Guild Wars 2

I don’t think that all of us who can doing a swap to bootcamp is the solution to this, though. They advertise a working mac client, but they don’t actually have one. They knowingly sold us a broken product in the form of HoT and the core game had been in terrible shape for the last year and a half or more.

This is an ongoing issue of complete neglect of the mac client.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first#post4447940

The game still crashes under the mac client constantly. Is there any word about the fixes and some sort of goodwill compensation you have for mac users who were knowingly sold a broken product?

How are the fixes coming? Would love some sort of communication and maybe some sort of compensation for being sold what you knew was a completely broken product.

Menadena.7482:

ananda.5946:

My husband and I were doing the verdant brink area together a little and started having synchronised crashing every 20-25 minutes while doing stuff. It was very romantic.

Hmm, if they were synchronized it might be a network issue. I have been having them a lot recently as well and so far they have been annoying to isolate. I wonder if cider is messing something up at a low level?

Try opening a terminal window and doing a ‘ping www.google.com’ and if you get some missing/dropped packets then it is on the network. Now try the same after rebooting everything (modem, router, computer) but not starting the client.

It wasn’t quite that synchronised. I was taking a little poetic licence. We have similar computers and kept crashing within a couple minutes of each other because we were doing the same thing and both hitting the memory wall at the same time.

We installed bootcamp and bought windows for 1299 kronor per copy. That’s about 185 us dollars each to play this 50€ game. Also, windows is horrible. None of our peripherals work very well (goodbye, magic trackpad). What a terrible os windows is! Just under the surface is all the windows 95 looking interface and nothing ‘just works’ like it does in os x. I really, really hate windows and having had to pay so much for the pleasure of using it is galling.

I am so disappointed in Anet… This customer support is absolutely terrible. They need to remove the mac as a supported system from their website asap since it is not supported at all.

Still crashes constantly when in HoT content.

new error for me:
SUCCEEDED && srcBits

FlamingFoxx.1305:

However, that could also be totally wrong as they’ve always been poor with assisting mac customers.

Either way, I think it’s helpful to have a bit more information/perspective.
Hopefully a more permanent solution pops up soon…

Thanks for the info, FF; it’s interesting. Their business problems aren’t really my concern, though. I understand the issues they face, but the acquisition happened some time ago and they have remained silent, sold us an expansion that they knew was broken for Mac and, for the last couple of years, have ignored the fact that the game crashed in large group content, making wvw, world bosses, etc. impossible to enjoy. Now, the state of the game is so bad that it’s just a broken product. And yet, they still sold it to us as is for full price.

I think, based on the last three years of trying to get support, that they just have terrible customer service. I’d love to think they have some sly plan, but they’ve been stringing us along with a sweet whisper every once in a while for a long time, never with any follow through. If they do something, I will be pleasantly surprised, but I am extremely skeptical.

Nevertheless, your research was interesting. Thanks.

My husband and I were doing the verdant brink area together a little and started having synchronised crashing every 20-25 minutes while doing stuff. It was very romantic.

How is the fix coming? Are you guys considering some sort of in-game compensation for mac client users given that you knowingly released a completely broken product to us? Could go a little way toward getting back of some of the goodwill from the mac community that you’ve squandered over the last three years.

Still crash constantly in large group events and the new areas and way more than I used to in the old areas doing solo content. This is on unacceptably lowest graphic settings. I don’t expect tot be able to do ultra settings, but moderate ones like I used to use seem to be the sweet spot for what one could sell as a functional mac client (wrapper).

Reading the reddit post from one of the devs, it looks like mac is not even on their radar and is not tested. They said that 94% of the players are on windows 64 bit. Are there really so few mac users? I find it hard to believe since mac has a pretty big market share, especially in the us. Even so, if the remaining 6% is 2% other and maybe 4% mac, that still is about 280k mac users if they claim 7 million accounts. Those are a lot of customers to disregard and toss aside.

Would love some real communication.

Tried wvw and crashed very quickly. How now, Anet? Give us the good word on how you intend to fix this!

There is a word for intentionally selling people a broken product, I think. They knew the client was broken; they had to know because it took about 20 mins of testing on a mac client to find the issue.

Day 7

Still alone on the island. Thought I saw a ship on the horizon, but it was a flock of seagulls, so I ran, I ran so far away. But I couldn’t get away.

Mac client still crashes every 20 mins or so in group content. Lasts a little longer in solo content.

Hoping for a message in a bottle from the Anet crew about what they plan to do to about knowingly selling us a broken product.

despite the game update notes that said client crashing was fixed, it still is crashtastic. How about some word on what you guys are doing to fix it? Please say that you’re sending the wolf who should be coming directly.

Jon Olson.8439:

shaden, what are you current in-game settings? I’m referring to things like character limit, and such. This sounds like an out of memory error, which is rather common with Cider due to it emulating 32-bit Windows. Also, how long do you play (and where) when these occur?

Jon,

This has been a known issue for more than a year (more like two years). HoT just exasperated the situation. Not sure if this dev is still with Anet or not, but here is the discussion from an Anet dev over a year ago:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first#post4447940

Setting all of our graphic sliders to the lowest possible setting is not a solution if the claim that OS X is supported is true. Even so, with the graphic settings all set to the lowest positions, you still crash every 10-20 mins depending on what you’re doing. This is the worst the wrapper has ever been. And, before you say, ‘yes, but you have to expect it since it is a wrapper,’ please note that the wrapper used to work just fine, so we all know it can be done.

This situation has been going on for a long, long time and HoT only made it more pronounced. It is obvious that either no QA was done on the Mac client or that the powers that be decided that it was cheaper to not bother to fix the Mac client because only x percent use it but most still made the HoT purchase so you still get the money without providing the product in working order.

I would have liked to stop and admire the areas sometimes, but there are so often groups of things trying to kill me that I just can’t stop and smell the roses. I’ve probably missed plenty of fun or pretty things because I just have to keep running. I will add that I am not sure I like the 180 degrees change in direction of the game. On the other hand, though, things were a bit too trivial to kill in the old areas.

I think my main problem is that you can’t do a lot of the hero points on your own and that the main source of mastery xp is from large group content.

None of the many patches over the weekend did anything for this issue. Still have constant crashes even on lowest graphic settings (which is not the way I want to play).

It’s pretty obvious that Anet knew that the game would be a disaster for Mac users and made a calculated decision to just go ahead and released anyway thinking that we are a small enough percentage of their customer base that they could ‘handle’ us as they have for the last couple of years since the only other option is that zero testing was done on the Mac client by the QA department and no one read the forums when people posted that the Mac client crashed non-stop in the beta weekends. (though, my thread about the crashes in beta weekend was removed, so I know someone read it enough to remove it)

Crashing constantly. This is unenjoyable and unplayable. You crash so you can’t finish what you were doing. You log back in and sometimes it even crashes within seconds of logging back. This was so predictable. Given the lack of feedback and the state of the client, it was obvious that HoT was going to be a fiasco for Mac users. Even tried to post about it in the Hot forum after beta weekend and my thread was removed. It’s obvious that no QA was done on the Mac client or that they just didn’t care.

What’s the ETA on a fix? I know the devs have been working on it for over a year at the least according to this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first

It is nice that someone from Anet acknowledged that the Mac beta client is terrible, but what would be even better is if they communicated on a regular basis and fixed issues.

The wrapper will never be perfect, but it used to be pretty good back before the EotM patch. So, we know it is doable to have it not constantly crash, making many aspects of the game semi-unplayable and thoroughly unenjoyable.

Just a suggestion, but not answering Mac threads because there may be some windows overlap is a way to alienate the mac users and give the impression that our issues are not important and won’t be fixed.

Devs posted over a year ago about the constant crashing bug and said they were working on a fix. Then, they went completely silent and no fix ever materialised. I hope this post isn’t the last we will see for another year on the topic.

Dynasty.5127:

Have you submitted a ticket giving a detailed description of the issue ?Maybe they are not aware of it.

They are definitely aware of it. One of the devs posted about it over a year ago saying they knew of the issue and were working on it. This was months and months after the issue first arose. So, it has been a known issue for a long, long time. They just stopped communicating and never fixed it.

Zypher.7609:

Would it not be simpler to run windows 10 in parallel? Then just boot up to your windows 10 to play the game. Have never used a Mac for gaming, but with the size of windows 10 now seems a good fix for the crashing issue.

If we wanted to use windows, we’d have PCs. We didn’t buy GW2 until they sold a working mac version. And, it worked well for about a year, then they introduced a problem and have ignored it since. They still sell the game as Mac ready, though.

The thing is, we paid for a Mac ready game and saying to switch to windows is not a solution. They sold it to us as working on a Mac. I’m not asking for a miracle and for it to work as well as the windows version, but it is not even stable anymore and hasn’t been for a long, long time.

What I’d love to know is, are they going to fix it? It has been a really long time with zero communication.

Will there be a fix for the Mac client (yes, I know it is a wrapper) when HoT launches?

With the memory leak or whatever it is that devs have acknowledged, the game quickly crashes in any large group activity without turning the graphic settings to the lowest so that everyone is a purple blob (and even doing this is just a delay tactic rather than a bad solution). It has been over a year since the devs said they are working on it, but there have been no results and no further communication. With HoT being large group activity based (from what we’ve seen in the beta weekends), it was crash after crash after crash resulting in an inability to do the new content with other people.

People are upset over the hero points required to unlock the full elite spec, but Mac users have a more basic issue: the game crashes when you do group content. Will it be fixed?

Lucifers Heaven.2167:

ananda.5946:

They didn’t raise the level cap, so this is the way they’re having you level up with all characters. Just pretend the level cap was raised, but all of your gear will still be fine.

And you’re already at max level, you just need to do some new challenges before you can use some new, but not necessary abilities. If you choose to replace you old one with them.
Your description more accurately fits the Masteries system. In fact it is the intended purpose of the masteries system.

I think they are intertwined. Not all hero points will be accessible without filling in some masteries one would guess. I didn’t say I like it, but I think this is the ‘leveling up’ they came up with.

My main concern is that hot launches in a couple of days and the Mac client is still broken. Playing the new areas in beta, the game crashed every ten mins or so. I guess I won’t be getting hero or mastery points to fill my spec till it is fixed. :P

They didn’t raise the level cap, so this is the way they’re having you level up with all characters. Just pretend the level cap was raised, but all of your gear will still be fine.

lionskeep.8473:

Especially since there is alreade a MAC Client.

The mac ‘client’ is also a wrapper and has been in terrible shape for over a year. Also with no response.

We have been thinking about bootcamp, but you raised good reasons not to with all if those patches, spy os, virus thingies and so. It sounds quite annoying just to be able to play gw.

Any word on this? It is still a huge issue and it has been over a year since the last time the dev team has communicated on it. You can probably guess how customers feel with lack of feedback or action.

We crash all of the time with large group content unless we turn the graphic settings down to bare minimum (which looks terrible).

Wings. They totally break the atmosphere for me.

Cloned NPCs. In DR’s home instance, there are quadruplets standing next to each other around every corner. Would have been nice if they had more randomised models for NPCs.

Yeah, the contents of the chests are such that I would never buy one with money. If the rewards were better, I’d consider it, but not the way they are. They are also rather expensive as well.

And, the worst reward from them, I think, is the guild discovery. That’s not even for me! As lacklustre as many of the rest of the items are, at least they are for me.

I will say that I like the idea of keys as it is fun to see if you will get something exciting, but it is almost always a disappointment when you actually use the key. Adjusting the loot table and the price would make them more appealing for me.

There is a serious issue with the Mac wrapper in the live game that has come over to the beta and been compounded. Namely, you cannot do large group content (or any content in graphic heavy or populated areas) for very long without crashing. Yes, you can turn the graphic setting down to basic so everyone is a pink polygon, but that is not an acceptable solution and it still eventually crashes like that; just takes a little longer. And, no, I don’t want to install Bootcamp.

All of the new stuff we’ve been shown in the HoT beta is graphic heavy, large group content in densely populated spaces. This results in Mac users not being able to play for very long before the game crashes. This is just unplayable like this.

The issue itself has been a ‘known issue’ for over a year. Here is a dev saying they are working on it from almost a year ago: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first#post4447940

Will there be any fixes for the Mac wrapper? Love the game, but the current state it is in will make the expansion a nightmare for Mac players. Right now, we can just avoid large group content (world bosses, wvw, etc.) even if we’d prefer to do them, but the new stuff looks like this sort of content will be unavoidable and so unplayable.

Will there be a fix or is HoT not for Mac users?

A sampling of crash messages:

-Exception: c0000005
-Model leaks detected
-success: a serious error has occurred

It’s been 11 months now since you guys were closing in on the fix. Any news? The game still crashes non-stop in any large group content.

Super beedog! (And the rest of the sab minis)

I half like the new sounds. It does remind me of the music accompaniment in a horror film where a creepy person is revealed to be standing right behind someone or something like that, though.

I didn’t mind Trahearne at all. The voice acting was not the best, but in no way does he steal the spotlight from the player. He takes charge because he is the expert on Orr and the dragon’s corruption and is a respected and known neutral figure whose life goal is the redemption of that land. The player character also cannot be the leader of The Pact for any number of story telling reasons. He takes this position leaving the Player Character free to do other things.

Gavian Whishaw.2930:

Hi all, this is a known issue for us and something we are working on but I don’t have any exciting news for this yet.

Getting any closer to the fix? I tried the beta weekend and everything is large scale group content in the new map that we’ve seen so far. That means that mac users cannot play the new content without constant crashes even while turning down the graphic setting to the lowest and ugliest possible settings.

My husband and I still have the game crash if we dare to do any group stuff every time we play.

Any official word about fixing this? The mac wrapper is in terrible place with both this and the memory leak that has been a Known Issue for a year, plus that causes us to crash if we do group events (aka most of the GW2 level 80 content).

I liked:

Revenant- seemed like a fun new addition to the game.

The new map bonuses in the old areas.

The living story seems like it is going in a fun direction. Favourite is still season one, though.

Feeding the frog people event was hilarious (if not a little absurd).

Things I didn’t like:

New area was pretty punishing on the FPS for the mac wrapper in a lot of places.

Reaper needs some work to make it fun. Hopefully, though, that will happen.

General thoughts:

I hope not all new areas are like the preview we got where there are wall to wall creatures and non-stop events. One of the things I love about GW2 is the existing areas are so big, lovely and fun to explore. I feel like part of a living world in this game like no other. We played wow for years and the ‘story’ and ‘lore’ there just feels superfluous and completely empty. The GW2 world, though, feels exciting and living. So, I hope not all of the new stuff will be these massive event train areas with wall to wall creatures.

Anyway, looking forward to more. And, FIX the mac wrapper memory leak so we don’t crash non-stop, please!

I had a lot of fun with the revenant. I loved the swords and the shout when you go into demon stance was hilarious; it made me laugh every time I used it (and I used it because it made me laugh).

A few issues with the weapons I saw were:

Sword3: if your target was next to an obstacle or wall or something, the attack would cancel out due to pathing issues, I suppose. When this happened, you didn’t get the might and so on and did no damage.

Sword5: Didn’t always seem to work. I didn’t see a pattern on when it would fail, but it was not consistent.

Hammer3: felt a little too slow and sometimes I couldn’t really tell what happened and if I succeeded on using it well or not.

The Mace and offhand thingie didn’t seem to synergise very well since they had different ranges. I liked the look of the effects, though.

Overall, though, I had a lot of fun playing the new class. Looking forward to more.

I thought the the shroud was nicely done. The skills were fun, though shroud 2 was a bit iffy to use depending on where you stood on the edges in the new map.

The great sword felt like it did very little damage and was far too slow. The chill effect on the auto attack was underwhelming. I get that the concept someone had was this slow moving, hard hitting movie monster, but GW2 has a fast paced combat system with high movement, dodges and so on. It is a case where ‘in theory’ and ‘in practice’ didn’t mesh well, in my opinion.

The animations are really nice, though. Hope they can re-tool this a little and perhaps let go of the movie monster concept to make it more practical in the fast paced GW2 system.

This is the same error discussed here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first
A Dev posted 10 months ago saying it was a known issue and that they were getting close to a fix. Then, they just sort of quit talking and never fixed it.

This is something that is pretty common with the mac wrapper. To avoid the restart, you can use Activity Monitor and Force Quit that guild wars 2 process.

I did guild missions last night and was getting 13-17 fps. The jumping parts were extra challenging this week at that fps rating! And, later, checking my deposits in the new, optimised LA, getting 10 fps!

If the future of the game is these large scale events in new ‘content rich’ multi-tiered areas, it will be impossible to play with the current situation, not to mention the ongoing memory leak in the mac wrapper that the dev have been aware of for a year and still haven’t fixed. I hope ANET decides to do something about the state of the mac beta soon (and maybe communicate).

Xillllix.3485:

ananda.5946:

Latest error gotten while doing living story achievements. Occurred just before the story ended so no achievements earned. Would be awesome if someone from Anet would respond again. These crashes didn’t used to happen before the EOTM patch.

What EotM patch?

Edge of the Mists (had some AMD performance stuff in it, I think it was). This patch totally broke the mac wrapper for a couple of weeks and the ‘fix’ was a token. Performance was never the same after that patch. Before then, I could do wvw and large group events with no issues at all. After? Crash, crash, crash and crash. This has become the new normal as it has carried on for over a year now. As you see, the dev posted that they are aware of it. They just don’t fix it.

I got a new error today that I had never seen before, too (attached).

Berobad.4536:

As Ambiant Occulsion and Light Adaption is new, have you tried disabling this options?

Yes. In fact, these new settings are why I knew what my fps was a day earlier. I had switched them on and ran around and watched the fps. Then, with the next patch, there was a large decrease in fps, even with trying various settings including having these both off and using the new anti-aliasing setting.

My husband and I have both gotten significantly lower fps since the patch on the 30th where a new anti-aliasing option was added.

Examples:
Havoc’s Heir Airship
Pre-patch: 28 fps
Post-patch: 15 fps

Divinity’s Reach:
Pre-patch: 25 or so- it looked okay
Post-patch: 13-16 fps when running between the TP and the bank with other players around (screenshot included with graphic settings)

Malchor’s Leap:
Pre-patch: mid 20s
Post-patch: 4-13 fps – This is totally unplayable and headache inducing.

Computer specs:
OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 (14E46)
iMac (27-inch, Late 2013
3,4 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB

Graphic Settings (see attachment)
Note, I have had these settings working just fine prior to the patch on the 30th.

Super Bee Dog pet. So cuuuute.

Also, Elonian hairstyles and faces for human females.

Latest error gotten while doing living story achievements. Occurred just before the story ended so no achievements earned. Would be awesome if someone from Anet would respond again. These crashes didn’t used to happen before the EOTM patch.

Another error. This one indicates that the crash was a success!

‘Success!
A serious error has occurred! Parades have begun to make their way to the Queen’s Jubilee!’

I crash about two or three times per session now. Almost got to do the Harathi world boss event before I crashed, too! Was close. I think I hit the dogs at least once before the screen froze and I had to force quit Guild Wars 2.

I wasn’t expecting a native Mac client, but a wrapper that does not crash on large group content non-stop. Without that fix, I wouldn’t consider the mac wrapper to be supported. I do really hope they fix it or I wouldn’t be posting about it. We’d like to do the pre-purchase deal also if we knew that the wrapper would be fixed.

If Gaile said she’d ask the team, maybe she can post the response?

More crashes daily on the Mac client. This is the latest one.

The Mac wrapper has contained a serious error for over a year now where the game will consistently crash while going any large scale events (world bosses, wvw, etc.) if you have your graphics set to something reasonable. This issue has been acknowledged and they have said they are close to fixing it over nine months ago here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first

So, I am wondering: since this issue has obviously been largely ignored and left unfixed for over a year, will HoT come with any fixes or will the Mac wrapper still be fundamentally flawed and broken? We’d love to buy the expansion (we being me and my husband, not the royal we), but there is just no way we will if something so basic is not fixed.

Has there been a mac beta? If so, is this issue addressed? Would love to know.

And, pre-emptively, if we wanted to run bootcamp, we would have. We were sold a working Mac client and would never have gotten the game if we had to use windows, so bootcamp is not a viable option. And yes, we realise it is a wrapper and that it will never perform as well as it does in windows, but this fundamental flaw was introduced later in the lifecycle of the Mac wrapper and it had been ‘fine’ till that point.

How is the progress going on fixing this? It has been over 9 months since this was already known issue with a fix being worked on. Are you still going to fix this or have you given up?

My husband and I are not currently planning to buy the expansion, but not because of the price or that new players would be given a bonus if they pre-purchase. We aren’t planning to buy it because the Mac version has been broken for over a year (crashes on graphic intense encounters e.g. wvw, world bosses, etc.) and is has been a known issue the entire time with devs saying they are working on it ( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Client-crashes-during-heavy-graphic-fights/first ) but with no follow through.

We would love to play again and would purchase the expansion if we thought that the mac version would be supported, but the pattern of disregard for the Mac users has left us highly disinclined to invest more time and money into the game. A pattern of supporting Mac users would need to be established to change our opinion at this point.

The people complaining about the fact that new players doing a pre-purchase also get the base game included reminds me of this scene from Louie where his daughter complains ’it’s not fair!’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q70EUjor84k

I played WvW today. I was able to play for about 15 minutes and then our group got into a large fight and I crashed with this message.