Guild Wars 2

Hi Danicia,

Firstly, I can understand that this is a BETA, understanding crashes, glitches, miscommunications and purely testing the demand to justify the outlay to a full client are part of the reason a BETA exists so none of the above are in my top 5. What I’d like to see the beta explore are only 3.

1) access to the high res graphics options; textures, character textures, character model quality – I suspect for some macs having those options available/on will make performance worse, but a full client would need these options tested beforehand in beta – (I’m hoping this is not my own ignorance that I’m not getting these options because my mac can’t support them, I’m pretty sure it can.)

2) a customised news feed on the login screen for mac players; rather than having to trawl through the increasingly negative forum or encounter mac players in game who aren’t aware of ‘why their tp is down’ etc. it’d be great if the news feed at the start included info like that ‘recertification news’ that dropped tp for some time a couple days ago. It’d help with communications to mac beta users so much.

3) in addition to the ‘minimum’ spec listed, a ‘recommended optimum’ mac spec where you think the beta runs best on. Ignoring issues caused by connection speeds I’m curious for the mac beta what is an optimum spec that at least hardware spec wise should not cause graphics crashes, demand too much of the processor etc. That may mollify some mac beta users who from high expectations of the beta are blaming the beta for issues rather than identifying shortfalls in their mac spec. And some issues I know aren’t limited just to the mac beta; lags, crashes from effects during events are experienced on GW2 irrespective of being on windows/mac client – sometimes hardware, sometimes software, sometimes connection.

Thank you and the mac team for continuing to work on this beta!