What's with all the D/ls and slow speeds?

So I just bought GW today and installed it immediately. I need to download a patch (no biggie) before starting the game, which is usual on all mmorpgs. No problem considering the patch is installed fast even though the speed is half of what my dling speed usually is.

I proceed to make my character and then I have to yet again download something else, no idea what it is. After 5 minutes of downloading (thx to the laggy speeds) I join the game and realize I mad the wrong character, I was level 20 with all skills, so I was like WTF?? Then i delete that character and make a carebear one so I can start in level 1 and gain my stuff..

Lo and behold, I have to download AGAIN another region this time my speed is under 20k so this means I have to afk out and go watch tv or something. After 15 minutes I come back and see that the progress bar hasn't moved much since im d/ling at 1kbps.. So i checked if I had any programs downloading crap but I have none... it's not my isp since I checked to see by downloading some song and I was dling and top speed.
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sry for the long rant, I just want to play this game and I get forced to download crap I dont even know.


I have a question,, will i have do DOWNLOAD EVERY region in the game? Are the servers always LAGGY like this? If so this sux and no wonder people say that WoW is better (wow sux so much, cant believe people say that, but if these issues are persisant then no wonder...).

It might not necessarily be the Guild Wars servers. I'm sure you are aware that your connection passes through multiple nodes before it even connects to the Guild Wars servers. In order to better answer your question though I would have to know your connection type and speed. It could easily be one of the nodes between you and the server that is experiencing the bottle neck and ANet obviously has no control over that. Generally speaking the updates occur while you are in game. Every once in a while you have to restart the program but most of the time Guild Wars is happily updating itself in the background while you play. After the initial install it can be a little tedious but give it some time and it will stop acting up provided you have a good connection in the first place.

Yeah seems you made a PvP character at first. But now you are on the right track with a fresh new PvE character.

What I think it is doing is downloading all the textures and such for that area.

When I bought a new computer I downloaded Guild Wars and Installed it. (thanks to High speed road runner 7MPS, it was done very fast). Then I tried to load my characters, they were in standard armor, not the armor I purchased for them. why? because my GW file hasn't downloaded the textures for my armor yet. After a few minutes of waiting, they had the armor textures on. Just give it time, it is well worth it.

Oh and as for server lag? I rarely ever have lag with Guild Wars.

Goodluck on your new Guild Wars Character

They're not always laggy like this. I noticed alot of lag last night and combined with my current junk internet connection I just decided to log off and try again tonight or something.

There is a considerable download up front though considering you don't already have all the content, and every zone will download some additional as well. After it's all said and done though, zoning is very quick.

Go to your GuildWars shortcut's properties and add ' -image' (w/out the quotes, note the space) to the end of the Target path, start GuildWars, and go out and throw a football around or something. After that's done, go back in, remove the -image switch, and you'll be gold.

Welcome to GW!

ITs not just the servers it might be your computer. The connection type/speed and your RAM. Also when you first install the game it takes a long time to load. So its worth the load/it won't always take long to load.

Good luck.

Fastest way... Create a shortcut for gw.exe, and then just type in '-image' for its path. (E.g. "C:\Guild Wars\gw.exe" -image). Launch it, and let it download the entire thing.

(best done just before bed )

Zuros, you need to read up on your new game. It's really not entirely surprising that your newly installed game needs to catch up on updates.

The game will update in the background while you play or while you sit on the character screen. But, since this background updating is slower and can cause lag while playing, you may want perform an image function:

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image

This way if you let -image finish, your game will be fully updated until the next update.

Keep the -image shortcut handy and run it when you want to fully update your client. Don't use it to start the game for playing purposes because it won't load.

Either way, you are playing an online game that gets updated frequently and you shouldn't expect it to be up-to-date right out of the box.

-Surly Mod

thanks for the help guys, I will try that image thing tonight to see if my lag gets fixed.

My PC is very good so it can't be that, and my connection is 10mb.

and my connection is even better not to mention i live less than 20 miles from the new servers in Los Angeles they moved into not long ago.

that means nothing to the squirrel that chewed one of the cables somewhere betweem you and their servers. and according to tech (ATT tech) one of the biggest problems surprisingly enough is squirrel chewed lines

they have no control how your connection hops before it gets to Anets servers or the alternate bad bounce on the way back.

Like everyone has said add -image to your shortcut and have GW install the entire game. I actually have a copy of the GW icon on my desktop just for the -image command.

What you have to understand is the unique way Guild Wars passes on and retains information. Everything you install is compressed until first needed. A lot of what you thought you were downloading was probably decompressing off your hard drive from the Gw.tmp file to the Gw.dat file. Once in the Gw.dat file you never have to worry about decompression again, it just comes down to how fast your computer can load it. This downloading and decompression process can be alleviated by the -image command, which will first download then decompress all the files for the game. Depending on your connection this can take a while, but is worth it if you want continuously fast loading times.

As for the bad connection, I would suggest using the -diag command and checking to see if there is a loss of connection between you, your ISP, and the A.net servers. If you are losing connection at the ISP level maybe they are blocking ports needed for the game to properly connect to A.net. If you are losing connection with A.net's server send them a copy of the diag file.

Also, in-game download speed is usually slower than -image download speed ( my experience ). You were also probably downloading during the weekend festival, where alot of people needed to update.