Guild Wars 2

Currently, that would probably make you about 4g 90s. The ingame gold/gem exchange varies daily and by time of day, but that’s a reasonable approximation, I think.

Last time I looked, 1g would buy 115 gems. Selling 115 gems would only get you 70 silver, though. Just something to be aware of.

If it downloads the entire game, then you’re looking at just under 16GB of data to download. If you installed from CDs or DVD, then you won’t download nearly that much. You may still have to check 200,000 files (or whatever the number is) of files in the GW2.DAT file, to make sure they are all up to date, since the launcher/installer will automatically install the required patches to whatever was installed on your computer. If that’s the case, there’s no real way to know how much data you’ll have to download.

You might want to see if you can find any commonality in the “crashes” when you driver stops working. Usually, when a driver stops working and is successfully recovered (usually what Windows tells you) it’s because of a mild hardware issue on the graphics card. If it was severe, then the driver wouldn’t be able to recover and your computer would crash. Some quick things to look at are framerates when the crash happens, temps when the crash happens, what’s happening in the game when the crash happens, etc.

Usually, there are 3 causes for this: heat, power, faulty part.

If you want to try some troubleshooting, you can use the GW2 graphics settings to set a framerate limiter. V-sync is a good limiter to start with because it will only slow the game down to the maximum framerate that your monitor can display, which won’t affect the playability of the game. If the crash still occurs, you might want to lower the limiter more by using the Set Framerate Limiter option.

Also, listen for the graphics card’s fan speed. If it’s resonably high when the crash occurs, then the GPU is doing lots of work, and the fan is having to speed up to cool it. This probably means that there is also a lot of power running through other parts of the graphics card, and one of those parts may not be getting cooled enough. (things like VRAM, voltage regulators, etc). In this case you may want to manually speed the fan up more than normal so that it blows more air across the board in an attempt to cool the entire board better. (it’s probably not the GPU overheating because that’s usually a fatal condition that crashes the entire computer)

If power is the problem, it will usually be a problem when the GPU is really busy. So places like Lion’s Arch during the Halloween event, when the card has to render the world geometry PLUS atmospheric effects, and lots of extra stuff that isn’t in the game normally. The extra power usage also leads to extra heat generation, so determining what’s causing the failure can be tricky.

Power problems are more tricky to track down. All it takes is a slight dip in the available power on the graphics card to cause the board to crash. What graphics card do you have? What power supply do you have? Does the power supply have dedicated connectors for the graphics card (if the card requires them) or does the card get power from adapters connected to the other wires? If the card gets it’s power by sharing the wires that hookup the other components, you may want to see if you can reconnect things so that no other components (HDD, DVD, etc) are plugged into the same cable that the graphics card is pulling power from.

Another possible power issue is related to overclocking. Sometimes, if a computer is overclocked, the graphics card will not be able to draw enough power through the PCIe slot as it needs to. Do you know if your computer has been overclocked? If it has, you should check into whether or not you need to do something to boost the PCIe power available to the graphics card. (but get help from someone who knows what they’re doing because if this isn’t done right you can fry the graphics card – if your lucky, more than that if you’re not)

Lastly, faulty parts. It’s usually pretty rare, but you can occasionally get a board with a bad/weak part that fails under normal loads. And GW2 is going to put a lot more than just “a normal load” on your graphics card. So if all else fails, you may want to see about RMAing the card just in case.

Indeed. That is the current build of Guild Wars 2 that you are running.

That’s not screan tearing. That’s more like parts of the world aren’t rendering. There are some places where the camera system is wrongly culling objects from the scene so they don’t get rendered. That’s more likely what you’re seeing. Was there anything behind you, that the camera was bumping up against? That’s usually when it happens.

I agree. Especially when doing the open world dynamic events. Specifically, The Shatterer, Tequatl, and the Claw of Jormag. The extra zoom allows for a much better perspective on the fight and makes the event a lot more visually pleasing.

Did you log out and log back in? It may be one of those things that isn’t visible ingame until you relog so the client can apply the changes.

The first thing I would do is check/compare driver versions and settings. It could be that you have a different setting somewhere or a different version that has a bug in it. I’d also check to make sure that you have the latest patches and bugfixes for DirectX (Using the DirectX Web Installer from Microsoft’s website).

AFAIK, the only way to lock the mouse within the game window/screen is to play in true fullscreen mode.

If you want to try a benchmarking program that more closely simulates a graphics card’s performance (power usage and heating) during gaming sessions, try using FurMark. It should put a good amount of stress on the card. I never let it complete a test cycle on my computer because after 3 or 4 minutes of testing, my GPU temp starts getting uncomfortably high. Meanwhile, during normal gaming, the GPU doesn’t get close to those temps.

It’s not a perfect program, but it’s closer to a gaming test than most other burning and benchmarking programs are.

This can usually be controlled by changing the Flash player’s settings. If you turn OFF “Use Harware Acceleration” it won’t down-clock your GPU when playing videos.

It’s (usually) only when Flash uses hardware acceleration that it changes the GPU clock.

Using a stress test on computer components is like asking the mechanic to take a test drive in your car: nothing goes wrong.

Stress tests are good for getting a baseline, but they test things in a very deliberate, systematic way. A way that “most things should be done” kinda thing. They drive down the interstate of testing. Games and other real-world applications never take the interstate. They travel over all sorts of back roads and shortcuts that normal programs never take. And it’s those shortcuts and back roads that are where things are most likely to get off track.

So using a “stress test program” is a great way to see if the computer will fail in day-to-day, normal applications. If you want to REALLY find a computer’s weaknesses and failure points, use a game. If anything is going to push your hardware past its normal boundaries, it’ll be the game. Then it’s just a matter of using intuitive guessing and due dilligence to track down the problem and fix it.

That looks like memory (VRAM) corruption. The first thing I would suspect is that the card is getting too hot and failing. How is the airflow around his video card? Are the heatsinks clean? Try manually increasing the fan speed a lot, to see if that helps. You might also want to turn on V-Sync or set a frame limiter to see if he can slow down the card and keep it from working too hard. Of course, that assumes he’s getting high framerates when the crash happens. That starter zone is pretty easy to rende, so the 660 could be overworking itself.

This sounds like something on the video card is crashing so it stops sending a signal to the monitor and the monitor goes into sleep mode. Once that happens, the hard reboot is the only way to “recover” the system.

The most common and most likely causes of a video card crash are too much heat and too little power. So some things to look into are increasing your fan speeds to see if that can keep the card cool enough to avoid a crash. You can use a utility to check the GPU temp, but there are many components on the video card that are a lot more susceptable to overheating than the GPU, to it’s not a guarantee that a cool GPU means a cool card.

Also, since you’re overclocking your PC, you may need to increase the voltages to the PCI slots to give the graphics card enough power to function at the higher clock rates. I don’t know much about this myself, but I’ve talked with other people who have done overclocking and have had issues with video cards being underpowered unless they increase the power to the PCI slots. If that’s something you haven’t done/tried, then you might want to do a little research and see what you need to do to compensate for the extra speed.

Well, the 2GHz processor is going to be pretty slow for GW2 and all the calculations that need to be done for the complex scenes that need to be rendered in GW2, especially when there are a lot of people around. Only having 2GB of RAM is going to hurt since GW2 will want to use about 1.2 GB of that or more and the OS will want the rest. So the computer is going to be swapping memory constantly, which will also put more strain on the CPU.

While Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2 and Mass Effect 3 are “new” games, they are not nearly as complex as GW2. They may look impressive, but their worlds/levels are not nearly as large as the zones in GW2. Also, they do not use nearly as complex geometry as GW2 uses. Most of the detail in Torchlight is done with detailed textures on simple surfaces – and relatively few surfaces. GW2 uses detailed textures on much more complex geometry and MUCH MORE geometry than Torchlight 2. And that puts a MUCH larger strain on your computer’s processing ability, both CPU-wise and GPU-wise.

As for “the latest drivers” for your video card, the probably don’t help at all. The “latest drivers” are primarily optimized for the latest video cards. They still have the functionality to work with your card, but through legacy code. The newer features of the drivers will require specific features of the newer hardware to truly take advantage of. So having an older card is going to be a hinderance as well.

The first idea would probably be to increase your RAM to minimize memory paging. Getting another gig of RAM would probably give you enough memory to let the OS and GW2 run without competing for all the available RAM. After that, how much do you want to spend? You can upgrade your video card to one with better capabilities, but that might require you to upgrade your power supply as well. Trying to upgrade the CPU might mean new motherboard, new RAM, and at that point, you should probably upgrade the graphics card just to avoid it being the anchor that holds back your system.

Other than that, no, you’re not seeing an issue between GW2 and nVidia cards. You’re just seeing the problems related to running a new, complex MMO on old hardware. It’s pretty much to be expected, I’m afraid.

If the problem truly is screen tearing due to timing issues with the refresh rate and the framerate that your graphics card is capable of running at, then “No. There is no problem.” It’s just a simple issue of your graphics card putting a new image into the display buffer before the monitor has drawn the previous image, so you’re seeing multiple animation frames on the screen at one time. It’s not going to cause any problems other than making things look funny.

If the problem goes away when you turn on V-Sync, that’s a strong indication that you’re seeing tearing. But it’s not 100%. If that’s not what you’re seeing, then there could be an issue. It’s one of those things you need to see happening or in a screenshot, if you can get one, in order to really make an informed guess about.

It’s almost certainly not a compatibility issue with GW2, though.

If you’re talking LCD monitors, then 60Hz is going to be the most standard refresh rate. You might be able to find 120Hz monitors, but they would probably be expensive. I don’t know, I haven’t bought a monitor in a few years…

If you have an older CRT monitor, then you should have a lot more options for refresh rates, as they were much more configurable.

Other than that, using V-sync to limit the framerate is probably the best you can do.

If it works like the other command line switches, then you should have quotes around the executable name/location with the command line switch and value outside of quotes. So something like the following should work:

“C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -authsrv 64.25.38.54

You need the quotes around the executable’s location because there is a space in the name and without quotes, Windows would be trying to run the “Guild” execuable in your C:\Games folder. That’s probably what’s giving you the error, since that file doesn’t exist.

I can guarantee that if the problem gets solved, your post had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Anet will most likely not contact you at all, about this issue. They have enough work to do without adding “contact one user about a problem many users are having.” The best you will likely get is someone from Anet posting in this thread, asking you to provide information that you should already know needs to be provided.

At a minimum, you should attach a dxdiat.txt report of your system so that Anet will know exactly what hardware, OS, and driver versions you are running. Beyond that, it would also be helpful if you provide info on your power supply make and model, in case that has anything to do with the crashes. And if you want to be more helpful, you can go into more detail about what you tested and how you tested it, in case that helps give them any insight into the situation or helps them rule out any of the common causes of crashes.

Make sure that you are loading the proper display driver for whatever monitor you are using. This is separate from the graphics driver, which is for the graphics card, mind you.

Also, any adjustments to make the image fit on the monitor’s screen are usually on the monitor, not in Windows. So you’d need to check your monitor’s menu to see how to adjust the horizontal size and/or positioning.

We probably need more info than that to give you any informed suggestions. You should attach a dxdiag.txt file for your system. You might also want to include what brand of motherboard and/or sound card your system has.

When did you last update the audio driver for your system? It could be that the driver is old and that’s what is causing problems. There have been other reports of sound issues, so you might want to search the forums to see if any of the other threads have information/suggestions that will help you out.

While it’s true that the application profiles are primarily intended for Crossfire setups, they are also useful for single card setups. So they shouldn’t be the problem unless there is a compatibility issue between the newest CAP files and the 12.6 driver. (I’m running the ATI 12.6 driver with the 12.7 CAP files and I haven’t experienced any crashing problems on my 6870.) That said, it might be worth removing them or at least reverting back to an older version, to see if that helps.

Before you wipe your entire operating system and start over, have you tried using a program like CCleaner or DriverSweeper to cleanup the graphics driver files? Configure Windows to use the generic video driver, uninstall your current ATI driver (if it’s still installed), then reboot the system and use CCleaner/DriverSweeper to make sure that the driver is completely removed, then reboot the system and install the ATI driver and see what happens.

One thing I did notice after the Mad King event went live is that the fan on my graphics card ramped up in speed/noise, so the card is clearly doing more work with the extra effects in the game. Is it possible that your card might have been running a bit too hot after the patch, which caused the crashes? If so, you might want to manually boost the speed for the cooling fan to see if that works, or open the case and blow out all the heat sinks to make sure they’re cooling things like they should be.

I don’t know how it would do on full settings, but it would certainly have better performance with an updated graphics card. The 440 isn’t one of the high performance gaming cards. It’s more of a high-end media card that also works for games.

If you do some research, you can probably find a good upgrade card that’s not going to break the bank. For nVidia cards, look for model numbers that end in x60 or higher, to get the gaming cards. (460 or higher, 560 or higher, 660 or higher, etc).

If you want to try ATI cards, the models you want to look for will all have hundreds digits above 5. So cards like a 5670, 5870, 6770, 6870, and so on.

This would be a greats suggestion to put in the Suggestion forum.

I did a quick google search, and I found the following instructions for re-installing/replacing the MSIMG32.dll. I haven’t tried ’em, but they might be worth looking into. Also, the file is a Microsoft file, not a GW2 file, so ANet might not be all that much more informed on problems with it than we are. The instructions I found were:

For anyone trying to reinstall a missing MSimg32.dll

1. Insert XP (or your support software) CD
2. Do system search for MSimg32.dll using advanced tab to make sure you are looking for system and hidden folders.
3. Select the zipped version of MSimg32.dll
4. Select the MOVE TO option and type in C:\Windows\32
5. Reboot computer

You can try lowering all the graphics settings, basically. The 2.4 GHz processor is going to slow down the game, overall. Especially in WvW and large dynamic events. And the Intel HD graphics is going to really hurt the framerates as well.

I can’t speak to the processor, but the graphics card might have been a pretty good downgrade. The ATI 5750 is a solid gaming/performance graphics card. The GT 640 is a high end media card that isn’t really meant for high performance graphics.

You’d want to get an nVidia card that ends with something higher than “50” to get their gaming cards. Like a 660 or 670 or higher, in the 500 series cards, you’d want a 560 or 570 or higher. Anything under 50 will play games, but not well.

Any chance that Windows “Stickittenys” got enabled by accident? I think it’s under Accessability Options or something, just in case.

Nope. If an item is soulbound, it can only be used by the character it was bound to. Which also means that while that chracter can put the item in your bank (which is shared by all your characters) no one else will be able to take the item out of the bank.

I’m not sure if it will help, but have you tried running Ventrilo as the administrator? It may not help with this issue, or with GW2 in general, but it does help eliminate some odd behaviors with other games.

easiest way is to target that player, right-click their portrait, and choose “Add Friend” from the menu. You can also do the same thing by right-clicking their name in the chat window, if they’ve said something recently. The other way is to use the “/friend” command followed by their character name.

AFAIK, Once you hit 80, you stop earning trait points. The max you will get is 70 trait points to spend building your character.

The only points you keep earning as you level up beyond 80 are the skill points.

As Jayne said, you can try adding the “-repair” switch to the command line in the shortcut to see if that will take care of the problem. That is supposed to scan the library for corrupted data and fix anything it finds.

Well, CN is the country code for China. Any chance you’ve got spyware on your computer or have logged onto a site using the same account name you used for GW2? It seems like someone has either gotten your account name or guessed it, and is trying to see if they can access your account and probably add it to their team of farm bot accounts.

In any case, you might want to perform some due dilligence and make sure your computer is as secure as you hope it is and change your account password. And definitely don’t authorize that address to log onto your account.

From the looks of things, I would guess that the problem is an outdated version of DirectX, some sort of driver corruption (conflicting files with an older version), or an issue with conflicting settings between GW2 and Windows.

So I’d check the Windows driver settings and make sure that the driver options are all set to “Application controlled” or “Do not override application settings” or whatever the option is. Then I would try doing a complete, clean install of the latest nVidia driver. That means do the full uninstall, reboot, use a cleaner program to make sure all traces of the current driver are removed, reboot, then install the new driver. And if things still didn’t work, I’d go to Microsoft’s website and use the DirectX Web Installer to make sure that all my DirectX files are up to date.

I read through the linked thread, and my initial impression is “I wouldn’t trust that Mesmer of Death guy any further than I could throw him – and I have a bad shoulder.” He seems like the kind of person who would make up theories based on flawed logic or incomplete facts and then just bluff to back them up. He was asked to provide links or evidence of his statements and all he did was get more “vaguely specific” on what he was claiming in a previous post.

Mind you, I have no proof that he’s wrong. I just would treat anything he says as kitten poo until I saw definitive proof of it. And so far, there is no proof.

Lending the CD/DVD shouldn’t be a problem since it contains the game’s client, which is the same for everyone. The only time you would really have a problem is if you let your friend borrow your account (play your characters) since those are supposed to be yours only.

So CD/DVD sharing, good. Account sharing, bad.

Does she get an error message when GW2 tries to update? Has she tried running GW2 as the administrator (right-click the shortcut and select “Rus as Administrator” from the menu) to see if that helps?

Check the wiki for command line arguments for GW2.EXE. Those might help you out. Specifically, the “-image” option might help. It’s supposed to download all the current updates to the GW2.DAT file.

If you’re lucky, it will only download the files you don’t have and/or the ones that need to be updated. If not, you may be stuck doing a complete download.

Earlier today, I did a google search and the only place I could find them was Amazon.com, for $33.99 (USD). That gives you 2000 gems.

Here’s the link.

That seems like something that would be better asked of Lenovo, not Arena Net or Guild Wars 2. It would likely be a BIOS setting or configurable through a Lenovo utility or Windows driver configuration, if it’s something that can changed by the user.

I would think that GW2 would be “at the mercy” of whatever display driver that DirectX/Windows chose to connect it to when the game asked DirectX/Windows what kind of hardware it was running on. I don’t think that GW2 is able to tell DirectX/Windows what driver to use for a particular display device.

If you mean those time when parts of the scene will vanish when the camera gets into a specific location and then reappear when the camera moves out of that location, then yes, I’ve seen that. I’ve been noticing it since about 2 patches ago, actually. For me, this happens mostly when the camera I rotate the camera around my character and it bumps into a wall or other “clip-able” object. So times when I’m in small rooms/caves, under rocky overhangs, walking through ruins or along cliffs, etc. It’s especially annoying when looking for paths to solve jumping puzzles and get to vistas.

I’m guessing that they made some modifications to the camera system to try and speed up rendering and ended up adding this feature that’s too aggressive in telling the camera when it “shouldn’t see” certain elements of the scene.

The first thing to try would be to read the other threads about crashes that lead to error reports, and see if any of the suggestions they contain will help you out.

Well, the theory is that in story instances and dungeons “there is less work to do, so the graphics card can do it faster, so it does.” The “working faster” leads to higher power usage, and more heat generation. Do you have V-Sync on?

An analogy would be to imagine your graphics card is a car’s engine and GW2 is the car’s driver. Normally, when the car is in an appropriate gear, there is no way the driver can over-rev the engine. But if the car is in too low a gear, or out of gear, there is no load on the engine and nothing to slow it down. If the driver pushes on the gas in this state, the engine will rev dangerously high, use up lots of fuel and generate lots of heat. Eventually, this will cause the engine to overheat and sieze up.

In your computer’s case, GW2 (on high settings and in the normal game world) has enough work for the GPU and CPU to do that the computer is “self-limited” on how fast it can do the work, therefore its top speed is within the power/heat tollerances of the computer. But when you get into story instances or dungeons where there is much less geometry to render and many fewer characters/NPCs to transform and render, there is a lot less load on the CPU/GPU. The fact that the CPU/GPU are now able to render the scene much faster (because there’s less to render) means that it can do more work, so it will. More work means more power being used and more heat being generated, and that might push things beyond the limits of what your computer can supply.

Do you have V-Sync on or are you using the frame limiter? Or do you have Fraps or some other utility that can monitor framerates? You might want to check that out during play in the normal world and in story instances and dungeons to see how the framerate differes in the different locations. That might help prove or disprove the theory.

Unfortunately, I don’t think your machine is as good as you think it is. The Pentium 4 is very weak by today’s standards. Even though it’s 3GHz, it’s not going to be nearly as fast as most of today’s 2GHz chips.

The 630 video card is also not going to help you out. It’s a mid-range media card, not a performance gaming card. At best, it will be slow to get the rendering done. At worst, it’s going to make the CPU do extra work to emulate any DirectX features that aren’t implemented in the hardware.

Lastly, the 2GB of RAM is going to hurt. Your operating system is going to be taking up at least half of that, with GW2 wanting to use up at least 1GB on its own. So your computer will be paging memory out to the hard drive all the time, when GW2 is running. That will slow your PC down even more.

As for the good framerates on the character select screen, that’s easy to explain. There is virtually nothing going on there. The PC only has to render a background image, some text, and your character. By all accounts, a very simple scene that is not at all indicative of what things will be like in the game, when the world gets infinitely more complex and there are dozens of other characters that need to be rendered.

Yes, you can. In a way. You can create a shortcut that automatically logs you in and/or change the current shortcut to log you in. You can do that by adding the command line arguments: -name, -password, -nopatchui.

So you’d end up with a shorcut with a command line looking like:
GW2.EXE -name mail@address.com -password 12345 -nopatchui

AFAIK, there is no way to populate the information on the launcher dialog by using command line arguments. You either have to completely log in using the arguments or by manually entering the information on the launcher dialog.

You might want to check the GW2 wiki page for command line arguments. It should have the information you need, in case I didn’t remember things correctly.

The 560ti card is supposed to be pretty good, so that seems fine. The one thing I remember about ASUS video cards (at least I think it was ASUS) was from my days of lurking on the Rift forums. It seems that ASUS bundles some sort of “performance enhancing utility software” with their graphics cards which, ironically, significantly lowered the performance of their graphics cards. So the solution/suggestion was to unload all of the ASUS utilities that come bundled with the cards and just use the driver bundle directly from nVidia.

At least that’s what I think I remember…

One huge issue is going to be the 2GB of RAM. The operating system (and it’s associated drivers, services, and utilities) alone can take up 1.5 GB or more. And if you’re running anything else (web browsers, etc) they take up even more. Then you add GW2 to the mix, and it likes to use up 1 GB minimum (on my system, I’ve seen it up to 1.6 GB on occasion). That means that your system is “using” at least 2.5 GB of the 2.1 GB it has available. So it’s going to have to do memory paging constantly, which is going to drop your gaming performance well below acceptable levels.

Your video card should be fine. You’re CPU is on the low side and will hold you back some. The real killer at the moment, though, is the RAM. I’d suggest bumping it up to 3GB, which is the maximum that your system can handle with a 32-bit operating system. That should eliminate a lot of the memory paging, and hopefully get things into the realm of playable.

I read a thread where someone said that the shift-PRTSCRN wasn’t working in GW2 (as far as hiding the UI while taking a screenshot). So it might be a feature that hasn’t been added or isn’t working at the moment. It definitely doesn’t hide the UI for my screenshots.

As for the JPS issue, I thought a read a thread where the JPS screenshots were stereoscopic screenshots. You might want to see if you have that option enabled and turn it off. I can’t test that one, as I can’t enable stereoscopic rendering.