Bad Lag? Try This.

K, this is going to sound soooo noobie, but here goes. I, like many others, have been experiencing some horrendous lag lately. I would like to try the un-install re-install idea. Now, as I understand it, this is what I have to do:

1. Make a backup of GW folder somewhere.
2. Un-install Guild Wars
3. Download the client
4. ? (maybe copy the .dat file back into the folder?)

As you can see I'm a little stuck after step 3. Can one of you computer savvy pepople out there shed some light on my seemingly hopeless situation?

When I defrag, should I just defrag the .dat file? Is it better to do it after a full re-download of the game?

My GW install has worked fine for many months. I keep my hard drive defragged quite regularly. None of the problems mentioned on the first page is what is causing my lag.

But ever since the December 20 update, when they added the reconnect feature I've seen lag spikes. Sometimes small ones, sometimes HUGE ones, on the order of minutes in length. On more than one occasion, my friends playing with me also had these lag spikes at exactly the same time.

Obviously they had to change something in the net-code to allow for reconnects, and it seems like they broke something else in the process. If this is what we have to put up with to be able to reconnect I say no thanks. Put it back how it was, and get rid of this ridiculous lag. And then when they can work in reconnects without breaking the net-code they should try again.

This will also "trim" down bloated DAT's

To get a clean Gw.dat do this:
(Make sure you have enough disk space)

1.) Run gw.exe -image to get all files. (If your installation of Guild wars is already up to date, skip this step)


2.) Then copy these files from the GuildWars CD into a NEW folder on your hard drive:

Setup.exe
\Data
\Data\cdrom.ini
\Data\config.ini
\Data\Gw
\Data\Gw\GwSetup.exe

3.) After the files and folders are copied modify \Data\cdrom.ini to this:

[CDROM]
Program=Guild Wars
Chapter=
Disc=1

4.) Move your Gw.dat file to the \Data\Gw folder

5.) Uninstall Guild Wars from Windows Control Panel

6.) Reinstall Guild Wars from the copied files on your hard drive by running setup.exe

This is a great way to shrink old DAT's back to their appropriate size.
Courtesy of: ObiWan07

Definetely sounds like some of the lag issues i've been having. When i run Gamecam it has increasingly been getting worse and worse and i've got to the point where i'm unable to run it and actually do anything. Also while sat in towns, or loading up towns i have been experiencing, totally randomly, my pc rebooting itself. It never does it when i'm not playing GW and it never does it outside of a town or in a mission :P

My .dat file is currently 3,668,519kb is that considered large enough to cause problems? I do carry out the occasional Windows defrag. Gonna try above tips to defrag it anyway

EDIT Update 1:

OK i followed the instructions as directed in post 1. It showed 97k clusters in 328 fragments and then it just flew through loadsa files after it far too fast for me to catch a summary screenie. But it looked to have broken it down into about 10 fragments. So i run it again, first defrag took about a hour (gave me chance to read the entire thread ), second took about 5 mins or less and went so fast it didn't even stop at the .dat file so i assume it got it down to 1.
I also noticed it stop at several other files, some of which were in alot larger fragments and some looked to be important system/memory files. So i would recommend anyone follows this guide to defrag your whole drive and not just the gw.dat file. As is stated above Windows Defrag won't touch large files so this should sort out your whole system.

I also noticed alot of people suggesting adware/spyware can cause problems which cause lag. As a former victim of WinFix (i spent nearly 2 years trying to get rid of it) i can not agree with this highly enough and to solve all spyware problems seriously suggest you visit avast.com and download their antivirus. There are none of the nasty adwares attached to it and it laughed in the face WinFix and since i've been running it alongside Windows Defender nothing has got near my pc. I have it set to automatically download updates, which can cause lag for me but i get the " avast has been updated" message when it has so i know when that is or isn't the cause of any lag.

Its also worth noting that i get alot of lag when we have these weekend specials going on. Usually if its a PvE related special its not a problem, but when its a PvP special weekend my lag is terrible, and i don't even do any PvP :P

For those struggling to free up enough space to carry out the defrag, i was ok at 12Gb free, i happened to come across c:/windows/backup folder and found 1.5gb of backed up gaming files that i no longer play that i "thought" i'd cleaned up long ago. I'm sure there are plenty of other similar folders about.

Anyway for the ultimate test i'm gonna now go run gw with gamecam and see if theres any improvement.

EDIT Update 2:

Ok took my warrior out for a quick run around an area in nf and gave my 55monk a quick troll farm run with gamecam running. I can say it has definetely improved from before this defrag but not enough i don't think to successfully do the videos i'm wanting to do. The last videos i made, solo warrior beach/spider cave and solo ranger forest farmer were uploaded last November and were using the same version of gamecam as i'm still using now. The lag gradually got worse upto then but has since been impossible to run gamecam while doing stuff.

My pc's not exactly state of the art but ram, graphics, sound, power supply/fan have all been upgraded and it should cope no problems. I have a flatmate with a spanking brand new pc running on the same connection, much better specked than mine who also has a gw account (wow player grrr) so i will run the same test on his as soon as i get the ok from him.

I definitely don't feel like going trough the whole topic, I couldn't even defragment my gw.dat for once. It was in 385 and I can't get it below that.

How do you unzip stuff?

He explained that in his post but I suggest that you'll get Winrar. It's easy to use and simple.

http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

Hey i need some help with downloading contig and stuff.

Ok first I need to know how to Get Contig in the same folder as the Power Defragmenter. Second, I dont know the password it needs so I can download it . Please help

Thanks for the step by step on dowloading contig and the defrag program. I could never get contig to work, but that process is helping me just fine! I'll let you know what I get my GW file down too.

My Gw.dat file is like 4.2 gigs or so, so I am trying this -image thing. Well, it's going to take a long time, I think I'm going to just delete my Gw.dat file and just redownload stuff.

Hasn't worked for me yet still experience lag with Vent...

Did anyone ever find a post on how to slow down the screen display on Contig utility? I used just contig and its gone before you can read a thing. Any help would be a boon right now.. Thanks

i have an FPS problem at the start of a battle-- big problem in pvp

the more players the big the FPS spike.

when players start using their skill my computer get "stuck" for a moment to load up the animation and then after the animation is loaded the game runs smoothly the entire match..

when there is 1 skill to load up its not a problem but in a gvg fight were at the begining of the fight 16 players are using diffrent skills at 1 time its horrible.. u can imagine what happens to me in AB..

since i am playing a monk it causes even more trouble. the first enemy's spike always works because i am totally shutdowned by this FPS spike

i have increased the page file to 3GB in each partition.. and yet it doesn't help.
is there no way to load up the animations before they apear on the screen?

Thought I would raise one point that I noticed when reinstalling GW today. That would be that once you do a contig on your Gw.dat file, dont think that is the end of it. My hard drive on my poor laptop may be quite full, but every time I run Guild Wars it stacks up on fragments.

What happened to me:
Before contig I had origionally 600 fragments. After contig I got that down to 250, and could get no lower.

Wanting to get even less fragments, I uninstalled Guild Wars and then defragmented my hard drive overnight. (In addition to this I removed any other large files that were fragmented and could not be handled by windows defragmenter... I recommend this is a good idea IF you know what you are deleting, ie dont delete system restore files. Instead use DiskCleanup to remove all unnessesary restore files.)

Re-Installed GW. Lo and behold. 1 fragment.

I then proceded to run GW and ran around a few towns in game, then checked my fragmentations. They went all the way back up to 200.

I have ran contig again to get the fragmentation down to 4, but now Im taking an extra precaution and running the guild wars executable with the -image command to get everything, and then defrag it one final time. Hopefully this will dull any future fragmentation.

For those who want an up-to-date Gw.dat, I recommend running contig every fortnight or so

When I try to run contig I get the following error message:

C:\Users\Xp>contig -a "F:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.dat"

Contig v1.53 - Makes files contiguous
Copyright (C) 1998-2006 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com


Toegang geweigerd.

Can anyone give me some help on this??
Thanks in advance

Edit: For those who are not english :P, Toegang geweigerd = Acces denied

i ran contig a few months ago, and got from 2000ish frags to 1, and it hasnt increased from 1 frag since.

However, i still suffer the lag spike since the dec 20 update, so it must be an issue outside the defrag of my dat file.

I did everything here, got my dat file down to 1 fragment ... still lag. I uninstalled GW, then reinstalled the client ... lag as bad as ever.

I cleaned the inside of my computer for any dust buildup, made sure there was no spyware or viruses complicating the issue, have kept my computer defragged regularly, and tested my internet connection to make sure there hasn't been any change in it that would cause a deterioration of service.

Still the lag, the 10 second freezing of the game at a time, 7000 ping brand of lag continues. Forget soloing FoW anymore, I can barely complete a trade.

This is a recent occurrence (last 1-2 weeks), but the lag has made the game completely unplayable for me.

If this persists the game will have been rendered useless and NCSOFT will have lost a current and future customer.

At this point if the lag gets any better it will have to be something they do on their end because I am all out of answers in regards to what I can do.

I do however appreciate the lengths people here have gone to in an effort to try and help others with this problem.

i did all this crap, 1 file processed ,1 frag/file, i havent defragged anything on this computer in 4 years, and the defrag outcome was not only disappointing, but when i logged back into guild wars everyone was teleporting all over the place just like before i ran the anti lag ritual.

Hmm, ever since they added in the connection status monitor (fps, ping, etc.) I've noticed that I've been playing at an average ping of 300 or more. Everyone else in my guild plays at an average ping of 70-150 in the middle of a battle; below 50 while idle.

I run Symantec Client Firewall and Windows Firewall (just because the stupid "There is no firewall" message annoys me), and I connect to a router through an Ethernet cable. This router also has a firewall. Could my high ping, relative to others, be because of this? Note, I have a 15mbps fiber optic line Internet connection from Verizon FiOS, so it's not an issue of connection speed. After reinstalling and defragging for a separate issue, I am still getting this amount.

Didn't work for me, I defragged and defragged, and still having the problems with high pings, rubberbanding, and temporary freeze ups. FPS is at 75-80 usually, but my ping is still high. After an -image and defragging until there was nothing to defrag anymore, I'm starting to thing it has to do more with a routing issue to their servers. I have contacted my ISP (again) and still awaiting a response from them. Also have done the -diag report and from the looks of it, something looks down with either AT&T or Sprintlink, but I'm not entirely sure if that's the route I take, or just another possible route to connect. Either way, it's been going on for like a little over a month now for me.