware of this fix?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Game-won-t-start-Try-this

Essentially that puts the game back into the default state, without the need to redownload everything.

If you don’t see the folder, you’re looking in the wrong place.
Read the instructions carefully, and follow them exactly:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Game-won-t-start-Try-this

I tend to boot into Windows for longer play sessions on the weekend, since the game just looks better with the higher graphics options on the Windows side. During the week, convenience trumps flashy graphics

Using a configuration with the i5, 680MX upgrade, 8GB RAM, and 1TB Fusiondrive.

On OSX ML, I play at native resolution, with most settings on highest option except AA (off), shadows (high) and post-processing (middle).

FPS in the open world is stable between 50 and 60, but I still have the Cider-induced FPS-nosedive into single digits right after loading into a new map.
FPS in Lions Arch or WvW battles is generally around 40, but can drop into lower 20 in high populated moments.

On Windows 7 64bit, I get roughly 20% higher framerates, while also using higher texture options, and the FPS-dive after loading is noticably smaller.

If you want to install the game in both OSX and Bootcamp, you don’t need to download it twice! You can start the second installation, quit it once it starts downloading, then copy the main game file (gw2.dat, an archive containing almost everything) from the completed installation to the other.

I agree that it probably isn’t smoothmouse by itself. I don’t use it at all and still had the same problem.
Have you tried changing the general OSX mouse & touch settings (speed, acceleration, touch gestures)? Experiment with those settings, disable anything you don’t need, try if it has any effect on the game.

Since this is neither a support issue nor Mac specific, could you please make a thread here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs

Could you give us an estimation as to how often this happens? I’ve had this problem yesterday, for the first time ever since the Mac beta client was available. (Razer Deathadder, no additional software, Mountain Lion on a recent iMac)

Several other users have reported this problem as well, but we still have no good idea how frequent this happens.
Also, which Mac are you using?

Generally speaking, that’s correct. The performance relies more on the single-thread performance of the CPU than the GPU.

Apple released an SMC update for retina MBPs that specifically targets performance problems with demanding games. Have a look: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1559?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Please reconsider this choice. Safari for example doesn’t have separate language options, it always defaults to the system language, and if it doesn’t work in other browsers either wouldn’t it be time to look for a different solution?
At least stop the redirection if I chose a specific language option in the URL, or put the language selector from the forums on the main site too.

Haha, I made the same mistake at first

cletiscake.9173:

Why does ascended gear benefit from the option to choose from a multitude of stat combinations? Players must spend time to acquire both ascended gear and dungeon gear, so I don’t understand why the ascended gear gives players options to choose from while dungeon gear does not.

Because the modes of aquisition for Ascended gear are very limited, whereas there are multiple ways to aquire each stat combination for regular exotic gear.

Attack doesn’t really help for this calculation, as it’s not part of the damage formula, so I will assume a base of 2000 Power instead.
In this scenario:
going from 50% crit damage to 60% crit damage is a 3,33% damage increase in total.
going from 2000 Power to 2100 Power is a 5% damage increase in total.
Bonus:
going from 50% crit chance to 60% crit chance is a 6,67% damage increase in total.

This only applies to direct damage of course, disregarding conditions or proc effects.

Edit: corrected. Applied the crit multiplier in the wrong place.

It may still run in 10.6.8, even without official support.

Try the steps described here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/mac/Game-won-t-start-Try-this
Pretty much every problem with patching/starting the game on OSX is related to that.
I think in Snow Leopard you can skip step 3 (hold option key) because back then the Library folder wasn’t hidden yet.

Depends, which quad? The client isn’t that well optimized for multicore, it’s very dependent on single-thread performance. A very fast dualcore would likely perform better than a slower quad.
On top of that, in OSX there’s the extra performance hit you take because of the Cider wrapper, which may be much more emphazised in WvW than in general PvE.
The latter can be avoided by booting into Windows, the former .. not so much.

If it’s not too much of a hassle, you should definitely test the performance under Windows.

Once the humans have finally subdued the charr for good, the silly kittens will make for good mounts!

Performance in large group fights like WvW is much more dependent on your CPU than your graphics card. You should try running in Windows though, it should be at least a small improvement.
Also make sure to put the more demanding graphics settings to low or off when doing WvW, specifically Shadows and Reflections.

Fastidius.7945:

The default is `, actually.

Different keyboard layout, different default key.

Not just you, OP. There are a lot of people who have been conditioned into thinking that games without the illusion of progression can’t be fun. A very unfortunate result of a decade of uninspired game design. I’m really sorry for you.

Aye.8392:

I keep playing because even with all of its problems Guild Wars 2 is still the best MMO on the market.

It’s hard to believe with these long lists of bugs, broken features and complaints about the design, but fundamentally, this is true for me.

critickitten.1498:

Whatever code they use to determine when a monster is “unable to hit the player”, it’s clearly bugged, because I’ve seen firsthand mobs that hit me just fine and yet I can’t hurt them.

Yes, the pathfinding is very bugged, but it IS a bug nevertheless. It is not by design, which is what the OP seems to think.

Every time you restart the client, it will calculate the % on base of the remaining files.
So unless there’s something really broken with your installation, it should actually finish pretty quickly.

If you have it installed on Windows already, you don’t need to download it, you can just copy the game files over. Search this forum for instructions, there are several threads about it.

Are you using a keyboard with a different layout than the standard US-english?

Jumping over certain obstacles can help to use mob movement AI against them. I guess taking that to an extreme could be considered exploiting, but other that that I can’t think of any particular use.

Considering the Shadow Behemoth has the same difficulty as the dragons (as in: none), I was under the assumption the rewards are already scaling the same way. I didn’t notice any difference in loot drops when doing the events in the last few days.

And yes, lower and mid level areas always seem to have people in them, so deserted starter areas might be a specific problem on your server.

vince.5937:

Any and all graphics drivers should come from Apple System Updates. The cards built in to Apple machines have custom drivers written for them.

That’s not quite true for the Bootcamp side of things, it’s pretty much like any laptop hardware. You can use the graphics manufacturers driver as long as the model ID of your card is in the list of supported IDs of the driver.

The only problem with Mac hardware is that it often takes a very long time for the Mac model IDs to get on those lists. You may need to use a beta driver, they tend to get these updates sooner.

loseridoit.2756:

WoW runs just as fast as windows because blizzard maintains an opengl renderer to their engine.

That is not my experience. WoW’s Mac client ran noticably worse than the Windows client, with FPS differences between 15% to 20%.
OSX’s OpenGL implementation is horrible, so porting the engine to OpenGL would just replace one bad solution with another.

You go to your Applications folder (in OSX), right click (or option-click) on the Guild Wars icon, it’s the second entry from the top on the list that pops up.

Hollow.9758:

Would doing the SMC reset help performance for those of us on the desktop at all?

There is no harm in trying, but from a technical point of view it should not make a difference at all on the desktop.

Zogyark.4597:

What do you guys think?

I think it was pretty clever of you to make this post now, after we’ve seen the 2 patches that were explicitly described as ‘introduction’ or ’ teaser content’ to the Living Story, instead of waiting to post after the march update that brings the actual Living Story content, as well as the WvW update that was postponed from February.

Ok, time to look at your file structure then. Use Disk Utility and check / repair the hard drive. You may have to boot from your recovery partition, otherwise it won’t allow repairs on the main volume.

Did you try to delete the game files completely and do a fresh reinstall? If not, that might be a good idea, just have the installer run over night. If you have a friend with a working installation, or have it installed on another comuter as well, you can avoid downloading it all and just copy the files over from there. Works with PC installation too.