Guild Wars 2

get ahold of a monitoring program and check your gpu and cpu usage when playing GW2.. i suspect that your GPU is maxing out.. becouse a modern day procesor ..even one that is on the slow side of 2.66ghz ..should be able to give better peformance than what your seeing.

An old Core2 series cpu specialy one only running at 2.4ghz will have ALOT of trouble running GW2. Additonaly 3gb ram is not alot, i bet nearly all of that is in use, specialy if your using windows vista or 7.

ontop of that the graphics card is rather dated now and wont be helping ether. All in all im sorry to say that i think you just out of luck with that computer of yours.

please note: and pass this info along (since loads of people do this)
You can NOT compare a modern mmo like GW2 to a old game like WoW that uses an old engine that for all intents and purposes was designed to run smoothly on old hardware just like you have.
Single player games like saint row and skyrim also take ALOT less from cpu, and thus rely mainly on your gpu.. that should be able to handle them to some degree.

I know your probably looking for a Anet response but …

Aslong as a program does not change the GW2 files to give an unfair advantage, then its fine to use.

Even FXAA injectors are fine since they work just like your standard graphics control center i.e Nvidia control centre.

I find the stats of the 35 and 60 armor and weapons fine ..i would buy them ..infact i was tring to ..which lead me to make this post. They just cost to much for the level.

I understand if you meant just the level 80 ones ..in which case yes ur right ..they aint worth it and you would only get them for skins at lvl 80. But not the level 35 and 60 ones. .they have use.

Aye GPU is fine ..i got the same.

Your CPU slowing you down.

Ill also add that you cant compare wow to GW2. WoW uses a old engine that doesnt requir much from you computer (cpu or gpu) even with all its updates.

The armor and weapons used to cost less. Atleats the weapons deffinatly did. They increased the cost to what they are now shortly after release.

those that bought them early got them for somthing like 1k karma, now they cost 9k (teir 1)… so if they changed them ….they wouldnt compensate anyone or anything ..same way they didnt punish those who bought them cheap by giving them negative karma or taking away said weapon and refunding.

I just want a response from Anet so we know if they intend on making these items accessable for the people leveling ..the lvl 80 stuff can be as expensive as they like , you aint gunna out level them, so you can farm away.
But trying to farm gold and/or karma for level 35 and 60 is impossible becouse you out level the gear before you have enough currency.

Any chance Anet is looking into this and may patch it sometime soon ??

Hmm ..ill have to agree with what most are saying here.

Whether thats in US $ or £ or euro’s .. thats to much for that rig. If you can you should most deffinatly return it and get your money back. You ‘could’ create a monster rig for that price.

Will your current rig run GW2 ..yes, will it run it how it should be played, i.e with max settings + native resolution with frame rates above 50fps most of the time… deffinatly not.

Go for the 3core overclock. You wont see much of an increase with GW2 with that old cpu ..but its better than nothing.

Check make sure you vents,filters, heatsinks, and fans are all clean – that can make a HUGE difference specialy on laptops.

Advice: Dont buy another alienware.. they are overpriced for what they are.

I would recommend the Noctua NH-D14 for air cooling (its huge make sure you case is big enough and RAM is not to tall i recommend GSkill RAM) ..its the best there is and will allow for some very nice overclocking which you will need to get the most out of mmo’s. 4ghz+ i would recommend. For budget gaming a 2500k is fine.

Graphics wise i personaly would stick with a 500 series nvidia for now, save the money and get a 700 series when they are released next year. The 600 series currently has a few compatability issues, specialy with GW2 form what i’ve seen.

A single 560ti will give you nice frame rates in general 60fps , but will dip in heavy areas like lions arch (40-50 fps) and though i havnt checked myself i suspected maybe 20-30 in WvWvW, if you want you could even Sli 2 for around £200 and that should help increase those numbers.

(EDIT: thats with max setting, except rendering which is on ‘native’, @ 1920×1080)

But i would not go for a 600 series, i’ve heared to many issues arising with them and to many belevable rumors that nvidia renamed the lower end 600 series cards to higher end ones becouse ati had nothing to challenge their ‘real’ best cards.

HDD = hard disk drive . SSD = Solid State Drive.

SSD’s are ALOT faster than HDD’s ..but are smaller ..and much more expensive per gigabyte. The smallest SSD you can really use properly for more than just your OS ..is a 128gb ..which will cost around £130 if you get the newest generation.

But since you dont have one, nevermind. Chances are the issues your having are just down to the fact your rig isnt strong enough to be blunt.

‘laptop’ ..well theres your problem :P

but seriosly.. modern day mmo’s requir alto of cpu power. And once you reach said cpu power 9and gpu ofc) ..any slowdowns wil be due to the game engine. In cases like WvWvW ..the game engine cant handle the amount of people on it, so not only are you getting slow down from the game engine ..but your also getitng slow down becouse your rig isnt beafy enough.

My next point is. you cant compare a MMO with games like starcraft and diablo which take very little from your cpu, and tbh dont take much from your gpu ether (unless you have a old gpu).

Best bit of advice i can give you is, if you are agrivated enough to post on the forums about speed issues, then chances are you are avid enough to justify moving away from a laptop ..and into a proper Desktop PC. For the same price as a laptop you can get anywhere from 30% to 100% speed increases. a £1000 laptop for example..the same price can get you a very nice Desktop PC, specialy if you take the time to make it yourself (pre builds are over priced).

i know its not the ‘solution’ you wanted, but its the truth.. you ‘can’ get a good gaming laptops ..but for the same money you could get somthing much better in a Desktop.

In WvWvW your computer has to load up lots of textures ..i asume your running a standard HDD ..if you have access to a SSD ..move guildwars to it and it should help remove or atleats reduce stutter from loading times of textures and such,.

IMO CPU overclocking is probably easyer. Specialy if its only a little OC .

now i only say this becouse i personaly buy pre overclocked GPU’s. Which imo dont really need OC’ing more usualy becouse they end up being unstable and not worth the hassle for the tiny extra OC you could get.

CPU OC’ing however, with current generation cpu’s tends to be easier UNLESS your going for massive OC’s. For example it took me a couple weeks to get my OC from 3.2 to 4.6 on my 3930k stable and running on its lowest voltage it could.

A small OC can generaly b done with very few tweeks and should not need new cooling systems. It might requir you to turn up your cpu fan ..but thats about it.

TBH i would like to hear ANet’s response on this.

If the gear is meant to be expensive and exclusive then why have them available for the lower levels when its pritty much impossible to get the required currency before out leveling said gear. And as stated by other and myself ..if its just for the skins ..why have stats at all.

Greetings.

I can only asume this is a bug/mistake … otherwise its just insanity on the part of the dev who implimented the following.

The cost of Cultrual weapons in Karma is insanely high. There is no way a person can gather 35k Karma before they hit level 60.

My Character has completed every map she has gone to as needed (i.e where she was sent) plus a few that i done anyway totaling 7 maps not including completed City maps. That includes doing the events which i done many of.
Even with all that and without spending ANY of it, by level 45 i have about 12k.
My old man who bought this game ahead of me is around the level 73 mark i think now, and he has around 23k.

Unless you spend all your time farming events and no other time leveling via personal story quets ,,hearts ..exploration ..gathering etc etc ..there is no possible way to reach that amount of karma at the required levels.

Moving on.

Cultural Armor.

Again the cost is insane. Level 35 armor is barely atainable ..barely.
The level 60 armor is not. Again after buying only 1 set of armor costing around 1.3g at level 35 of the BLTC, i now have 2g at level 45. There is no way you can make enough gold by level 60 to buy the cultrual armor which i beleve comes to just under 8g.

not to mention that you can buy armor from the BLTC that fits your personal needs in stats for a fraction of the cost. it kinda makes the cultrual items pointless.

Ether there needs to be an increase in money drops/gear worth to vendors ..etc ..or you need to lower the costs of these vendor gears. otherwise they r pointless apart from possible reskins ..in which case they mightaswell be sold as armor with no stats.

Few things i wil ladvise first of

Check nvidia control panel for guildwars 2. make sure your on single display performance mode, powermanagment is on max performance, triple buffering on, rest leave as standard.
make sure your drivers are on the latest BETA drivers from nvidia website.

Use some monitoring software to check cpu and gpu usage when your fps is NOT on your max (60 for 60hz Vsync). If your GPU is not maxing out then i would say its a cpu bottleneck. And visa versa

If it turns out your gpu is not maxing out then try overclocking your cpu a bit. A new gen 3.1 to 3.6ghz processor is nice but never underestimate how much cpu power a mmo requirs

I found that ..in the case for the black citidel .. If you go to graphics otions ..go to Render Sampling ..and set it to another setitng then back to what you run at (i.e super sampling then back to native) .. It will fix the slowdown issue ..Dont ask me why ..it just does.

Post system specs when dealing with issues like this. Aswell as current GPU driver version.

of the top of my head i would say …do you have your GPU overclocked ? ..if it is ..remove the OC and try again ..it may be causing issue.

MMO’s are dependant on your CPU mainly.

I used ot run an old core 2 extreme (QX6850) ..which is a quad core 3ghz processor. I OC’d to 3.7ghz. but even with that mmo’s would have lower FPS than you would expect. My graphcis card would be sitting at 50% usage ..my cpu at 70%.
Wheres the problem you say?

Well. The CPU was holding my GPU back ..not becouse it was maxed out in load, but it was maxed out in the speed in which it could handle the load it was given. Bassicaly the archecture of the CPU could not handle the information it was being given efficently enough to pass it onto the GPU. So from experiance i can say ..you wont see your old C2D or C2E reach 99% usgae ..but it will still be slowing you down.

What you DO want to see is your CPU below say 50% usage and your GPU maxed at 99% asuming you have vertical sync OFF. if you have VSyn ON you may not see your GPU reach 99% if it comes across an area where it could make 100 fps but your screen is set to show a max of 60 fps via vsync.

I for example have a intel i7 3930k OC to 4.6ghz ..totaly overkill for any game and mmo out atm it barely reaches 15% usage.. however my GPU is a 560ti ..deffinatly NOT overkill. With Vsync on im maxed at 60 fps. I get 60 fps most of the time but it will dip down to the 30’s and 40’s when it comes across somthing really intensive. And when that happens my GPU usage is at 99%

You dont need to go overbored like i have. But you should try get a i5 or i7 ..over 3ghz as standard (not including boost). That way your CPU wont be the bottleneck.
…Well i say wont be ..it wont be until you get into seriose Graphics settings and GPU power.. at which point in a mmo ..you will still see advantages all the way up to 4ghz (which is OC’ing territory)

As some have pointed out ..its your cpu.

When a game (mmo’s in particular) shows no noticable fps increase/decrease when changing major graphics options, it signifies that your GPU is not the problem and in allmost all casses means the cpu is at fault.

Minimum recommendations just means that the game is ‘playable’ on its lowest settings. Each persons veiw on ‘playable’ is different , for example mine is at minimum 30 fps ..on mmo’s, 50 fps on first person shooters. Anet could hold ‘playable’ at 15 fps ..who knows ..but the point still stands.

Games come out taking advantage of last generation hardware.. since current generation hardware tends to be to new and a game cant be made fast enough to release whilst said hardware is still current. That said, last generation is still i5 cpu since we are on generation 3 i beleve of the i’s. Ivybridge i7’s for example.

Therefore using an old core 2 duo which is like 6 or so years old and expecting a game to run without issues is ..well .kitten

Additionaly say you have a core 2 duo, and it can run games which are considered the gods of graphics and have high requirments. .say crysis 1 for example. Those games rely heavily on your GPU (graphics card), and take very little from your CPU. So they cannot be used as a benchmark.
If you need to compare, you need to use another MMO, specificaly another MMO that is roughly the same age as, in this case, GW2.
Using WoW or GW 1 as reference isnt an option since they use engines that were designed and built to run on old hardware, have less eye candy, are less complicated, and thus usualy have much lower requirments.
Compare GW2 to ..Rift ..Tera .. SWTOR..Blade &Soul…. erm ..cant think of any more of the top of my head ..but i can tell you from experiance Rift is very poorly optimised, Tera runs smooth as butter untill there are more than say 40 poeple on the screen due to the engine limitations..
SWTOR apprently wasnt very well optimsied ether. Blade and soul ..well thats still in beta ..but you get my point.

Aye, those are some good ideas.

the problem is …in most past cases with other games, when a key feature like this is found to be not working aswell as people had hoped. Nothing gets changed, simply becouse its a key feature.

Its a bit like saying ‘personal stories dont work, change them’ ..it aint gunna happen. I could probably see dodging getting changed, but not for a long while. Which is a shame, since i dont like the idea of playing through the game as melee with this crappy dodge system.

OI hope ‘someone’ *wink wink ..not calling out here :P * see’s this thread and gives feedback

Greetings

I sugest a new dodge mechanic.

The current one, though inivative ..just doesnt work well. I have already seen people say that its worse in group pvp were its inpossible to dodge enough to make any difference specialy when skills hit so hard.

I personaly am looking at it from the pve perspective. And again when fighting groups it really doesnt help at all, and when fighting say.. a full on boss ..a giant for example ..that stomps and can 1 shot any1 if not dodged ..its a real pain when said boss stomps faster than you can regen stamina to dodge. And you cant run away becouse the stomp damage radius is massive.

I’ve played tab target mmo’s with dodge stats.. block stats ..which uses random number generation to decide if you get hit or not ..they work ..though are dull and generaly to easy a style to play, but they work. And action combat games like Tera and blade & soul. Again that style works ,, you move and dodge and block yourselves with little restriction (although there is some ofcourse to discurage infinite dodging).

GW2 needs to adopt one of the above to some degree, preferably the action style one to help move further away from tab target style gameplay.

At the very least you should increase the number of times you can dodge and/or increase base stamina regen.

I like hard games, im an ‘older’ gamer, so am used to games pre 00’s, which were harder. But, not having the ability to properly attempt to keep myself alive is not making a game harder, it makes it more annoying. Please allow a players skill to matter more than it does now..i would very much like to see more mmo’s adopt a more action orientated style of gameplay so that skill really does matter mroe than stats.