-image: What you need to know

I'm seeing a lot of confusion on other posts about running GW with -image appended, so I thought i'd be helpful and clear things up.

I created another shortcut to gw.exe from my desktop for this, but all you have to do is right-click on your shortcut to gw.exe, and select "properties". On the second tab, where it says "shortcut," it will have a path to your gw.exe file. at the end of that path, outside of the quotation marks, simply add "-image" with no quotes.

The next time this shortcut is run, it will download ALL the files related to Guild Wars. All the areas, all the newest updates, everything. if this is your first time running the -image, this will be a HUGE download. Don't panic, after the first time, most of the updates are small.

Once it has finished downloading all the files, it will decompress them and add them to your gw.dat file. Again, if this is the first time running this, it could take quite a bit of time.

If the shortcut is run with -image, guildwars WILL NOT load up. Once it's done downloading and decompressing, the process will end. To play guildwars, you need to edit the properties of your shortcut again, and remove the "-image" at the end. (This is why I have 2 shortcuts- 1 for playing, one for imaging.) Once you've returned the shortcut to normal, you should be able to play Guild Wars without loading every new area that you haven't been to- it's already sitting on your hard drive.

To put it simply..all -image does is download every file you don't have on GW.

If you do this after a cd install or let it download in the background, there are a ton of files that need to be decompressed.

If do a clean install from web client, when it starts to do the download. Kill it, delete the gw.dat file, then do the -image. It send all the file uncompressed.

Wouldn't that take longer? And obviously waste bandwidth?

I was late in buying Guild Wars: Prophecies, so I have to dload 60000+ files... It's about a week on my PSTN. Should I get Factions to be able to play a bit or be VERY patient?

If your GW.dat file is over 3gb, you are best just deleting gw.dat and running doing a -image anyway. You'll save space in the long run.

Oh and btw,

It doesn't matter if you have factions or not, the game will d/l the files for it anyway! (With -image)

i did this the other day after deleting my 3.6gig dat file and it pulled down 4.8gigs, anyone know why that is?

I dunno, maybe Nightfall is up? O_o

I did that and it downloaded over 11gb of info. Is that going to be the new size due to nightfall? or is something wrong?

Not sure about the 3GB.

I did a fresh 'install' of GW 3 days ago, deleted GW.dat and ran with -images.
GW.dat is now 3,52 GB, about the same as 3 days ago.