Reinstalling GW2 ?

[MiMaMark.3720]

Hi all,I have a question about reinstalling GW2. I am a player that installed GW2 since the begining.But the .dat file is now almost 46 GB large.Is it a good idea to re-install the whole game or will this only have a minor advantage ?

Thanks in advance.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

Mine is 42 GB, and is like 8 months old (estimated). So you can reclaim a few gigabytes of disk space by re-installing. Please not that it may take long to download such a large archive.

[Skotlex.7580]

unless you change your language settings, deleting and patching won't affect your data file size.

Those additional gb are probably due to voice files of other languages.

When in doubt: just patch what you had, and at the end run a "-repair" call to check consistency of the file.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

@"Skotlex.7580" said:unless you change your language settings, deleting and patching won't affect your data file size.

Those additional gb are probably due to voice files of other languages.

When in doubt: just patch what you had, and at the end run a "-repair" call to check consistency of the file.

Not (entirely) true, old GW2.dat files will contain some space filled with old content that is no longer in use. If you re-download the entire thing, you will get a new GW2.dat file with only the contents that are used by the current game, saving a bit of disk space.

[Skotlex.7580]

@TheQuickFox.3826 said:

@"Skotlex.7580" said:unless you change your language settings, deleting and patching won't affect your data file size.

Those additional gb are probably due to voice files of other languages.

When in doubt: just patch what you had, and at the end run a "-repair" call to check consistency of the file.

Not (entirely) true, old GW2.dat files will contain some space filled with old content that is no longer in use. If you re-download the entire thing, you will get a new GW2.dat file with only the contents that are used by the current game, saving a bit of disk space.

Right, this mostly covers LS1, right? Because pretty much everything added afterwards wasn't temporary.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

@Skotlex.7580 said:

@TheQuickFox.3826 said:

@Skotlex.7580 said:unless you change your language settings, deleting and patching won't affect your data file size.

Those additional gb are probably due to voice files of other languages.

When in doubt: just patch what you had, and at the end run a "-repair" call to check consistency of the file.

Not (entirely) true, old GW2.dat files will contain some space filled with old content that is no longer in use. If you re-download the entire thing, you will get a new GW2.dat file with only the contents that are used by the current game, saving a bit of disk space.

Right, this mostly covers LS1, right? Because pretty much everything added afterwards wasn't temporary.

Well, it is more complex than this. To fully answer this, you will need to know how the updater works. And I don't.Here is a guesstimate: Let's say: A 5MB large weapon skin gets updated in the game. The new skin is 6MB. The new skin won't fit in the location withing GW2.dat of the old file, so it is written to the end of the file instead, making the file 6MB larger. This ensures low internal fragmentation (the new skin is still in one location) and prevents many GB to be relocated, which would take many hours on slower systems. At the cost of a 5MB gap. Maybe this gap is later reused for another small item, but over time there will be many small gaps of wasted space.

if you redownload, the game creates a new, empty GW2.dat and fills it with all of the current contents, written one after each other without any gaps. Over time, new gaps will be created of course.