New to GW -- Can't find answers in the Tech Forum

Greetings!

I'm new to GW and am having some issues that I can't find answers to in either the FAQ in this forum or in Technican's Forum. Hope you might be able to help.

1. I bought the access key through the Online Store and therefore I don't have the game discs. When I enter a new zone, the game downloads the new zone -- every time I enter the same zone. Is this normal?

2. Speaking of downloading, I'm getting a wonderful download speed -- a whopping 5Kbp! Yeap, with a "K," not with an "M." I'm assuming that the game is forcing me into a Peer-to-Peer download. Is there an option to turn off "P2P" to download through a game server that might improve this download speed?

3. When the game finally completes the download of the new zone, it kicks me back to the character selection screen with the message "connection lost" even though the download was fully completed. Again, is this normal?

Would appreciate any insight on these issues. Thanks for the help!

1. GW is like 3-4GB, you download a little bit every time you zone (even when in an outpost). You can force a complete download by adding the command -image in the command line of your shortcut. Note that if you have placed this command in the command line, the game will abort after it has finished downloading, so you'll have to remove the command if you wish to play. More info: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Command_line

2. It's Wintersday, a big event around christmas which draws many players. This may cause slow downloading speed and some lag while playing. It could also be you, but I can't know that. Try googling for CCleaner, run that, and see if it helps.

3. What error code do you get? More info: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Error

Thanks for the quick response and the good information.

I'm not getting an error code associated with the return to the character selection screen. Just the "connection lost" statement (I'll check it again when I hit a new zone).

The d/l speed for GW is pretty much always slow.

OK, change one to all of the above.

My wife just said she was experiencing some latency on her game (not GW). Seems our internet connection might be dragging a bit today.

Gotta love satellite!

No. It's not normal for you to need to download the area every time. But, judging from question #3, you would seem to have some other problem.

Your connection sucks.

No, this is also not normal. I'd say your game client is corrupted. Try deleting Guild Wars and downloading the client from Guildwars.com again. Your characters, items, gold, etc., are all stored server-side, so none of that would be lost.

You could try using the "-image" command (as referred to in Blazes post about Command Line options). With your connection it would take over-night and might end up corrupted anyway. Or you can just download one area at a time as you play. Normally, you only need to download them once.

I think satellite can be effected by weather.

To make downloading all maps easier, here's a suggestion. First, make a copy of your gw shortcut and change the name. Then right click and select properties. Change your target location to this---> "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image <--- Now you can just download all imgaes while you do something else, like sleep.