Guild Wars 2

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/karma HTH, HAND.

Chase.8415:

Healix.5819:

Chase.8415:

This is the best method in my opinion, however I highly suggest creating a batch file with this command and then using EFS encryption.

If you want to be more secure, use multiple Local.dat files, which is where your password is remembered. For example, make a Local-1.dat for account #1, and a Local-2.dat for account #2 and so on, then make the following Gw2.bat:

Gw2.bat

cd %appdata%/Guild Wars 2/
del Local.dat
mklink /H Local.dat Local-%1.dat
start /d "c:\path\to\" Gw2.exe

It’s using a parameter for Local-#.dat, so for account #1, you’d make a shortcut like this:

Gw2.bat 1

The local.dat is encrypted so there’s no reason to delete it or create a shortcut. (Try to open Local.Dat in Wordpad and notice it appears to be garbage.)

Creating a shortcut will store the password in plaintext that a simple malware program could steal your password just by running a search query on your computer. Encrypting it would prevent that.

A word of warning: “encoded” and “encrypted” are very, very different things. For example, “dGhpcyBpcyBub3QgZW5jcnlwdGVk” is not encrypted, but it also contains “garbage” rather than a plain english text string.

You shouldn’t assume that “I can’t see the password” is the same as “an attacker can’t see the password”.

Likewise, using EFS and a batch file is almost certainly useless, unless your threat model is “someone powers off the computer and steals the physical hard disk, then tries to find the password on it.”

Malware running on the computer has access to the unencrypted content of the file, EFS or not.

If you want to improve security here, there are two things that will have a real world, practical benefit:

One, turn on “two factor authentication”, and use it, for those accounts.

Two, use a unique password that you generated only for GW2.

Rognik.2579:

I’m just trying to imagine the minimum number of unique button input needed to play the game, not counting communication with other players. OK, so there’s interact with objects (1), open the menu – which could include inventory and hero panel (2), then 10 skills (unless you want to reduce that number) (3-12). Probably one more to quickly open the map for convenience (13). Are there enough buttons on a game controller to accommodate all of that? Or can you think of a way to combine those pretty basic controls to the game?

It’s absolutely possible to obtain that with minimal additional development effort; if nothing else, a “hold button for menu, move selector to pie slice” style UI is pretty common on console, and works decently to expand less frequently accessed options. (eg: inventory, world map, etc.)

None of which matters, really, because porting a PC game to a console is a programming effort roughly on par with writing one from scratch. The two share approximately no common ancestry in terms of how they work, are used, etc.

Fiddlestyx.9714:

This… this is why we can’t have nice things.

We kill animals all the time in game. What is wrong with you.

“We have tiny people following use around against their will. That’s slavery, I want them removed from the game.”

kitten

Some folks feel pretty uncomfortable when presented with, eg, the option to torture an NPC in-game, even if they know it’s not “real”. Likewise, killing animals is one thing, but I’d be quite upset if GW2 offered the option “torture the animal to death”.

Not coincidentally, I also prefer violence to tend to the cartoon side rather than the realistic, and fantasy “world” violence to more realistic settings.

Anyway, yeah, a fish constantly suffering like that is about the furthest thing I can imagine from a “joke”.

http://gw2timer.com/ now has a feature to alert you when items come on the gemstore, so that might help catch this for you?

http://gw2timer.com/ now has an alert feature that will tell you when a specific item is on the gemstore; you may wish to avail yourself of that.

FWIW, you should also make sure you /bug this in-game, and check off the “blocking progress” flag. That helps ensure that anet get all their internal debugging details. (Like, which map shard it is, etc)

Posting here also is fine too, of course.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reporting has all the various options, including an email address where you can report exploits, etc. It gives guidance about what information is useful to anet, also.

Amaimon.7823:

is it possible to have two shortcuts to the same game? and save different login credentials in them. It would save me some hassle if someone knows if this is possible. I’m not looking to multibox or anything, I’ll just be playing one acount at a time, but it’ll save me time from typing login credentials everytime.

Absolutely. Simply create as many shortcuts as you wish. Each one is a separate “document” of sorts, which points to the thing that is run.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-program-shortcuts-windows-easy-way/

It’s worth noting that the main platform for GW2 is case-insensitive, and macOS case-sensitive filesystems are … well, “poorly supported” is probably the understatement of the decade.

I’d strongly encourage you to simply abandon efforts to use them at all, and accept that macOS is also a case-insensitive file system.

Sounds more like a driver problem to me; NVIDIA support forums might be a better bet? Though someone here might happen to know the answer.

innocens.1582:

thanks for the answers.

Yesteday evening went ok without disconnects or spikes.
If the problem returns i’l contact anet support.

What i notice at this hop is that it does answer, but in only about 40% of the time.
I would expect a router to either answer, or not answer at all (100% loss).

This is a little ways off-topic, but the short answer is: routers like that one, which are normally the fairly high end routers from the small handful of vendors, process things used like traceroute (which PingPlotter is a graphical version of) slower than they move “regular” packets around the place.

Since it costs more, and someone paid an awful lot of money for a very big, very fast router to move those “regular” packets well, ICMP TTL exceeded messages are usually rate-limited, and tend to get some-but-not-all of the responses you would expect.

Basically, they get to take the slow lane, so the amount that comes back depends how busy the router is the rest of the time.

Sometimes a router is just configured never to respond — 100 percent packet loss — but that’s actually annoying for the people who own them when they try to debug stuff, so it’s more common to see this sort of some-but-not-all ignored. (Again, this is something the owner can configure, so it depends a bit how they want things to work. None of this is absolute.)

It’s also worth noting that small amounts of packet loss (eg: one percent or less) are actually not that bad. In an ideal world, sure, none of them do get lost, but in reality games like GW2 are designed so that things that don’t matter (eg: movement details) can be lost and it will just recover when the next one comes along.

Since traceroute style things don’t do retries, they show you every single loss, even if it’s not going to have a user-visible effect in the game. (Which, also not coincidentally, is why it’s sometimes hard to figure out what is going on, or you see glitchy things like players changing direction oddly, that sort of thing — a packet or two was lost, and the game is now correcting what you see to the reality that the server finally told it about.)

I think I already said it before, but if you find this boss fight frustrating, consider bringing a second person in with you and fight them together. It’ll certainly significantly reduce the agony level for both of you.

JonnyForgotten.4276:

The HoT and lws3 stuff is absolutely soloable. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I do it on a kittening thief. It’s definitely a big jump from core Tyria, however, and takes some training/getting used to. I also feel that difficulty jump was necessary, as everything in core now feels like I’m always playing on godmode. Plus, once you learn the maps, the HoT maps are absolutely gorgeous pieces of design.

Yeah, going through LS2 makes the ramp much more gradual, but it’s also something that requires spending real money (or significant gameplay time => gold => gems) to acquire, so you get the much sharper jump into HoT.

If I had any advice on this for anet, it would be that if the players skill level desired for the next xpac is comparable to Lake Doric &c., consider making it part of the price of the expansion, so that people do get the ramp up in challenge.

Moonyeti.3296:

A note for anyone else experiencing this – there does seem to be a bug. When you need to clear out the remaining forces, there is a chance they don’t all spawn (separate from the issue where they might spawn downstairs). I just was on a map where 1 white mantle remained but wasn’t spawned on the map anywhere. I hope it gets fixed soon, I really need that mastery point!

Don’t forget to /bug it in-game, along with checking the “blocks progress” flag, so that devs start to get automated internal feedback on where people are feeling the pain. Like posts here, you won’t get a response, but anet will look at that data when it comes to allocating developer and QA time to fixing problems.

Plastazote.7914:

DPS throughout classes should be made much more equal than it is now. It will never be equal but DPS gaps like the one between necros and elementalists should be much less noticeable.

How are you judging this gap? Is it based purely on the “DPS test golem” numbers these classes can manage?

One of the things that was shown by the ability to talk openly about DPS meter results in practice was that the differences on the golem were much more pronounced than the real world DPS performance of the various classes, which also matches experience from WoW where “HP sponge” style bosses showed much more significant DPS disparities between classes than anything with real mechanics would.

It’s also … let us say, pretty likely that the goal for anet is that classes should be roughly equal in terms of output. That is something they have the tools and monitoring to be able to measure at the scale of the entire player group — not just some little subset — and use to tune numbers.

Until we start getting those numbers from GW2 content, like we do for WoW we can’t really, as players, know if the common perception is actually accurate or not.

It’s also worth observing that some differences become more apparent if you only take the 99th percentile players, rather than the 75th percentile, or the 50th percentile performance

Ultimately, too, player perception can play a role in this. If a profession is only represented in one tenth of one percent of parses, we can confidently say that people don’t play them, but not that they underperform — just that they are believed to underperform to the point that players choose against them.

You are correct on the last side: it is absolutely not coded to accommodate “official” mods of any sort. Regardless of which came first, the design decision to not embrace them, or the code that makes them hard, the fact is that they are not part of GW2.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Well, there is a Point of Interest to complete in the Chantry of Secrets map/instance. So, one thing. =P

Then I guess there is a discarded Chantry of Secrets make, like the Lake Doric one, hanging out somewhere in the history of the development of GW2.

I’d suggest you restart the episode in your story tab in the hero panel, see if that helps out. Alternately, yeah, CS are the folks to talk to.

nottsgman.8206:

innocens.1582:

i have lots of disconnects to since yesterday.
i attached a pingplotter graf.
Am i correct the problem lies with the router at ip 213.46.182.142 (hop 6)?

This is a router in the netwerk of my isp (Ziggo)

it does look like that is where the problem is for you. if that is part of your isp’s network, you should probably contact them about it.

A single host with high packet loss, like that one, followed by hosts with “normal” packet loss mean that specific machine isn’t responding to the type of packet used to track the connection, nothing more.

If it was the problem you would see packet loss at least as high for every step following it. In the screenshot we can see that it’s definitely around the same level as the steps prior to it, so it’s not an issue.

What that shows is no packet loss, and generally good latency other than that periodic “pulse”. My best guess would be one of two things:

One, you have some problem in your local networking, either the connection from you to your router, or on the line from the router to the ISP. That isn’t causing packet loss as such, but it is causing these odd spikes in latency — where you see that big step up.

That could also be triggering something that results in disconnection or something.

Two, it’s at the anet end. Anyway, assuming your modem logs don’t show anything odd, I’d get in touch with ANet support, because they may be able to better advise you on how to further debug this.

(The “good” news is that strongly suggests it is either your local network, or anet, which means that if you talk to anet support, the two people who can understand and fix it are talking, so that’s more likely to end with the problem gone for you.)

You can try removing the local.dat file, which some people report being over-large, and causing odd delays.

I’d suggest checking for software like NVIDIA ShadowPlay, or the AMD Afterburner, RivaStatisticsServer, or any other “GPU monitoring, optimisation, or enhancing” software. Those have been known to casue some pretty strange issues.

One way that might help to eliminate them would be run as admin once, and see if the problem persists.

You might also check that your GPU is getting a PCIe 16x connection, though it seems more likely to be unrelated. GPU-Z is the usually recommended tool.

Odds are, “replace the router” is the most likely answer.

I’d take a look into firewalling, rate limiting, and quality of service or throttling configurations on the router, though. Any of those could be responsible for trying to do something smart that randomly happens to mess with GW2.

zealex.9410:

I’d prefer red pandas, but i also would like horses. Ppl on tyria know what horses are or look like but for some reason we havent seen any ever…

The Charr ate them all. or the humans.

No, no, I mean the humans ate the horses, not the charr ate the humans. Though now you mention it, given Norn eat Grawl…

Sarcastically, mesmer if you found levelling up too fast, elementalist if you found yourself thinking “I wish I died more often after level 50”.

Truth is, though, they are both good and fun, but in different ways. You should experiment with what works best for you…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Can I vote for rabid foxes that leap out of hiding and bite passing chars and the end result is character deletion? It would make the game more interesting.

I got you, fam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsPctkXW1I

Cruzyo.7304:

I would love to see the Tracker for Daily Achievements unlinked from the Watch List.

I shouldn’t have to manually add daily achievements to my watchlist or remove my watch list to see what’s to do with daily achievements, even more so with the Living Season 3 Maps having all their own Daily Achievements.

I’d really like to second this. I find the “automatic daily achievements” super-useful to have, since I like the structure of doing them daily.

At this point, though, all the things on my achievement tracker are larger scale things like “token collector” in Ember Bay, where I work on it gradually, token by token, over the course of a long time. (Also, apples for Hal, which is time gated, sat there for some time.)

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that is the actual chantry of secrets map, which has nothing to complete, being magiced or something by finishing the rest. shrug it’s an oddity in GW2.

Kaizoku.1298:

I’m not using any apps I didn’t use before the black screen issue.

Well, if you tried all the things other players have to suggest, I’d take this to a support ticket via the website — see if CS have anything else to suggest. (also, if you find out what, report it back here.

We have collectable cats for our home instance, and that is cool. We have giant cats for running around as, yay Charr. These are awesome.

All we need now are some super fluffy foxes in different colors. It’s a thing we should have. Please! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox

You might find the guild recruitment forum here, and/or on reddit, useful for this.

DomAri.2351:

Problem I’m facing is that I enjoy them all. Hence why ive got 1 of each class. Which of those condi classes has the best over all mobility/durability?

Why not both? Thankfully, GW2 makes alts quite painless.

Anyhow … mesmer only has move speed boosts in their chronomancer trait line, so you are stuck with that if you want the 25 percent out of combat. They have good in-combat mobility and utility mobility though. (They do have quickness via the … focus, I think? One offhand, anyway, and one sigil that gives 50 percent uptime on it.)

Rangers with druid have a 33% out of combat move speed boost that competes with nothing all that significantly interesting for solo play, so if that’s what you are concerned about, that’s the choice. They don’t have an amazingly huge amount of mobility on their condition weapons though.

Necro is either dagger or signet, and the dagger move speed trait line isn’t part of the current “meta” condi builds, so while you can do things with quickness and warhorn, it’s vaguely annoying. I just accepted a signet with an emergency heal on press while doing open world stuff.

Hope that helps at least a bit. None of them super-slow or immobile. Oh, and engi has solid 25% options, I think both trait and some utility skill slot or other, but I know less about them than the others.

edit to add: PS: go reaper, it’s the best.

zealex.9410:

Casual run of what, where would this aply, how would this be any diff from just saying arah p X or t4 fractals or vg run or w/e. Is this only asked because of the “not able to kick others” suggestion u make at some point in your post?

Pretty sure it’s the equivalent of the WoW dungeon queue (or whatever FFXIV call their equivalent): press button, say “I’m a DPS”, and the game auto-matches you with a group and ports you into the instance.

Presumably without the painfully long queues full of DPS waiting on tanks and healers, because we don’t have them.

…I wouldn’t object, honestly. For instanced content, at least, I treat it more or less as that system: find first group, click go, hope for the best — at least on daily dungeon days.

I’d also be happy if it made it easier to get a group for them without having to think so much about it.

Rashagar.8349:

It was so much easier when I only had to worry about one set of colloquialisms (ie. my own).

SlippyCheeze.5483:

You can either accept it, or you can stand on the beach shouting at the ocean, “no, you may not come in, I refuse you.” Whatever makes you happy, I guess.

That’s a little too close to current political climates there =P

Probably only too close if we pay attention to the demographics that use the “disfavoured” dialects, really.

darksouls.3908:

I saw a lot of thief’s on hit kill people and I do not know how they did it I have a thief and I can not one hit kill people so I don’t get it if someone reads this please help me

Were they hitting someone in berzerker gear, while having all their procs to go along with a dodge-into-and-hit attack that triggered several damaging things. It’s not all that far away from 20k burst in one or two attacks, which is around the HP of a zerker player…

The sad truth is, you are probably going to have to send them the crash report in order to get it fixed — but if you can copy and paste the error message with all the technical details, and submit it separately, that might be enough.

Panzer Commander.5084:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Are you sure that you are there at the time Modniir Ulgoth actually happens? The meta-chain runs at other times, it just terminates without bringing out the world boss…

I know that’s, like, “is it switched on” level debugging, but I’d be very surprised if a world boss remained busted like that without significantly more noise. Plus, cough, some of us might have learned that the hard way in the past.

http://gw2timer.com/ has a timer for when the boss actually runs, though lots of them exist.

I have been there at those times, also, if you look at https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Seraph_Assault_on_Centaur_Camps
it gives you the order in which events should happen. Over the past 2 days, I have waited at the Forward Camp 3 different times for the next event to spawn, never happens.

I’ll admit, I have never found a pre-event before the “defend the camps from centaurs” one. I assume they happen or something, but I’ve never seen them. The chain runs fine from that point on, and I just figure I missed it … but maybe it skips that if some map conditions are true or something?

Kehlian.4380:

Wait there is DPS metters for GW2 ? :o
What are reshade and gemfx ?

Yeah, memory-reading DPS meters are tolerated by the developers, so you can use them if you would really like to. It’s a bit contentious, and it is absolutely “at your own risk”, and since they hook into low level code, and use internal data structures, they can definitely cause crashes.

reshade and gemfx are tools that hook into the graphics presentation pipeline and let you apply additional filters to what is displayed. (As far as I can tell, mostly to make things look terribly garish, but I guess some people like over-saturated or whatever? Anyway, that’s just snark, and they can do more or less anything graphically.)

Since those all hook into the graphics pipeline and/or client code, if they are out of date they are potential causes of crashes. (reshade and such are much less likely to be at fault, because of what and when they do, but it’s not impossible, and it’s an easy test to eliminate them, so…)

Altie.4571:

fyi one 4k gem purchase went through fine, I tried to do one more and it failed.

Since I’m doing a purchase to show support and get some shared inventory slots I figure I’m not in a hurry. And since I’m a bit self conscious when buying online I don’t want to many “error” transactions. You never know what can suddenly hit your bank.

Well, at least in several banks in the USA, it’s “your card is now locked, security call you to verify it’s not fraud”. You might want to call them and double-check, just in case they are less helpful than the ones I dealt with about calling you first.

Dr Krise.8016:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Dr Krise.8016:

well. looks like its not the first time this happened
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Connection-error-7-11-3-191-101-merged/page/21

and there doesnt seem to be any way to fix this or atleast no suiggestion to it. i tried the few that have been mentioned like repairing the client or changing ports. didnt help at all.

You might want to follow this guide to track down and identify the location of the problem. It may be anet servers, but if not, it may also be possible for you to resolve this elsewhere.

(Also, it is definitely not unknown for this to be caused by ISP filtering of traffic, so check in on that.)

i tried it and there seems to be a packageloss with that serverconnection…
so it is their server? i dont know. maybe just from certain areas im standing in?

If you have traces that definitely show the packet loss only in anet / ncsoft servers, then you should file a support ticket and work with the CS team to get it fixed. They may have to work with ncsoft data center techs or whatever, but at least it’s narrowed the issue down to something they can fix.

Nochtflamir.2879:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Your best bet to skip levelling is to use tomes of knowledge, which shower on you from PvP and WvW play, among other things. Check the wiki for sources.

Then you can do the same content you would have done while leveling up at 80, so enjoy that, I guess?

Yes, but with the benefit of having a fully skilled toon. Not for first time players, but they shouldn’t have enough tomes to hit lvl 80 anyway.

The free 80 boost with HoT purchase is such a temptation… and you are not wrong, but I also don’t think it’s a significant enough difference to be worth the trouble. Either way, though, it’s a good correction.

I’d recommend the one you most enjoy. All of those choices are solid, and with the exception of necromancer, all of them are acceptable or desirable in raids. Every one is desirable everywhere else.

(Also, “desirable in raids” simply means “in the popular structure that is used by the very best guild that talks about this publicly”, not “can be used in a group that successfully clears the content” and all.)

notebene.3190:

Well, irregardless (one of my pet peeves) is not supposed to be a word. And don’t get me started on literally.

English is a live language. It is not a tame language, as was written down in the books already decades out of date that your teachers used to tell you what the “one true way” of the language was.

It will have dialects, it will evolve, it will change the meaning of words, it will simplify and gain complexity. This is unavoidable.

You can either accept it, or you can stand on the beach shouting at the ocean, “no, you may not come in, I refuse you.” Whatever makes you happy, I guess.

vesica tempestas.1563:

really lol, such is raiding these days i guess, go away! we wont have fun if we dont kill!

…eh, pug raiding has always been like that. Some but not all guild groups are similar; in my experience you can usually predict that based on things like “no drama” in their guild adverts.

Meanwhile, people raid on non-qtfy blessed builds, successfully, without meters or drama, all the time. They just don’t talk about it, because they are busy having fun and getting raids done.

…yeah, that’s not good. Try removing any DPS meters, graphical enhancements like reshade or gemfx, overlays like overwold, etc.

Disable video card monitoring or recording things, such as AMD Afterburner, RivaStatisticsServer, NVIDIA ShadowPlay, which have been known to cause various oddities.

Ensure drivers are up to date.

Reboot; at least one person had crashes due to a partial LavaSoft uninstallation or upgrade resolved by that.

Consider saving your gw2.dat file, delete the rest of the content of the directory, do the install thing again, cancel when it gets to downloading files, and put gw2.dat back. That should give you a clean, uncorrupted exe to work with.

Check your GPU has a PCIe 16x connection using GPU-Z; poor connections have cause a wide range of extremely strange errors for other players.

best of luck.

Are you sure that you are there at the time Modniir Ulgoth actually happens? The meta-chain runs at other times, it just terminates without bringing out the world boss…

I know that’s, like, “is it switched on” level debugging, but I’d be very surprised if a world boss remained busted like that without significantly more noise. Plus, cough, some of us might have learned that the hard way in the past.

http://gw2timer.com/ has a timer for when the boss actually runs, though lots of them exist.

Check for background apps. Someone else recently reported that “PlaysTV” was a video card related app they didn’t know the purpose of, and caused this. Seems like “video card related things that might adjust driver settings, and/or inject themselves into the rendering pipeline” are a common cause of this.

Afterburner, RivaStatisticsServer, NVIDIA Shadowplay, all also applications known to cause various issues.

Some people report that running the app as administrator (which presumably prevents injecting the code from those things) helps them, maybe try it?

Alas. You might be able to get a refund or personal reply by contacting support, but that video demonstrates the issue you experience — so hopefully the QA team will be able to reproduce it.

VaLee.5102:

zinkz.7045:

No dear, they are in the same NA or EU datacenter, but are spread across many physical servers, hence Slipycheese’s notion that it is always down to people’s connection is nonsense.

In fact the tool he suggests confirms it is nonsense, I use it, and sure at times it is a connection/hop at fault, but guess what at times it confirms it is at Anet’s end, especially in things like 3 way blob fights at SM in WvW, the game/ Anet servers simply can’t cope with it properly much of the time.

Pretty much this.
Either the server or the client can’t handle the flood of incoming packets during massive zergs (metas in DS, traitor in AB, WvW, EotM, etc) and connections are dropped due to timeouts. You can sometimes notice a huge delay, then all the packets get processed at once, if you are lucky.

Lots of facebook “experts” around nowadays talking without having any clue about how “ze internetz” works.

It’s absolutely possible. (…and, for the record, I don’t think it is always your connection, I just think that is the most likely cause as, to date, one person has said that pingplotter or equivalent showed that, and the rest … have turned out to be either a transit provider between them and ncsoft, or their ISP.)

Really, though, since this is a “community” support forum, what you are going to get is the same advice each time: eliminate things that are not in the anet ballpark, obtain details showing where the problem is, and then if it is something that anet may be able to do something about, contact support with that information.

So … yeah, it’s definitely possible the lag is on the anet servers. Have you verified that by doing something to check for packet loss between anet and you?

If so, then report it via a support ticket, and do let us know how you get on.

If not, you can also report it via a support ticket — which unlike the post here will get a response from anet — and … let them ask you to do the same thing, I guess?

Menalfa.3721:

I Have the same problem.

Did you try following the guide at https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network and identifying where the problem is? Was it at the anet end, or somewhere on the network between you and there?

Your best bet to skip levelling is to use tomes of knowledge, which shower on you from PvP and WvW play, among other things. Check the wiki for sources.

Then you can do the same content you would have done while leveling up at 80, so enjoy that, I guess?