really slow area loads

Hey Everyone,
I have played guild wars before about a year ago and my dial up 52kbps connection ran everything smoothly (it took me half an hour to load ascalon for the first time), i have all the system requirements but now when i trie to load up ascalon citie it takes it 25mins to do 1%. What is the reason for this and how can i speed it up?

(it is prophesies and it sais it has 12000 more files to go!)

If you haven't played for a while this is due to the various patches that came out during the time you weren't playing. There's no way to speed up download, however you can use the -image command and let GW run during the night. This command makes the game download everything, patches, areas etc. and close after the download. After you finished using the -image command, remove it and the loading time should go back to something close to what it was before.

To use the -image command, rightclick on the Guild Wars icon on your desktop or your start menu if you haven't putt it on your desktop, click on properties, and in the shortcut tab, modify the shortcut by adding -image so that it looks like this "C:\Program Files\GUILD WARS\Gw.exe" -image. After everything has been downloaded, just switch the shortcut to "C:\Program Files\GUILD WARS\Gw.exe".

Note if you haven't installed the game in the default directory your shortcut wont be the same as the one i just showed.

thanks tijo ill do that

If I were you, I'd start the -image command going before you go to bed, because on a 56k connection it's going to take ages.

Do you have a mate with a DSL connection that could burn you his gw.dat file?

Doing this would be even better than using the -image command, would be faster and also if your Gw.dat file gets corrupted and you need to reinstall you won't have to download everything again since you would have a backup.

In any case, do this if you can.

Problem there is the settings and other information are stored in the dat file. Using the Nightfall cds and doing -image will help more than anything.