Game problem, PC problem or something else?

[Danikat.8537]

I was doing the Serpent's Ire meta event, so there were a lot of people around but no more than usual for a big event and I had no noticeable lag or other issues. Close to the end I was south of the main group attacking a branded crystal, so the two bosses and the majority of players were off-screen behind me, but the crystals waves of purple attacks were on screen and I was kiting around it. Just as I killed it there was a bright flash of purple then my screen went black.

At first I thought the event had finished and maybe there was a cut scene or something (I've not done it often and not for a while, I don't know if there is or not), those can take a few seconds to load for me so I didn't think anything of it until the 'No signal' message came up on my screen and it went into power saving mode, meaning it had lost it's connection with the PC. I could still hear the music and ambient sound from GW2 coming from the speakers but nothing else and nothing I tried - wiggling the mouse, alt+tab, ctrl+alt+del etc. worked to get the screen back on. I had to restart the computer to get it back on.

The PC restarted fine and apart from missing the final reward for the event it doesn't appear to have had any impact on the game, but I'm not sure what could have happened and I'm concerned it might be a problem with my PC. Has anyone else experienced anything like that, and do you know if it's a problem with the game or possibly something on my end?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Black screen, can't do anything but quit with Windows, or worse?
Yes, you can find threads about it.
I had it for about 2-3 weeks, and then it cleared up (seemed to be connection issues; probably Tier 1 issues).

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

That could be a couple of things. You could pull up the windows error logs (which might or might not be helpful). I'd file that one into the "if it doesn't happen again, it's nothing to worry about" category. And if it does, then you'll have more data about the preceding events.

If you want to do something that feels more proactive, you can

• Reseat your cables, i.e. with power off, unplug and replug the computer power cable, monitor cables, etc.
• Repair the client
• After repairing, copy the gw2.dat file. Delete the old and rename the new one to that name.
• Clean the computer innards of dust and reseat the GPU, maybe the RAM.
• Do some Pingplotter checks periodically to see if your getting good throughput to Virginia AWS (the amazon servers where GW2 is hosted).

Those are obviously unrelated generic steps that cover the "could be a couple of things" scenarios. Repair the client, for example, would handle corrupted files (one of which might have been triggered during the confusion), while reseating cables or components takes care of potential connection issues. And duping the file sometimes helps because the .dat is huge and windows can't always keep it from being fragmented. The initial copied file (assuming sufficient space) should be contiguous, which helps reduce access times... and that is sometimes enough to prevent the game from hiccuping.

There are some more serious potential root causes; I personally don't think your symptoms are frequent or severe enough to warrant a more thorough investigation.

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tl;dr probably nothing to worry about (not exactly). It can't hurt to do some proactive steps. Either way, keep an eye peeled.