Trying to install game on a new pc

Because my internet connection is very very slow and after reading several posts saying you could install GW2 on another pc just by copying over gw2.dat and the exe file I tried it myself, however every time I try the game tries to download all game files again (over 400000 of them), I cant even work out where its trying to put these files as no matter how much it says it downloads the size of the GW2 folder remains the same.

I cant work out why it isn't working for me and would greatly appreciate if anyone could shed any light on this for me.

When dealing with some online games where you have to re-install the game for what ever reason. It was simple as copying the whole game folder back to your computer and run the EXE launcher.

How ever there is some online games where you have to install the launcher and let the launcher update. Once it get's to downloading the game files stop it and at that point you can copy over the game DIR backup you made and over write any files it asks you if any.

It appears to be downloading game files, however the gw2.dat file is there still (40.1gb of it). I've let it download 1gb tonight (it took hours) and yet the game directory is the same size as it was when I first tried transferring the gw2.dat file over, so where is it saving all this data to? the amount on my hard drive is definitely increasing but its not saving into the guild wars 2 folder

GW2 should be downloading to the same folder it's located in. If the Gw2.dat in your folder isn't being used by GW2, then it's probably running out of the %temp% folder. This can happen when you're either running Gw2Setup.exe (Gw2.exe -allowinstall) or have Gw2.exe located on a drive it doesn't support, such as an SD card. To find out where it's running from, press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open the task manager, find GW2 under the processes, right click it and open its file location.

The gw2.dat is in the gw2 folder, the same as gw2.exe I have deleted every temp file I can find to ensure its not going anywhere else. The folder is on a SSD, whereas the pc I copied it from has an old HHD, other than that there is no difference.The gw2.dat does seem to show it had been modified every time I launch the installer but its size remains the same.

Replying via my other account.

Does your client try to download files when you start the game? Or, only when you try to copy the .dat file?Usually, when copying the .dat file and .exe file (make sure it is for GW2-64, rather than GW2 [unless you don't have a 64-bit OS]), you can stop the initial download after a few minutes, and then start the game.

Good luck.

Whenever I start the game it downloads files, if I wait a few minutes and replace the dat file it starts downloading again when I start the game again.

Thanks for the good luck but I feel this is a weird glitch that might be beyond me not letting the days of download occur.

It's so weird though I really want to understand what's going wrong.

@redjowl.2816 said:The gw2.dat does seem to show it had been modified every time I launch the installer but its size remains the same.

The size won't change until it needs to make the file bigger. It probably couldn't read the file you copied properly, so it treated it as garbage data and is overwriting it. If you want to try again, rename Gw2.dat and try launching GW2 to confirm a new Gw2.dat is created, then exit and copy over the original Gw2.dat and launch with -repair. If the other computer is still functional, first use -repair on it and confirm GW2 is still working, then quickly compress Gw2.dat before transferring it over, just to confirm it's not corrupted during the transfer.

You could also try copying %appdata%/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat, which generally isn't needed, but it does include patch information.

The thing is the game is working fine on the other pc which I copy the data from and I've tried multiple times now to copy it again using different memory sticks in case it somehow got corrupted via transfer.

I tried the renaming and relaunching and it did create a new .dat file but it still won't accept the other PC's .dat file and redownloads when I replace the new .dat with the 40gb one.

Im thinking it somehow must be to do with file permissions but I couldn't get it to work even with trying to copy what .dat was set to on the working pc.