Guild Wars 2

Absolutely the correct decision to postpone other legendary weapons. Create content that is open for all of the players, don’t create content that is viable for only a small subset of players. I feel the same could be done with the raids, by the way.

The other two mentors are somewhat bland characters with a plain and simple backstory script that can appear everywhere.

Tybalt comes with tragic instead, and he lives it. He not only has only one paw, he has become depressive and tries to overcome it during the whole story. He is a real hero in trying to overcome his fate, for example with his apple jokes, but although he is successful in all of his missions, he is still trapped in his depression. But he carries on until the end, and this is what makes him a hero. He is the only character in GW2 that does not only fight enemies, the real fight is the one with himself.

(I don’t know if you ever met a depressive person in real live, but if you didn’t, it might be difficult to recognize that aspect of his character)

For me, I found the hardest PvE encounter was the arm seals of the Cliffside Fractal on level 94. If there is one fractal level you cannot complete from all 100, it’s because of this this fractal and this encounter. Forget this fight on lower levels, I only mean 94.

I like the movie comparison. I was just old enough to watch the original Star Wars movie in cinema when it was released. It seems like yesterday – I have not grown up since then (much).

What you all want is not true randomness, it is equal distribution instead.

True Randomness has no memory, so whenever the rng is rolled, it has no knowledge of what happened before. If it rolls the dice for a drop, it doesn’t know if the character already received 5 precursors as drop and should be ineligible to get another one until every other character in the world also got 5 precursors.
This is fair in a mathematical sense, because for every roll in the whole game, every player has the same chance of success. All the time.
This is considered unfair at the same time, because without memory the dice may roll 2 successes for the same player and omit another player. The rng doesn’t remember that one one player already got his success and should be ineligible for another.

Instead, you want equal distribution of good rng results. You want that every player get equally good results within a time frame like any other player. If there are 5 precursor drops, they should not go all to the same player, they should all go to 5 different players.
This requires memory! You have to manipulate the previously random result. The rng has to check if a candidate already got his success, and if he actually got it, it should not give him one again.

This is unfair in a mathematical sense, because the probability of a success depends on previous rolls. The more successes you got in the past, the less successes you get in the future. Every player has his own drop probability, not equal to that of every other player.
This is considered fair at the same time, because it ensures that within a time frame every player gets his equal share of drop successes.

So true randomness within drop results is not as desirable as it seems to be. Players want a manipulated rng. A rng that smooths out too many losses and too many successes, so in the end everyone gets the same share of success within his play time. A true rng smooths out within infinite play time, but the player wants that a game should smooth it out within a much shorter time – his play time, which is not infinity but only some 100 or some 1000 hours.

I don’t spend a thought on the looks of other characters. It’s not interesting to me.
Sometimes, I am pointed to somebody by one of my Teamspeak friends, and then I go looking, but usually I ask myself: “well, yes, that’s a player character. And now?” They are looking all the same to me, like all the people in a crowd.

Yes, there are of course characters that look better than others. But that’s unimportant to me.

More important to me are character names. Sometimes, I browse zergs for the character names instead of fighting. Names tell stories.

It’s probably a texture the game tries to load, and this texture is located on a sector of your hard disk that has become bad. A texture that is only used in that specific location where your problematic character is standing.

Do this:
duplicate the game data file: copy gw2.dat to gw2.dat2. Then delete the original gw2.dat and rename gw2.dat2 to gw2.dat. This way the file with the bad sector is deleted and you have a freshly written file that has no bad sector. Then run gw2 -repair in case the data that was on the bad sector was not copied properly.

It might also be that copying gw2.dat is interrupted due to the bad sector and you are unable to fully copy the file. In this case, delete gw2.dat and re-download it.

In both cases, the bad sector is somewhere in your free disk space afterwards. Whenever Windows wants to write again on that sector, the hard disk is remapping that sector to a spare sector with its internal defect-sector-management and there is no bad sector visible to Windows any more.

But your hard disk might be failing. Get a diagnosis program from your hard disk vendor and check the drive state. If the number of bad sectors are steadily increasing and you experience other files you are unable to read, replace the hard disk. The sooner the better.

In case someone from the US tries to verify the error: It happens only if you try to connect from Germany (or probably Europe), because the DNS name resolution seems to be location-specific.

If you connect from the US, you get the IP address 64.25.40.54 for www.guildwars.com. This server, located in the US, is working fine!
If you connect from Europe, you get the IP address 64.25.47.11 for www.guildwars.com. This server, located in Europe, exhibits the error!

Screenshotmachine gives the error, because this service is located in Europe.
shrinktheweb is able to retrieve www.guildwars.com, because this service is located in the US.

If you happen to see the crash related to the lavasoft-dll, then the only way to remedy this problem is to get rid of the software component the dll comes with. If the dll is still there after uninstallation, look here, it’s from Lavasoft support:

http://www.lavasoftsupport.com/index.php?/topic/34376-solution-for-lavasofttcpservice-problem-after-uninstallation/

There are numerous reports in the forums that immediately after uninstalling the dll GW2 runs flawlessly again.

Repairing the client, driver updates, disk cleanup… all that will not help. The culprit is the lavasoft dll that is not compatible with GW2.

I just read this (german) news article that contains a picture subtitled “The Selfie-Presiden: Barack Obama is practicing how to handle the selfie-stick, the sceptre of bad taste”.

This is it! Please, I want this for my Asura! I want the Sceptre of bad taste, a selfie-stick, as skin for one my sceptes! I don’t know exactly what you should put on this stick, of course it cannot be a smartphone in GW2, but Arenanet, you will find some obscure inquest device for this, won’t you?

(and please no discussion about Obama. This is only about the gadget)

There are 3 things why I never even considered trying the GW2 raid:

- the requirement to exclude badly skilled/equipped players to enable the team to succeed. With badly skilled I don’t mean players with the wrong traits/weapons equipped. Equipment can be bought. Instead, I mean players from which I know they are not able to withstand a difficult fight. This would exclude some guild members. It’s not possible to carry them. With other words, to not be forced to exclude them I will not even begin to try the raid.

- the timer. I don’t want to try and fail and try and fail for hours. I play the game to win, not to fail the whole evening except probably once (if were lucky).

- the mechanical fight. According to videos, the fight is so totally scripted, it doesn’t feel any natural. You are clicking and tapping keys according to the rhythm of a script someone else wrote, not fighting a deadly enemy. I don’t feel a challenge, I feel it’s just stupid – like I were drilled in the army to learn marching lock-step, and if you fail to march lock-step, you are immediately shot dead.

In the past days I had too much time on my hands, so I made a statistics of posts in this forum. I was curious on the activity trends in the last 3 years, and I imagine the forum activity somewhat resembles the ingame activity as well.
I also added some milestone updates.

The big orange bars are the english forum, the small blue bars are the german forum. The french forum is about as small as the german forum (a bit smaller, in fact), and the spanish forum as about a quarter of the german forum, so it didn’t made any sense to show all of them in the graph.

From the numbers and the trend, I would say 2015 has been a more successful year than 2014, although 2014 was filled with LS2 updates and 2 feature relases, and half of 2015 passed with almost no important gameplay updates until specializations and HoT hit us.

Enjoy

In case you are wondering from where I got the numbers:
Every forum post gets a unique number, one higher than the previous post. Every forum (en, fr, de, es) has its own counter. So I made a small crawler that searched for the last post of each day in each forum, and the number of posts a day is the difference between the numbers of these posts. If you have proof that this is a wrong assumption, I’m happy to correct my analysis.

One last thing:
I never thought there are still a whopping 2000-4000 posts a day in the english forum.

Updated statistics up to 2016-08-18:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Forum-post-statistics/6293305

I have no daily routine. I log in, look what’s up in the guild, do some fun stuff with or without them, then do some other fun stuff with or without them, then log out if it’s got late.

I ignore all daily achievements, home instance, time gated crafting, etc, since it’s a huge time sink for no fun at all. It’s all designed to rob an hour from my precious play time every day.

At some point in the past I realized how much more time I have as soon as I stop doing daily routine stuff. I have about 2-3 hours of play time per session. It’s a magic time machine: just stop doing routine stuff and suddenly you have 1 hour of more play time per session to do fun things instead of assembly line work.

1st: we need a proper gadget, I suppose.
2nd: somehow nice group.

For me, I tried to modify the standard setup so that the most used keys are nearest. In the default, F1..F4 is way too distant, and so is 6..0. The goal is to never click any skills.

As mouse I use a Logitech G700 that has 4 thumb buttons. The ideal tool to put F1..F4 there, especially for my Ele, where permanent attunement switching is vital.
Then I moved WASD to ESDF (one key to the right), because this way the left hand is in the same position as when I type text. The index finger feels and rests on the small knob on the F, so I can position the hand without looking on the keyboard.
Then I positioned the often used utility skills (6,7,8) in a half-circle below the 5 -> T,G,B.
Healing is on 6 and additionally on the R, because R is nearer.
The other functions get one of the remaining buttons.

Here is a complete overview for the important keys:

F1..F4: mouse thumb buttons 1..4
F5: mouse top button 3 (one of 3 additional G700 button on the top of the mouse)
skills1..5: keys 1..5 as usual
skill 6: key R
skill 7-9: keys T,G,B
dodge: key X
skill 10: press mouse wheel
pick up aoe loot: tilt mouse wheel left (“pull it to me”)
switch weapon: tilt mouse wheel right (“push it away”)
Movement via ESDF instead of WASD
Interact: V

The two tilt mouse wheel functions are implemented by assigning keys to the mouse buttons with the Logitech Gaming Software and assigning these keys in GW2 to the corresponding functions. I think I used y for aoe loot and # for weapon switch. The original ^ for weapon switch was much too near to the 1, I pressed it often by accident. So I moved that to some other key. Tilt mouse wheel right (“push it away”) was the right thing for this.

laokoko.7403:

The laughable part is players keep calling game company evil. When the players are what causing the problem. “Oh I want quality entertainment, I’m just too stingy to pay money for it.”

Yes, calling a company evil only because they want to make money, is in fact laughable. It’s the core business of a company to make money.

You have to look at their actions. It is evil, if the company tries to extract money from the players without delivering content that is even remotely worth the price players pay for it. If you ask me, the high price for skins in the store is somewhat questionable, and the concept of the black lion keys definitely is.

A few of the quotes would be these:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/So-much-for-the-bag-bank-slot-sale/1492252
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/So-much-for-the-bag-bank-slot-sale/1491917
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/bltc/Who-sets-Gem-prices/705345

You don’t understand how the ratio between the pools sets the price. The pools will not run empty, because if they get near empty, the price would go so high or so low that players react accordingly, so the price adjust in the other direction and the pools refill from player transactions.

If the gem pool gets about empty, the gem price raises so high that nobody would buy gems any more but sell them instead to get big money for only very few gems. And so the gem pool refills.

And if the gold pool gets about empty, the gem price lowers so much that everybody starts to buy gems, because gems are so dirt cheap at the same time. The gold pool refills with that.

I don’t know, but you can always promote/demote the various Mist Essence types in the Mystic forge from lower/higher tier Essences. For example, you need 5 Globs of Coagulated Mists Essence to create one Shard of Crystallized Mists Essence. The other way round creates 3 Coagulated from 1 Crystallized.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shard_of_Crystallized_Mists_Essence

No, gems spent in the gem store are destroyed. This is the way of the gems: they are created by buying them for cash and destroyed by spending them in the shop.

The way of the gold is similar: gold is created by playing the game and is destroyed in various gold sinks of the game, like the trading post fee, travel costs, commander books, recipes…

Yes, the gem pool in the gem exchange started with something to begin. I explained in my first post in this thread where that may have come from: 1 gem per newly created account into the gem pool, and 16 copper per newly created account into the gold pool.

I assume there exists in fact the possibility for Arenanet to manually raise or lower the contents of the gold and gem pools of the gem exchange. But that’s not necessary. The gem exchange works perfectly without such manipulation. The formulas I presented are able to explain every historic development of the prices fine. There is no need for manual adjustment. And upon inspection of the price development, there is no indication that manual adjustments took ever place.

HenleyLegoMan.4987:

As I said before, There are ALWAYS gems available for cash. So as long as this is so, then the whole gem pool amount theory is not a valid one I’m afraid. Unless the gems bought with cash go into a different pool after being traded for gold.

Gems you buy with cash end up in your account wallet. In the moment you buy them they come into existence (are created from thin air). These don’t show up on the gem exchange, because they are your own. Buying gems with cash is the only way to create gems from thin air, or create them at all. (edit: every 5000 AP you get 400 gems – these are also created from thin air, I suppose)

Once you sell one of your gems on the gem exchange, they’re deducted from your wallet and added to the gem pool that is embedded in the gem exchange. At the same time the corresponding gold is deducted from the gold pool of the gem exchange and added to your wallet.

Gold is created from thin air by playing the game, and only by playing the game. If you sell an item to a NPC merchant, the item is destroyed and you get some copper or silver. This copper didn’t exist before, it is created and exists since that moment you sell the item. Or you get some gold from an event completion: the moment the event completes, the gold is created and placed into your wallet. Don’t confuse this with the trading post. The trading post exchanges gold and items between players. It doesn’t create gold or items, it just manages the exchange of existing items/gold between players. And also don’t confuse this with the gem exchange: the gem exchange exchanges gold and gems between players.

The gold pool and gem pool of the gem exchange can get empty. But that didn’t happen yet, because nobody would pay the price for the last gem in the pool (yet): it would simply be too expensive. Nobody would pay 100 gold for 1 gem, for example.

And for emptying the gold pool: as soon as some very rich man buys an abundance of gems with thousands of $ and begins to sell them on the gem exchange for gold, the gem price lowers and gamers would begin buying the just-sold gems into their own wallet, refilling the gold pool at the same time. So the gold pool never gets empty as well, as long as there is at least one copper in the wallets of the players.

The mystery stories about that Arenanet manipulates the gem exchange stem from the problem that these persons don’t know how the exchange actually works. For example, what “player driven” means.

In the past, John Smith, one of the game economists, gave hints on how the exchange works. Of course, you are free to suspect conspiracy and insist that a Arenanet empoyee tells lies about game mechanics, but I am sure that all what he says is in fact true and tells about the game.

He essentially said something around this, and I take this as hard facts:

- Gem exchange is player driven
- Gem and Gold isn’t generated out of thin air within the gem exchange
- There are 2 pools: gem pool and gold pool
- The gem exchange works autonomously since game start

From this, we can deduct the exchange mechanics:

- If a player sells gems and receives gold, the gold is taken from the gold pool and the gems are added to the gem pool
- If a player sells gold and receives gems, the gems are taken from the gem pool and the gold is added to the gold pool

The above is the core of the gem exchange. The gem/gold price is computed from the ratio of the gold pool to the gem pool. The larger the gold pool, the higher the price, and the larger the gem pool, the lower the price. This resembles the supply/demand relationship.

Additionally there is the rule that not all gold paid is added to the gold pool but only 85% of it.
And not all gold you buy if you sell gems is paid but only 85%.
Together this makes the 27.75% difference between buy and sell price of the gems. We can see the 27.75% gap in each gem price statistics.

At game launch, the gem pool and gold pool was empty, so you needed some starting gold and gems. I assume for every new account a fixed amount of gold and gems is added to the pools on account creation. I assume 1 gem and 16 copper is added (more on this later) for each account creation.

I thought about the gem/gold formula for a long time and tried to produce something that explains all the price developments we have seen in the game since start.

I don’t want to bore you with all the reasoning, but simply present the formulas.

M is the amount of money in the gold pool
G is the amount of gems in the gem pool

Price p für g gems:

                g
p = M * -----
            G-g+1

.
And the other way round: how many gems do I receive if I pay m gold:

             G+1
g = m * -----
            M+m

.
G and M are adjusted after each such transaction.

If you run buy and sell simulations with millions of transactions with these formulas, the pools behave like we see ingame. The pools are also stable: no pool runs away or becomes empty.

I find the above formulas are correct for the general case and describe the gem exchange since game launch. They are not 100% correct, though, because rounding errors would taint the pool ratio in the long run and they also don’t explain the price difference if you buy 100 gems in one transaction or 100 times 1 gem. There is some stuff added in the buy/sell dialog with integer arithmetic, because you cannot pay 0.5 copper or buy 0.3 gems but only whole numbers. But this is minor.

That’s it. No mystery, no conspiracy. The gem exchange just works without manipulation. It is fueled with gems players buy for money and with gold you get by playing the game. How they exchange these 2 goods is described above – just a mathematical algorithm that doesn’t need to be manipulated.

The prices are “manipulated” by changing supply and demand of gems and gold, but not by manipulating the algorithm or pool size in the gem exchange itself. Put up a nice skin into the gem shop: people buy gems, so the gem price raises. Reduce drop rates ingame, so the supply of gold lowers, so the gem price lowers as well.

One last thing. About the initial fill of the pools at release. If you take the earliest reports of gem/gold prices in 2012, which was “I got 528 gems für 1 gold at release” in one of the forum posts somewhere, you paid 18.94 copper per gem, which is 18.95 * 0,85 = 16,1 copper in the pool. Voila.

Make sure you plug the monitor into your external AMD card and not into the internal one that is provided on the mainboard backplane.

Actually, the display adapter reset is working great. If this mechanism doesn’t exist, a bluescreen or simply a hung system would happen every time a TDR happens. With it, we “only” have a pause of 10 seconds and can continue working.

However, it is only a workaround against faulty hardware. On a system with ok hardware, a TDR never happens.
So the message is: “fix your hardware” and not “search for a driver where TDR will happen less often”.

In the linked thread, the solution was to underclock the GPU (or reset an overclocked GPU to standard clock), which is the easiest fix for the hardware. If that isn’t working, a real hardware issue may be the case: GPU may be defective or incompatible with the mainboard or the power supply may be defective.

Your order is never switched if you go along with a friend. You always have full control over your own personal story line. If the mission of your friend is the same that you have currently open, you always have the option to accept the progress. If you refuse, you don’t progress and you can run the mission again for yourself.

Don’t think that betrayal doesn’t happen if you take the lead. The branches are designed in such a way that one branch is performed by yourself and the other branch is performed by some NPC. For the story, always both branches are performed by someone.
Regardless of what you choose, the results always happen. If someone is supposed to die by the story script, he will die, regardless of you taking the lead or taking the other branch and let someone else take the lead. The branches also always reunite after 1-3 missions.

This information may be somewhat spoiler-like, but it should remove the fear that you screw up something essential if you take the “wrong” branch. You really can choose freely what you feel what is right for your character at the time.

By the way, the line you quoted is one of the great lines in the script. Its not only funny, it also has depth if you consider the charr versus human history and if you consider why Tybalt’s surname is Leftpaw, and how he lost one paw and appears to be somewhat depressive in general.

If you have never played GW1, going to and through EOTN straight without ever played the base campaigns would be like running through GW2’s HoT maps on a non-level 80 GW2 character: you only die. You lack all the skills you are able to buy if you play through the campaigns, and skills are the most important combat aspect in GW1.

If you ask me, reach level 10 and only go to the first outpost in EOTN to get 2 heroes for your party. Then continue with your favorite base campaign. I suggest you start in Nightfall, as Nightfall provides you with heroes for filling up your party and has the best balance between difficulty, learning curve and time required to play through the missions.

Prophecies (the first base campaign) is extremely long and without heroes. Factions (the second base campaing) is extremely short, also without heroes, and probably overwhelming in terms of difficulty for a beginner and for someone who has to learn most stuff alone in a game with dwindling community.

If you have a mouse that’s coming with a software that enables you to remap mouse buttons, for example Logitech Gaming Software for Logitech mice, you can edit the GW2 profile and remap the right mouse button to send the key for dodge instead of the right mouse button.
Using profiles with that kind of software changes the mouse button behaviour for the corresponding application/game only, not globally for the whole computer.

But… beware of side effects. The right mouse button might be in use by subtle functions you only detect after remapping the button. Test thoroughly.

It has no lasting impact after finishing these race missions. It may be that some of the races show up in later missions, but you can see them like weapon skins: they look differently, but their impact is the same, which is actually none. Choose whoever you want to see later on.

The more “important” decision in the Order of Whispers story line is just behind you: I hope your choice was “Thrown off Guard” where you led Tybalt in disguise as decoy through Lion’s Arch. That’s by far the best mission in whole GW2 – if you like the dialogs. But this has also no lasting impact. It’s only that one mission. After that, the branches of the storyline are united again.

I completely agree with the OP:

Although I play since pre-release almost every day, I consider myself somewhat casual. Every evening, I do whatever pops up in my mind or what is suggested in the guild as guild action. Every evening, something different.

HoT, on the other hand, has very few different activities that are interesting for one evening alone. Moreover, the update reduced interesting activities even from the old game: dungeons being less attractive, and fractals as well.

In HoT, almost everything is about long-term grind-like activities for the hardcore gamer, who is able to dedicate hours over hours for a single goal.
Nothing for the short term. Half of HoT are the new legendary collections. They are in fact legendary grindfests, adding nothing from a gameplay perspective. Only huge sinks of expensive items and play time.

The new maps are only fun if you leveled your masteries. How do you level your masteries? Only by playing the new maps. So, is it fun to level your masteries? No! You have to have the masteries already, if you want to have fun. Without having these, you always struggle to get over there to that point, to that event, to be able to open that bounty chest, etc. It’s simply a stretch.

You have to dedicate all your time over weeks to a single goal and achieve nothing in between. In the end you get one shiny item, and your purse is empty again. Congratulations!

Let’s take an overview over HoT and the usability of each component for me:

- masteries: a stretch to get them. No fun. Explanation was above.
- elite specs: For me, as ele main, playing only PvE, the Tempest is practically useless. Don’t need it.
- new maps: Yes, very nice graphics. But playing there is not much fun, since I need all the masteries. Running through, an event here and there, missing most stuff because I cannot reach the location. Not the fun I paid 99 Euro for.
- raids: I hate the raid concept. The absence of raids was one of THE reason to begin playing GW1/GW2 in the first place. Dedicating hours to prepare for a single boss fight and endlessly fail trying is the essence of what I don’t like in gaming.
- legendary collections: legendary grindfests. Time-stealing, uninteresting, boring. No gameplay!
- guild hall: long overdue, nice. But not what is adding to my daily gameplay.
- PvP: I don’t know what was added in HoT for PvP, but it’s irrelevant for me, because I don’t play PvP. Ever.
- Fractals: it’s the same fractals as before. Only added some grind-goals. But that’s no new content, so no added value.
- Dungeons: damaged instead of made more out of them. Nothing I paid my money for.
- HoT adventures: just discovered one of them. Very strange and don’t really fit. Like activities and minigames: not very interesting in comparison to open world or organized instanced combat.

It seems to me the game got a new target audience with HoT. Someone who likes grind, who likes repetitive tasks, who is able to dedicate hours over hours upon one single goal over weeks. Someone who likes power-gaming or min-/max-gaming even more than the dungeon community. Either single player (adventure) or super-organized (raid) or totally forced to comply to a map goal (meta-events).
It’s not “the game I play the way I like it” any more. Everything now feels forced and without freedom.

I’m very disappointed. I don’t have fun any more, if I go to HoT. I still can have fun in old Tyria, ignore all grind goals from HoT, but that’s old content, and that’s not what I paid 99 Euro for. Do I have to wait another 3 years for the next addon that maybe changes direction again? I don’t think I last another 3 years.

If anyone is interested, I made a set of bigger/more visible GW2 mouse cursors for yolomouse:
http://www.wombaz.de/uploads/2014/10/gw2mousecursors.zip

A video that explains how to tell Yolomouse to use these cursors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYc11uUGYfQ

If you want to see the level of detail put into Taimi, glitch your camera inside Scruffy, her golem, and see the seat and the pilot controls.
Unfortunately, you cannot see her actually sitting in the golem when she is supposed to be in the golem. Probably engine limitation. But the controls and blinking lights are cute.

But this is indeed the case. The gold you buy in the gem exchange was indeed sold voluntarily by other players. Gold is not created from thin air in this system. The gem exchange is called gem exchange because of that: one player gives gems and receives gold, and another player receives these gems and gave this gold.

The most strange thing is: it makes no sense to buy from RMT. The prices they offer are not really lower than the prices in the gem exchange nowadays. And you put your account at risk, and the most important one: from RMT, you buy stolen gold. Gold that comes from the account of your ingame friend that was hacked and pillaged.

If I read the log correctly, you don’t have a pagefile configured in Windows: CommitLimit is the same size than your physical RAM. And all memory is in use: CommitTotal is as big as CommitLimit.
So the operating system was apparently not able to allocate new memory for GW2, because there was none available, because Windows was not able to free a bit by swapping stuff into the pagefile.

Workaround for you: let the operating system handle the page file size automatically.

I used to have the same problem. It turned out to be a mouse hardware problem.

The right mouse button began to wear out, so it lost contact sometimes. Clicking was always ok, but holding down for some time period was not any more.

I also thought the mouse hardware was not the culprit, but after I bought a new mouse (exactly the same model), the problem was instantly gone. Instantly and completely. I didn’t even reinstall anything. I simply plugged out the old mouse, plugged in the new mouse, and poof, the camera started to work again as it should.

If you use application-specific profiles with your mouse software, don’t forget to add the new 64-bit gw2-64.exe to the GW2 profile. Otherwise your GW2 mouse profile is not activated when the 64-bit client is up.

Extended playsession on the weekend, no problems at all with the 64-bit client. I completely forgot that I tested a beta-client. Not a single crash or other problem. Memory usage didn’t raise much above 3.5 GB, though.
The 64-bit client behaves exactly like the 32-bit client. For me, it’s a drop-in replacement for the 32-bit client in every way.

Actually, there is one difference I noticed: a few times, a single lag of approx. 0.5-1 second happens. As far as I remember, one lag happened when I turned the camera around by 180 degree (not always, only sometimes).
And it happens in the instant I drop through the hole in the ground in Tarir to enter the lower level. At least that one is reproducible. It seems to me that in this moment a huge amount of textures are loaded from disk, which produces the lag.

Nagle’s algorithm is an optional setting an application can turn on or off for each tcp socket the application uses. It’s no system global setting and no user-definable setting.

If it comes to GW2: GW2 already uses this option for its game data connection. Additionally, GW2 uses a very small receive window, so latency is already at the absolute minimum you can achieve for a tcp connection. Even with the occasional packet loss, the latency is still as low as it can go. You cannot make it work better. I know this, because I dumped and traced and analyzed the GW2 data packets out of curiosity: it’s working optimal. Its implementation is superb.

Your oversea connection has latency because of the long distance. The signal needs time to travel that distance. The speed of light is finite. You cannot do anything about it apart from physically moving nearer to the data center.

There are no user-configurable components. Don’t mess with your computer. You are not able to make things work better, only worse if you do something wrong.

I am also susceptible to motion sickness in computer games. At release, GW2 was very bad in this regard. I wasn’t able to play much more than 1-2 hours.

I found several issues that increase my motion sickness:

- screen tearing. Screen tearing happens if you turn off vsync. Screen tearing makes me nauseous almost immediately. To mitigate the fps loss connected to enabled vsync, enable triple buffering in the control panel of your graphics card.

- low fps. The higher the fps, the better the feeling. Low fps increase the latency of input devices, and increased input device latency makes the game sluggish. And this sluggish feeling is what me makes sick. I cannot play if fps are lower than about 45 for an extended amount of time. I tuned my settings to yield 60 fps if not in a zerg. I bought a faster computer soon after GW2 release to mitigate the fps problems, otherwise I would not been able to continue playing GW2.

- too high or too low mouse speed. If the mouse speed is too slow, you move your mouse over the whole table, and if the mouse speed is too high, the game starts swaying like a ship in the sea (same as if the input latency is too high).

- too low field of vision (fov). The more far away the camera is from the back of your character, the better the feeling gets. The new camera settings in GW2 give much freedom about the camera positioning. My settings are 3/4 max.

- camera shake is especially awful. Turn it off.

- empty stomach. Eat something. If my stomach is filled with a delicious meal, I feel less motion sickness afterwards. I cannot explain why this happens, but this is the case.

Funny thing, I don’t get sea sick. I only get sick while playing some computer games.

If you’re considering GW1 only as AP source, forget it. It takes months to get a considerable amount of HOM points. The link to GW1 was not made to make people grind AP for GW2, it was made to give something to GW1 veterans, who filled their HOM during their GW1 time. That was automatic.

If you are considering GW1 as a different game you want to try, and you think you might enjoy the gameplay, go for it. But if you don’t, I prophesy you will leave GW1 after spending some $30 and achieved exactly the default 3 HOM points everyone get, which is worth the first 3 parts of the armor skins and zero AP in GW2.

Daniel Dociu cannot leave. GW2 is doomed, if he leaves.

That’s not an issue within GW2. Probably, your hard disk has a problem. Probably data sectors are going defective. A replacement may help before your hard disk is failing completely.

Go to the website of the manufacturer of your hard disk and download the hard disk diagnosis tool from that website that is suited to your hard disk. Test your hard disk and act accordingly to the result of the test.

Half a year ago, at the 10 Euro sales, I bought a mule account and leveled an elementalist just for fun on that account. I did about the same thing like you (OP), but only in PvE. All alone, nothing with guild. In dungeons, under 80, I was not kicked once. After reaching 80, I even started with fractals, having about 1500 AP at the time. I did that until about fractal level 30. I was also not kicked even once. I witnessed the kicking of other people, though.

Overal, it was a pleasant experience and much fun. I was under the impression that nobody looks at the AP but in fact at how you actually perform in combat.
Of course I never joined groups with “4000 AP+” and such, but only groups whose description suggested that casuals are welcome.

I must admit, a real beginner probably will have difficulties, because I did know how to play the elementalist and always got myself the best equipment for the given level. Always rare with under 80, exotic with 80, and after some fractal levels even ascended, which I all sponsored from my main account.

I don’t care. They sometimes clutter the lfg tool with their ads, and that’s a nuisance, but apart from that neither sellers nor buyers affect my gameplay, so they are free to do what they please. I don’t understand why anyone wants to buy dungeons, though, but there seems to be demand, otherwise there would not be any sellers.

Over the last 5 years I used about each and every Nvidia driver including some beta drivers. I never experienced a difference between any of them in terms of stability. They all were rock solid. No crashes due to the graphics subsystem.

If your system isn’t stable regardless of the graphics driver, it is no driver issue. You probably have some kind of hardware problem. Your system might overheat, your power supply might be insufficient, the graphics card may be incompatible with the mainboard, or your RAM may be defective or isn’t compatible with the mainboard.

Since you gave no exact information about the kind of crash or error message you encounter, it is not possible to guess any further.

If there is no answer from Arenanet for a “yes/no” question that long, it means they have neither yes nor no as answer, which means they don’t know at the moment. They have not yet decided, if they should make the blooms a recurring currency or not.

Which means, the blooms were not ultimately designed as onetime currency. If they were, they would simply answer now: “Blooms have no use any more after the vendors disappear”. But they don’t.

So it is possible that they planned them to be the currency of some future event as well.

But if they answer: “keep them”, the players expect that some future event will give blooms, so this would establish come kind of commitment. Imagine the skritt storm if Arenanet yet decides to give that hypothetical future event a different currency and no blooms for reasons that pop up at that time.

It’s not an easy decision, because the event reward system and the vendor was largely frowned upon by the players for many well-founded reasons.

If you (as dev) change the vendor items or prices, you can expect a skritt storm as well, because if you make it cheaper, the players who already spent the blooms are upset. If you make it more expensive, the players who kept their blooms are upset. If you decide to drop the blooms, players are upset who expected to be able to restock their blooms at a future event and buy the items later.

If a future vendor will have different items, the players who already spent the blooms will be upset, because they want the new items. And the players who kept their blooms will also be upset, because they rather wanted the old items. And if you don’t change anything with the items, you have the same situation as with the failed event, which was basically a skritt storm as well.

It’s not easy. Each way is wrong. It’s a lose-lose situation.

So, in the end, I would drop that items if I were Arenanet and make a new currency for future events. It may be expensive in regard to developer time, but the blooms as currency are “burnt” from the player’s side. In anticipation, I acted this way and destroyed my blooms to free up the inventory space and get rid of the bad memory of that event.

But if there is a future event and blooms return, though, I will get new means to get them. If the drop rate and prices are the same as before, I will simply skip that event, so nothing was lost. If the prices are cheaper in that future event, the destroyed blooms will not matter, so nothing is lost either. And If the drop rate is higher, the few destroyed blooms will not matter either – the inflation will level the loss.

If you get your parents into a video game, especially into an MMO, solely depends on your parents. It’s possible, but not guarantied.

Some guild friends of mine are well above 40, and we play together since GW1 7 years ago. Some in fact are parents whose childs played GW2 at some time in the past. I am 47 and enjoy GW2 very much, playing the whole PvE range up to fractals level 50.

Other guild friends of that age struggle at this difficulty level and only play open world stuff or run with the zerg in WvW. I have to say that some of them don’t play good and you still have to explain every step in a dungeon to them even in their 20st run of the same dungeon. Why they still play after 3 years of GW2 is a mystery to me.

I also know some fellows in this age since GW1 who tried GW2 but ceased playing immediately. It’s not theirs. The gameplay is too active and too fast for them, even in open world PvE.

What kind of gaming personality your mother is, nobody knows. Create her a free2play GW2 account and let her try. Or let her try GW1. GW1 is slower. It is much easier for people with slower reactions than GW2.

By the way, my parents (now aged 75+78) always considered gaming a waste of time. I myself thought the same – until I saw Morrowind (2002). Dunno what your mother thinks about gaming. I guess you will have to find out yourself.

If she wants to try, give her a ranger. In my opinion, the most easy starting class. Ranged characters are easier to play than melee characters, and the ranger is the most easy starting character of the ranged classes.

Who do you mean with “other”? I assume every character is able to travel to LA through the PvP lobby. If you want to travel to the other cities, travel within LA is free. Just jump to the waypoint in front of the portals, but it is rarely required to travel to other cities than LA.

For the gold sink: I travel approx. 3 times a day to LA through the PvP lobby. I played approx. 1000 days since release, which makes about 3000 times a travelling cost of about 2 silver, which makes about 60 gold. 60 gold is not nothing. It’s not much for a long time player, but it is not nothing as well. It’s the difference of having a bunch of exotic weapons skins more, or not having that skins. Or the the full equipment of runes of strength for your armor. Just for not directly travelling to LA but through one more loading screen. I have GW2 on SSD, so loading is reasonably fast.
However, it’s one of the things I passionately hate in GW2: give up convenience for sparing a little bit of money. How nice was travelling in GW1!

By the way, since a few months there is a generic merchant, account bank access and trading post access in the PvP lobby. If you only need these services and no crafting access, just enter the PvP lobby at no cost, and if you leave it, you even return to the place you were before.

The most basic way is to move gw2.exe and gw2.dat from their program directory on C: to some new program directory on D: and adjust any shortcuts to gw2.exe you might have created. This way might require some basic Windows knowledge.

A way more suited to someone with less Windows knowledge is probably in fact uninstalling and re-installing to the new place. If you don’t want to redownload the huge gw2.dat file but re-use the existing one, do this:

- find the directory where gw2.exe and gw2.dat are currently located
- move gw2.dat from there to a temporary directory
- uninstall gw2. This should remove references and shortcuts to the old location.
- download the installer from the GW2 website (from “MY ACCOUNT”->download client) and install GW2 into your desired new directory on D:. This should create new references and shortcuts to the new location.
- as soon as the game is installed and is redownloading the game data, terminate it
- locate the new directory, where you will find a tiny new gw2.dat.
- move your saved big gw2.dat from your previous installation from the temporary directory to the new directory, overwriting the tiny gw2.dat

If you have plenty of download bandwith and even less Windows knowledge, then simply uninstall GW2, then download the installer from your account management, and reinstall to the new directory and let it download the whole client.

Your customizations and your GW2 account are kept with each way, because they are either saved in a user-specific directory on your machine that is untouched during uninstall/reinstall, or on your GW account on the Arenanet servers that is also untouched during reinstall.

Almost all of you don’t realize that there was no change in the game with the sending of data packets to the network, so there is no change in disconnects, lagspikes and all the other things that make your individual experience unplayable. The “latency tuning” is a module within the processing of the game logic that deals with packets already received by the server or the client.

It only adjusts internal timestamps of actions as seen by the game logic to make the game appear to run a bit smoother. If your game client receives an action from a player who has higher latency, that action is received on your client with a delay. The game now tries to subtract the latency from that delayed action to make it appear without that delay. It tries to display the action when it actually started. It’s actually heavy voodoo, because you cannot display an action before you received the notification that this action starts to happen in the first place. But the game tries to make it appear as if it does this.

This has nothing to do with how fast or slow packets are put on the network card of the server or the client, and also no Internet routing is affected. The number of lost packets is totally unaffected. If you experience sudden lag spikes, this is an unrelated problem that only by chance occurs at the same time as this thread popped up.

There are people who arrange their PC workplace in several strange fashions, because they think the PC and its input devices should be arranged to keep some kind of order on the desk. Or want to make the desk look clean and empty.

But you have to realize that a PC workplace can only be ergonomic, if you accept that the monitor, keyboard and mouse is an integral part of your desk arrangement. It’s nothing you put away after work, it’s always there instead.

How do you work with a PC? All of the time, you are looking directly on the monitor. You want to keep your body straight, so you put your hands on the desk in front of the monitor. The most natural thing is now to put the keyboard under your hands, directly in front of the monitor, so you don’t need to turn your head or body if you either type on the keyboard or look on the monitor.

You put your mouse directly right from the keyboard (or to the left, if you are left-handed). Otherwise the way from the mouse back to the keyboard is much too long and you waste your time by moving your hand between keyboard and mouse instead of actually use your mouse or keyboard and input something.

Put your keyboard on the top of your desk. Not sink it into some low hanging drawer. How do you eat? You eat from the table, of course, you will never put your soup plate into an open drawer that hangs below the tabletop and eat from the drawer. It’s the same with the keyboard. Type on the keyboard the same fashion and posture you write with a pencil on a piece of paper on your desk.

Here are more professional workplace health recommendations:

http://www.ehs.pitt.edu/workplace/10steps.html

Gamers have no different requirements than regular office workers who sit 8 hours in front of their work PC, so this applies for all of us.

I find the numbers in the leaderboards interesting by themselves. Read them like this:

• 90% of all accounts have less than about 3700 AP
• 50% of all accounts have less than about 700 AP
• 40% of all accounts have less than about 470 AP
• 30% of all accounts have less than about 250 AP
• 20% of all accounts have less than about 130 AP

(the numbers were like this also well before f2p)

How long does it take to get these amounts of AP?

• you get 130 AP in about 10 hours
• you get 250 AP in about 3 days
• you get 470 AP in about 1-2 weeks
• you get 700 AP in about 1-2 months
• you get 3700 AP in about half a year, up to 1 year

That means the median play time is about 1-2 months (median means: 50% play more, 50% play less than 1-2 months)!

• 30% of all people who buy GW2 don’t play for more than one week!
• 20% of all people who buy GW2 don’t actually play it. They install, create a character, look around, and forget about it!
• Only 10% of all people who buy GW2 play more than half a year.

Another fun situation:
Some weeks ago, a fellow guild member looked at the leaderboards like you and asked himself (aloud in Teamspeak) what it takes to be a hardcore gamer. He considered himself and our guild long-term players, but somewhat casual. He wondered how much more than himself a hardcore gamer would play to count as hardcore gamer.

I told him the above figures and said to him: we are the hardcore gamers! You are the hardcore gamer! Yes, you! 90% of all players have less than 3700 AP. So tell me, how many gamers have less than your 17000 AP? What do you think? 98% perhaps? Or even 99%? You are among the 1-2% of all GW2 players with the highest AP, which means you are among the 1-2% of all GW2 players who have the longest playtime and probably played through every aspect of the game not once, but many times. We all are hardcore (our main guild members have well above 10000 AP). And he was very surprised, but agreed in the end.