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@Randulf.7614 said:From Feb 18th you can use GeForce Now instead if on a Mac

Is it working fine? I have my concerns, I use my Mac for work a lot and gaming on occasion. I don't see myself buying another computer just to play some games for 2 hours a week.

It is still a bit painful not to have GW2 as an option... especially with the incoming expack

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@NotTooFoolish.7412 said:

@Randulf.7614 said:From Feb 18th you can use GeForce Now instead if on a Mac

Is it working fine? I have my concerns, I use my Mac for work a lot and gaming on occasion. I don't see myself buying another computer just to play some games for 2 hours a week.

It is still a bit painful not to have GW2 as an option... especially with the incoming expack

I have no idea. I'm just clarifying for the OP that there are other options based on what tha nnouncement said. I have seen some positive commenst on Gw2 on GeForce Now, but I've no experience myself

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The most logical reason i can come up with is that the Mac platform is only used by a tiny part compared to MS windows on pc/laptop with intel/amd. It is not worth the cost or time. A native client that is. A emulation would always cause many bugs and anomalies and is it worth/viable to support that, not in my opinion.

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Guild Wars 2 ran perfectly well on the new M1 Macbooks, I even made a video on it

Cutting off Mac users is a very disappointing move by Arenanet. I am angry that they are completely shutting down the game for OSX users when there have been no issues with playing the game on both Intel and M1 processors.

@Veprovina.4876 said:

@"Vangalter.5210" said:

They're dropping it because Apple is making it impossible to code cross platform for developers.I thought Universal2 was there to make it easier.They're moving to proprietary chips and an entirely different architecture that current code doesn't work on well,The game currently runs fine under Rosetta2Apple is not known for supporting their older systems
Looks at 2013 Macs on macOS 11.1
And they're not about to code a new client from scratch just to accomodate Apple's stuffYeah, i understand that, i mentioned it in the post. Regardless, isnt it a wine wrapper anyway? And i'm not asking for them to build a new client, im asking for them to keep using it until option (1) or (2) happen.Sure it kinda still works now, but one new Apple chip later andthe support for the current OS is gone.The option (1) of what could happen, yes, but why not maintain it until then?Apple is dead set on making developer's lives harder with the decision they madeI mean, not really? They've been building up Swift for like half a decade and it's great for coding. Open source, too. And Catalyst helps being multiplatform.that means double the work for every update of GW2Again, thought it was a wine wrapper so it shouldnt require much maintenance if any at all >.< (please correct me if im wrong)Linux at least is bridging the gap between Windows and Linux. Apple is widening it.M$ has been trying for years to build ARM machines and native ARM windows. Linux has a huge technological investment in ARM as well. But this is besides the point.

Oops sorry, didn't notice the post.

Look, just look at my previous post and you'll see the reason.The game might currently run fine and all, but the fact is, it's a wonder support lasted for as long as it did.Anet, from what i read (bits and pieces), is no longer staffed like they used to be. With covid and all the kitten that's happening right now i can't imagine they would be.

Whatever the new chip is, Universal2, etc., the fact still remains that they're doubling the work basically for a very small userbase.

Case in point:

Did Guild wars really work on M1? Cause from reading the comments, it didn't, and Apple made it clear they're moving to that type of chip going forward...That means coding from scratch for Anet... And if that's the case, i don't see how Universal2 or whatever made it easier.GW2 might run fine now, but even Anet said in their post (i think), that in the future it's probably not going to work, in future OS updates.

Wine is fiddly. Just look at Linux for that. Every new update to linux can and will mess up wine. Every linux distro, every distro version, all need slightly different wine settings, wine versions, etc. to make something work. That all has been managed by Anet so far, and it's still a lot of work for "just a wine wrapper". Anyone who messed with wine on Linux will tell you it's not that simple. It's not just the same client but with wine slapped on it and it "just works". There's tons of other stuff that needs doing for something to reliably work with wine. And every new update requires that process all over again.

Bottom line is - it's probably too much work for a company that has less staff than it used to, and they're dropping support so they can focus on what needs fixing in game.And there's a LOT that needs fixing. Performance for instance. It runs laughably bad on laughably overpowered hardware for such an old game.

I mean, don't get me wrong, i'd love for everyone to have everything available for every platform, but that's just not viable.

Besides, while Anet is dropping support for GW2, that doesn't mean people can't pick it up and make the windows client work on a Mac with Wine... That's what pepople do on Linux so... Unless the new M1 chip won't allow it. Wine is a windows wrapper after all, and windows is coded for the style of chips that are in PCs now, that architecture. M1 chip is very much different from that so it's really a gamble if it'll work and when. Nonetheless, i'm sure someone will figure out a way soon enough, and Mac users will be able to play GW2 on Macs again, just not in an "official" capacity.
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There's a solution I can see (I like solutions), and that's to compile Wine64 for Intel architecture under Rosetta, and then to run Guild Wars 2 via Wine via Rosetta. If Apple's Silicon is as good as they say, it shouldn't struggle too much. I'm not being ironic or sarcastic there. This should actually be a viable solution if the chip can pump out enough performance.

A lot of the legwork has been done getting Wine to run on Catalina by stripping out the 32-bit elements. This means you won't be able to run 32-bit apps, but thankfully GW2 has a 64-bit downloader, launcher, and client. So that's a non-issue. I imagine that anything that can be compiled for Intel Catalina can be compiled with Rosetta, yes?

This is what I've managed to piece together after some cursory looking around.

For those who're already on Intel Macs and don't plan to upgrade soon, I'd recommend running Guild Wars 2 via Wine. It'd be a bit of a fiddle to setup but the performance should be alright there, too. I believe DXVK support is coming along nicely too, so that makes the situation even better.

What I will recommend is downloading the entire client first. The performance can be terrible if you don't do that, just as a warning. It's not guaranteed to be terrible, perhaps especially if you have a high-end SSD, but it is... likely.

I don't own a Mac, mind you. I just like researching things.

Here comes an edit.

@loseridoit.2756 said:Linux players probably have a better GW2 experience than many Windows players.

Just wanted to add... Yes. This is actually true. Guild Wars 2 runs better on my Linux partition than on my Windows one. It loads faster, it has less frame dips in crowded areas... It's weird. I can only guess it's down to Gallium9, but I dunno!

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@"akcsl.8501" said:Guild Wars 2 ran perfectly well on the new M1 Macbooks, I even made a video on it

Cutting off Mac users is a very disappointing move by Arenanet. I am angry that they are completely shutting down the game for OSX users when there have been no issues with playing the game on both Intel and M1 processors.

@"Vangalter.5210" said:

They're dropping it because Apple is making it impossible to code cross platform for developers.I thought Universal2 was there to make it easier.They're moving to proprietary chips and an entirely different architecture that current code doesn't work on well,The game currently runs fine under Rosetta2Apple is not known for supporting their older systems
Looks at 2013 Macs on macOS 11.1
And they're not about to code a new client from scratch just to accomodate Apple's stuffYeah, i understand that, i mentioned it in the post. Regardless, isnt it a wine wrapper anyway? And i'm not asking for them to build a new client, im asking for them to keep using it until option (1) or (2) happen.Sure it kinda still works now, but one new Apple chip later andthe support for the current OS is gone.The option (1) of what could happen, yes, but why not maintain it until then?Apple is dead set on making developer's lives harder with the decision they madeI mean, not really? They've been building up Swift for like half a decade and it's great for coding. Open source, too. And Catalyst helps being multiplatform.that means double the work for every update of GW2Again, thought it was a wine wrapper so it shouldnt require much maintenance if any at all >.< (please correct me if im wrong)Linux at least is bridging the gap between Windows and Linux. Apple is widening it.M$ has been trying for years to build ARM machines and native ARM windows. Linux has a huge technological investment in ARM as well. But this is besides the point.

Oops sorry, didn't notice the post.

Look, just look at my previous post and you'll see the reason.The game might currently run fine and all, but the fact is, it's a wonder support lasted for as long as it did.Anet, from what i read (bits and pieces), is no longer staffed like they used to be. With covid and all the kitten that's happening right now i can't imagine they would be.

Whatever the new chip is, Universal2, etc., the fact still remains that they're doubling the work basically for a very small userbase.

Case in point:

Did Guild wars really work on M1? Cause from reading the comments, it didn't, and Apple made it clear they're moving to that type of chip going forward...That means coding from scratch for Anet... And if that's the case, i don't see how Universal2 or whatever made it easier.GW2 might run fine now, but even Anet said in their post (i think), that in the future it's probably not going to work, in future OS updates.

Wine is fiddly. Just look at Linux for that. Every new update to linux can and will mess up wine. Every linux distro, every distro version, all need slightly different wine settings, wine versions, etc. to make something work. That all has been managed by Anet so far, and it's still a lot of work for "just a wine wrapper". Anyone who messed with wine on Linux will tell you it's not that simple. It's not just the same client but with wine slapped on it and it "just works". There's tons of other stuff that needs doing for something to reliably work with wine. And every new update requires that process all over again.

Bottom line is - it's probably too much work for a company that has less staff than it used to, and they're dropping support so they can focus on what needs fixing in game.And there's a LOT that needs fixing. Performance for instance. It runs laughably bad on laughably overpowered hardware for such an old game.

I mean, don't get me wrong, i'd love for everyone to have everything available for every platform, but that's just not viable.

Besides, while Anet is dropping support for GW2, that doesn't mean people can't pick it up and make the windows client work on a Mac with Wine... That's what pepople do on Linux so... Unless the new M1 chip won't allow it. Wine is a windows wrapper after all, and windows is coded for the style of chips that are in PCs now, that architecture. M1 chip is very much different from that so it's really a gamble if it'll work and when. Nonetheless, i'm sure someone will figure out a way soon enough, and Mac users will be able to play GW2 on Macs again, just not in an "official" capacity.

And yet you completely ignored everything else i said.I said tt runs fine now... Your video is a pointless argument since no one is debating that.The problem is Anet's staff, covid and future apple architecture gating.

But whatever, forget it, i'm happy you like your Mac but the fact still remains, Anet did what they did for various reasons explained in this thread, and other threads that talk about this so, if you want to mindlessly post one super specific irrelevant argument, it's your time.

Good luck in the future, trying to get GW2 to work on ARM chips! :+1:And i really mean it, i'm not trying to be sarcastic here, i really hope someone finds a way to run GW2 consistently on future Apple hardware.

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I think it's worth trying to compile Wine64 with DXVK under Rosetta and running GW2 via that. If the Silicon is really up to it, that could provide even more performance given that—as I understand it—the Mac client is outdated and underperforming anyway. The nice thing is that if that works, it'll continue to work for as long as Guild Wars 2 exists. Linux users already have to do this, after all.

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What about the announcement was unclear? GW2 Mac Client uses a specific kernel to work. Apple no longer uses that kernel and is removing it from current systems. Therefore GW2 Mac client doesn't work. So they have the choice: rebuild it from scratch or abandon it. They chose not to rebuild it.

The fact that you can easily mod it back to functioning is irrelevant and, quite frankly, probably why they chose not to bother.

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@Veprovina.4876 said:Wow, Apple really hates its users doesn't it?I mean, just by the way of making it super hard for developers to do anything without them looking over it like a fussy mother.And now they're closing their systems even more which means, soon, you won't be able to do anything on a MAC that didn't come out of Apple directly.

Why people continue to support Apple is beyond me...

Because it is flat out a more stable and superior operating system. And yes I say that from an informed position of having worked in IT on Windows for well over a decade.

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@"TamX.1870" said:Yes, I was wondering if mac users can play with Linux and as pointed out above, it should be possible. I have played GW2 and other games under Linux with Wine for years. It is not always perfect, but it definitely works.

Unless you buy a mac with an Apple CPU it's an overpriced computer basically (which is why "Hackintosh" implementations exist). You can install Windows or Linux on them.

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@Vangalter.5210 said:

@Infusion.7149 said:If you don't understand it likely means you've never run a business or had to manage multiple code paths.

I wouldn’t expect most of the player base to do this. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

If you feel the need to feel condescending, it likely means you should keep it to yourself.

Also, it doesn’t add anything to the conversation. ?

What do you mean by that? It's not up to player base to manage code lol, nor is the majority of the player bas on Macs.

@Infusion.7149 mentioned that for anet to keep supporting Macs, they'd need to have teams for PC and Mac version to manage both codes at the same time. They weren't condescending, just probably spoke from experience. And it definitely adds to the conversation.

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I've been playing for almost 6 years.I can continue possibly if I go through Nvidia meaning I can play one hour a day for free or I can pay another amount to buy a membership.Not sure what I will be doing.You can blame Apple & there might me some truth to it but that's between the businesses.Where does it leave the player?

Koda the judge & kodan the jury

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@"Gyro.9182" said:I also notice that the posting said that For the time being, Mac users can still play Guild Wars 2 using the Nvidia GeForce Now service while streaming over the Internet. (Apart from the fact that this costs money, and I am not sure how well it will work depending on your Internet connection, the for the time being means "this will probably end at any point in time, perhaps soon, and perhaps with little advance warning".

I don't think Anet is going to sunset GeForce Now support anytime soon. Especially after GW2 Reddit asked them to explicitly opt into it in sometime last summer. However, GeForce Now is kind of a "beta" product right now (that's why it's super cheap), and it's not clear whether Nvidia will be able to keep it going for long.

If you're wondering what it's like to actually use it, I'll quote myself from the other thread:

Feedback's pretty simple:

  1. Input lag is manageable as long as you're close to the data centers.
  2. When the game would normally drop frames (rotating the screen quickly in the middle of a busy WvW battle, for instance) you tend to get massive tearing.
  3. Anet constantly locks your account due to IP address changes.

(Their support staff is nice about unlocking you, and reasonably quick, but they really need to fix that third one.)

tbh I'm likely to run an emulation wrapper before I go back to GeForce Now.

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This issue definitely lies on Apple's side.My best advice for anyone would be to just ditch the overpriced Apple products.

But you could always try that Windows emulator (at least it sounds like one to me) TheQuickFox.3826 mentioned, as long as it's still usable.

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To expand on the above comment, Arenanet likely has zero developers with experience developing for Macs let alone with a newly released M1 chip. Considering the former lead engine developer has left and there hasn't been a port to vulkan (which would allow for MoltenVK to translate Vulkan to Metal), plus no experience by anyone outside Apple working with the M1 silicon consider this "complaint" an exercise in futility. There's only one person listed explicitly as an engine programmer currently (who has 3 years experience at Arenanet in that function) which is why as I stated in another thread complaining about needing a new engine is far less likely than incremental improvements to the main thread (in addition to network improvements that are not clientside).

A MMO is built to cater to the most users as possible and any investment is made conservatively. They will not and should not (especially as NCSoft is publicly traded company) develop for an existing player-base of below 3% and an unknown quantity that may or may not be supported in the future. Under NCsoft's leadership Arenanet are more likely to develop for ARM than for an Apple M1 chip given their existing portfolio of products does support ARM (Lineage 2 M for example). Ensuring compatibility would be entirely at their managerial discretion: there's a huge difference between supporting something and simply allowing for compatibility (as opposed to the program shutting down when a certain translation layer , operating system, or application is detected : see games with anti-cheat mechanisms that simply do not run outside Windows).

Arenanet has not said anyone on Mac OS cannot play the game. They stated they will not support any users with issues and it's no surprise given the complaint thread this past month by someone getting support information that was incorrect or outdated. It's the same as if you use D912pxy, dxvk on Linux , arcdps, Taco markers, etc. A developer even offered suggestions of workarounds (Boot Camp, Parallels, VMWare Fusion, Geforce Now) which are very reasonable and then very generously offered refunds to a portion of affected users. This is quite reasonable considering people are using Autodesk products on Macs via Parallels desktop and Autodesk has a huge budget.

I feel as though Apple users are used to the entitlement of iOS on phones because iPhones have a significant marketshare in the USA. Outside of the USA, the lion's share of the market is actually low to mid-end Android phones. In the computing market , however, outside of the media and entertainment industry iOS isn't a bulk of the user-base.

To put in layman's terms: the Concorde was a supersonic jet that could travel faster than any other commercial airliner. It was discontinued because of economics. And that was after being a proven product/service.

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@Moira Shalaar.5620 said:

@"Veprovina.4876" said:Wow, Apple really hates its users doesn't it?I mean, just by the way of making it super hard for developers to do anything without them looking over it like a fussy mother.And now they're closing their systems even more which means, soon, you won't be able to do anything on a MAC that didn't come out of Apple directly.

Why people continue to support Apple is beyond me...

Because it is flat out a more stable and superior operating system. And yes I say that from an informed position of having worked in IT on Windows for well over a decade.

Happy informed gaming then :lol:

"having worked in IT on windows" just says nothing about your expertise btw. You could as well sit in an office and be "the guy to connect the cables, install software and restart pc to fix a bug" and it would still mean you "have worked in IT on windows".

...and it's almost as if that "stability" is something you gain by apple closing itself off from others, which is a direct cause of... well, threads like this one. Stability by exclusivity non-inclusivity, waow.

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@"Sobx.1758" said:

Happy informed gaming then :lol:

"having worked in IT on windows" just says nothing about your expertise btw. You could as well sit in an office and be "the guy to connect the cables, install software and restart pc to fix a bug" and it would still mean you "have worked in IT on windows".

...and it's almost as if that "stability" is something you gain by apple closing itself off from others, which is a direct cause of... well, threads like this one. Stability by exclusivity non-inclusivity, waow.

Yup, that description cold be applied to my minimalist statement, but it is not applicable to me nor my actual experience. I could post my resume to back that up, but I doubt anyone would care anyway. I do not disagree that Apple has made its own decisions that have directly contributed to this situation being what it is. That does not change the fact that the OS is more stable than Windows.

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@Moira Shalaar.5620 said:

@"Sobx.1758" said:

Happy informed gaming then :lol:

"having worked in IT on windows" just says nothing about your expertise btw. You could as well sit in an office and be "the guy to connect the cables, install software and restart pc to fix a bug" and it would still mean you "have worked in IT on windows".

...and it's almost as if that "stability" is something you gain by apple closing itself off from others, which is a direct cause of... well, threads like this one. Stability by
exclusivity
non-inclusivity, waow.

Yup, that description cold be applied to my minimalist statement, but it is not applicable to me nor my actual experience. I could post my resume to back that up, but I doubt anyone would care anyway. I do not disagree that Apple has made its own decisions that have directly contributed to this situation being what it is. That does not change the fact that the OS is more stable than Windows.

It's only more stable because of the hardware tied to software thing they do. Windows needs to work on thousands of different configurations so as far as the "engineering prowess" is concerned, Windows is far above Apple for doing that. Also, statistics that "measure" that stability don't ever account for systems used to run some tests it's mostly just Apple vs PC. That PC could be from 10 years ago (that still runs Windows) and is probably not very stable, could be 5 different Windows versions, which one was tested, etc... While Apple's stuff only runs on the latest things. They kill any support for older systems as soon as problems start to occur. And there are a lot of problems with Apple software and hardware if you look around the web a bit.

In direct comparisons, Windows is basically on par with MacOS...

I mean, don't get me wrong, i agree, MacOS and Linux are generally more stable than Windows though, it bugs me when those statements are just uttered like a bandwagon when in reality, they come with hundreds of asterisks and addendums that go with them to make them true.

But whatever, i have no horse in the race. It's good that the market has competition and something for everyone. It's just weird to praise Mac for how stable it is for work and servers and whatnot, then complain about gaming on it. That's not what they're for, and Apple, unlike Microsoft, never actively develps tools for gaming, they can focus on oen thing and one thing only while Microsoft has to encompass all of it. So the comparisons of Apple and Microsoft and even Linux are unfair to say the least.

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@"Infusion.7149" said:Arenanet has not said anyone on Mac OS cannot play the game. They stated they will not support any users with issues and it's no surprise given the complaint thread this past month by someone getting support information that was incorrect or outdated.

They explicitly said they're sunsetting the game client:

Starting February 18 , we will be discontinuing support for the Mac OS version of Guild Wars 2. This means the Mac client will no longer work after this date.

You can still find workarounds for running GW2 but it's not as simple as "we give up on support tickets," they're literally turning off users' current client at a specified date.

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