Crash Issues after January 9th Update [MERGED]

[nortask.8351]

well I redownloaded the game and the launcher and it actually passed initialization! I'll let you know if it works and if it crashes once I'm in! This is still on the mac with the HDD for the record

[Gaile Gray.6029]

I posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

If you're experiencing crashes:

1. Are you noticing an increase in crashes in recent days?
2. Can you estimate when the increase happened?
3. Are you using any third-party programs, particularly ArcDPS? Please name any third-party programs you're using in your crash log/report. (We are looking at the crash issue, not the programs you're using, so please feel free to be candid.)
4. If you already have submitted a game report through the crash log, you might consider triggering a new crash so that you can send a report log with the third-party program info in it.

[Sarge shot Grif.6450]

Over the last few months I've had an increase of crashes that would lock the game and my computer up to the point of being forced to ctrl/alt/del and log out, never received a prompt for crash reports with those. In the last week I've been getting multiple crashes a day that do give the prompt and happen for no visible reason, it happens just as much if I'm using the griffon at high speeds or just standing still at a crafting station. Only thing I have running is yolomouse.

[nortask.8351]

they just rolled out an update that broke the game again. I think I fixed it by starting a reinstall, if I have to reinstall for every update I'm out. This 5 year vet is going to swap to a game that doesn't make me download 30+ Gb of data every update. Plus SSDs have limited amount of write cycles that they can handle, if I had to do this on an SSD I would be beyond pissed.

[Tanek.5983]

I have noticed crashes recently (the past 4 days or so? maybe a week? sorry, can't say exactly when they started, but it has not been long). Last crash before that was waaaay back. Maybe over a year.I don't have any 3rd party programs for GW2. Only other things normally running while I play are Chrome, Skype, and Mumble.Don't think I can trigger a crash on purpose, but if it happens again, I'll put in as much info as I can on what I have running, if that helps at all.

[shodannet.7409]

For me the games being freezing, so there's no dialogue to submit a crash report. Started about Halloween last year maybe once a month, but just today doing the joko invasions seen me freeze twice

[Gaile Gray.6029]

@"Tanek.5983" said:I have noticed crashes recently (the past 4 days or so? maybe a week? sorry, can't say exactly when they started, but it has not been long). Last crash before that was waaaay back. Maybe over a year.I don't have any 3rd party programs for GW2. Only other things normally running while I play are Chrome, Skype, and Mumble.Don't think I can trigger a crash on purpose, but if it happens again, I'll put in as much info as I can on what I have running, if that helps at all.

That would be super helpful. And please note in your log notes -- if you get the option to submit a log -- that you are not using any third-party programs. Even "negative input" is helpful in this case. :)

[arendo.6954]

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:I posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

If you're experiencing crashes:

1. Are you noticing an increase in crashes in recent days?
2. Can you estimate when the increase happened?
3. Are you using any third-party programs, particularly ArcDPS? Please name any third-party programs you're using in your crash log/report. (We are looking at the crash issue, not the programs you're using, so please feel free to be candid.)
4. If you already have submitted a game report through the crash log, you might consider triggering a new crash so that you can send a report log with the third-party program info in it.

1 & 2) No increase, it just started happening since Christmas for me. Can be a bunch of crashes in less than an hour, can be no crashes in multiple hours of gametime.3) Not using any GW2 mods (thought it might've been GW2Hook, but deleted that, crashes still happening). I am running RTSS and MSI Afterburner as monitoring software. RTSS is disabled for GW2. I am also running Discord and I noticed the overlay started working, might've been around the same time of the crashing. I have just disabled it, but don't know yet whether that fixes the crashing.4) No crash log, so can't report. The game just freezes, though sound keeps going. I can alt+tab to my second monitor and force close the game through TaskManager and then boot it back up.

The game crashes regardless of area or mounts (as suggested in other threads), it even happens in classic dungeons. I usually play with the same 3 friends (all from the Netherlands) and we 4-man the dungeons. 3 of us have these issues, the 1 person on older hardware, has not had these freezes/crashes. We'd all be on Discord together, but I was the only one with the overlay enabled. I am also the only one that uses MSI Afterburner. I'm also the only one on Windows 10, the others use Windows 7.

When the game crashes, Gw2-64.exe is no longer using any resources (apart from just under 1GB of RAM).

My specs:Windows 10 64-bit HomeAMD Ryzen 7 1700xMSI GTX1080 Gaming X+ 8GB (drivers 388.71)Corsair 16GB DDR4 3200MHz

[Leamas.5803]

Just after Halloween, I started receiving the new crash type, the one where you can recover the system by using ctrl-alt-del to get log out. I haven't received them in any great number and might have gotten one every few days. I think I was in a PoF map for every one. For several weeks previous to that I was finishing up season 3, finishing up some of the HoT mastery stuff I wanted as well as Dark Harvest. There is no crash report since GW2 just locks up and stops responding. I use no overlays, unless the nVidia driver counts that asks me if I want to record the session, no 3rd party applications, no 3rd party antivirus or firewall. I don't even have a chat program installed and typically shut down things that might affect network performance, such as Steam.

There are 3 type of crashes that affect GW2:

1. The oldest and most difficult to debug are the system crashes. These have plagued GW2 since at least the fall of 2012. These are characterized by the entire system completely freezing, requiring a hard reboot (Holding the power in for 5 seconds). The screen changes to a solid blank screen, the color can vary (I've seen at least black, white, red, green, blue), the sound loops. There is a second type of system crash where the computer will either spontaneously reboot itself or simply shut off completely and immediately as if the power was pulled. These crashes are very invasive and random and tend to happen within 30 minutes of starting a session, but can happen with seconds or if one is lucky can go hours. Setting the frame limiter tends to help along with reducing some of the other graphics settings. There is also, typically an nVidia driver (Nvlddmkm) crash in the Windows event viewer at the same time. In my case, down clocking my video card fixed the crashing, but I shouldn't have to resort to that, and it does not help for everyone. I've had large, sprawling posts on these forums over the years related to this issue. These crashes are like Sadako in the movie Ringu (The Ring), once you're cursed, there's no escaping, no matter what you.
2. These are your standard CTD crashes that generate a pretty little report. I haven't experienced these, but I know many have and they often seem to be related to bad or not enough memory.
3. The newest, having surfaced in the fall (2017) is one where GW2 just freezes. The screen just stops moving, but still shows the game, like a screen shot. The music is still playing, or at least seemed to be, and team speak still works (This was noted by someone in another thread). You cannot alt-tab out or use the Windows button to get out, but you can recover the system gracefully by using ctrl-alt-del to log out, which will kill the GW2 process. I don't know if it generates any Windows events as I forgot to look at the time, I'll look to see how far back the logs go. Changing the anti-aliasing to something less intensive seemed to help me, but maybe I was just lucky. As I said, I didn't get them terribly often, but often enough to be annoying.

It's most often that crash types 1 and 3 happen in only GW2 while all other games and apps work fine, bench test and stress utilities work fine, diagnostic utilities all report fine. I can't speak to crash type 2.

System with crash type 3Windows 10 Ultimate with the fall patchi7-7700K16GB RAMeVGA nVidia 1080gtxGW2 installed on an M.2 SSDAll drivers up to date. The machine is less than a year old.

System with crash type 1Windows 10 Ultimate with the fall patchi7-3930K16GB RAMeVGA nVidia 670gtxGW2 installed on a conventional SSDAll drivers up to date. The machine was bought in Dec-2012 and still works fine for everything except GW2, which will still crash the computer if I forget to down clock, at least as of 6 months ago, or so, when I last tried it with the kids.

[Leamas.5803]

@arendo.6954 said:the 1 person on older hardware, has not had these freezes/crashes.

I can corroborate this. I also play on an OLD Dell XPS laptop (XPS L701X) and it has NEVER crashed, not once that I ever remember in 5 years.

Windows 10 Home (Most recent updates)i7-Q740 (1.73GHz - First generation i7)8GB RAMnVidia 445M GTConventional HDD (5400RPM).

[The Dusk.2654]

http://tinypic.com/r/2hy9t75/9I just bought the game on 1/12/2018 and am getting crashes on the same spot of the sparking the flame mission in story...

[alucardromero.9172]

I wouldn't say that I'm having crashes but recently I am freezing for several seconds and then going back to normal regardless of what I'm doing. Doesn't last for more than five seconds. It's not specific to any kind of map. I'm also noticing sound is acting a bit wonky too... certain sound effects will cease for several seconds and resume. The graphics freezing and sound ceasing do not happen at the same time. I have played around with graphics settings, even going as far as selecting "Best Performance" and freezing doesn't occur as often but still happens on a minuscule level.

I want to say this has started happening around the time of the whole Meltdown/Spectre scare. I believe Microsoft may have been responsible with one of the patches they've forcefully pushed out to mitigate that, but I honestly cannot say for sure. I'll uninstall all December and January updates and see if that makes a difference and report back.

I've ran a memory stability test and results were fine, no erroneous modules. All 4 CPU Cores and all 8 threads are working. Drivers for everything else are up to date.

ASUS Maximus VI HeroIntel Core i7 4770K @ 3.5GHz32GB RAM @ 800MHzGeForce GTX 960 w/ 2GB VRAMWindows 10 x64 ProUSB Intravenious Coffee Delivery System (J/K :P)

[The Dusk.2654]

was going to spend a great deal of money on this game since my income just came in, but the game on path of fire continues to crash so I don't see it as worth it anymore unfortunately.

[johnnymiller.5968]

Not played gw2 on a regular basis for quite some time, up until the last couple of weeks. My game was very stable in the past. Now my game crashes constantly on Windows 10 64 bit. I've run multiple repairs, deleted the dat file, adjusted settings, none of which made any difference.Game suddenly freezes & crashes. Almost crashes when exiting water where the chests are located at the forgotten city in Auric Basin, gets a mini freeze. Other times the client simply stops working and closes. No crash reports are generated.I do not run any 3rd party programs for this game.Use 64bit game client.Also run the game on windows 7. The game seems to be far more stable on windows 7, so far.System:i5 347016gb ddr3 memoryR9 380 4gbWindows 10 64 bitWindows 7 64 bitBoth hard drives are conventional 7200rpm 1tb drives

[Heksaeder.5807]

@"Gaile Gray.6029" said:I posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

If you're experiencing crashes:

1. Are you noticing an increase in crashes in recent days?
2. Can you estimate when the increase happened?
3. Are you using any third-party programs, particularly ArcDPS? Please name any third-party programs you're using in your crash log/report. (We are looking at the crash issue, not the programs you're using, so please feel free to be candid.)
4. If you already have submitted a game report through the crash log, you might consider triggering a new crash so that you can send a report log with the third-party program info in it.

1. Clearly, a crash every 10-15mn as I log in.
2. Probably since the last update, january 10th I guess, since I didn't log in for quite a while now.
3. I used to, without any problems occuring, but I don't anymore and deleted all the files.
4. And I can't report any crash log since the client stops working instantly, that "report window" with it.

[Kumbaya.4689]

@vpchelko.4261 said:it's arcdps

No, it's not.

[Leamas.5803]

@BobbyT.7192 said:

@vpchelko.4261 said:it's arcdps

And for those that don’t have that?

Exactly. I use no overlays and no monitoring tools outside of what is delivered with Windows and the nVidia drivers.

[Yoroiookami.3485]

@nortask.8351 said:well I redownloaded the game and the launcher and it actually passed initialization! I'll let you know if it works and if it crashes once I'm in! This is still on the mac with the HDD for the recordI deleted the game and re-downloaded it just like you, hoping it would help. It worked, for some reason.Support wanted me to fiddle with my router, but since I didn't want to do that (it seemed irrelevant) I just did what you did. Now I'm hoping it won't stop working again after anet decides to release a major update. It happened to me once before. I don't want to download the game once a month.

[Erulogos.2591]

Anyone getting freezing rather than outright crashing, look in %appdata%\Guild Wars 2\ for ArenaNet.log (at least on Win10.) At least in my case, the many freezes are logged as crashes there.

[nortask.8351]

@Yoroiookami.3485 said:

@nortask.8351 said:well I redownloaded the game and the launcher and it actually passed initialization! I'll let you know if it works and if it crashes once I'm in! This is still on the mac with the HDD for the recordI deleted the game and re-downloaded it just like you, hoping it would help. It worked, for some reason.Support wanted me to fiddle with my router, but since I didn't want to do that (it seemed irrelevant) I just did what you did. Now I'm hoping it won't stop working again after anet decides to release a major update. It happened to me once before. I don't want to download the game once a month.

Yea I posted on a different thread that I have had to redownload it at every little patch that anet rolls out. So yea I'm pissed.

[Heksaeder.5807]

So, as surprising as it is, I didn't get any crash since more than 30mn (instead of a crash every 10mn one hour ago). Speaking of arcdps, I remembered an issue with the d3d9.dll file. I re-uploaded it from arcdps website and replaced it in my gw2 folder, and it seems to work perfectly.

[shodannet.7409]

What about those where the game just freezes? We're unable to submit any sort of debug info to Anet to look at

[Kercie TelMic.6785]

So, my partner and I (using two different brands of equipment) are experiencing fairly regular DCing (to be clear - game freezes...then a disconnect message appears). Sometimes it will go back to the Character Select screen... and sometimes it just totally disconnects. This began only today...I'm guessing with today's small build.... This is really getting annoying!!! ANET, you MUST fix this!

Update: I just had the freeze happen on the Character Select page....

Further update: Now my game client doesn't load completely.... So...is it ArenaNet? Or Wonderful Windows? I should not have to reload the game in either case. That is incredibly annoying!!!

[johnnymiller.5968]

Had my first crash on windows 7 about 20 minutes ago. Was in the process of traveling to world vs world when the client stopped working. I have decided to reinstall the game to see if it makes any difference.

[Andy.5981]

Since November 2017 I've had occasion where my machine would simply freeze within GW2. I'm not running any screen recording software (such as Nvidia Shadowplay). I'm not running any third party add-ons to GW such as Discord or TeamSpeak. No DPS monitoring - nothing. No other program freezes the machine.

It isn't the fastest machine in the world, its an old Intel Q6600 (quad core running at stock speed which is 2.4ghz), graphics card is a Asus Nvidia GTX 970 with 4Gb memory and again running at stock speeds. Hard drives are a 1tb SSD which as Windows 10 and GW2 installed upon it, along with other software.

When running GW2 nothing else is running.

I've taken part in Bounty Hunts/Legendary kills with lots of players around but every so often it just locks completely. One occasion I was in Istan near the Guildhall. Just finished the Legendary Smoldge fight and GH started - headed over towards the gate. Quite a few players waiting outside. No problem. Event started, quite a few players swooped down with Mounts. Screen froze solid.

Its a combination of too many textures/character/mount meshes that's causing this. It isn't specific to lower end machines either, since some seriously higher spec machines have been having the same issue (see the thread that has been in existence since November in the Account/Technical Support Subforum).

Someone mentioned that they have seen crashes being caused by people mounting and dismounting the 'star' effect Griffon? Maybe that is a separate issue but who knows.

Istan definitely has some FSP issues, on occasion something happens in zone where everything slows down for a few seconds.

One thing I need to bring up Gaile, is the following. When your programmers test these things, I suspect they're done on an internal network with your own in house servers, using some quite nicely specified machines? Have they noticed these issues whilst playtesting? If not how about getting some mid spec machines, install GW2 on them as we would do and then (keeping them separate from your internal network), patch them from an external cable or asdl connection so that they have to connect to whichever server farm is used nearest to your base and then try playing the game. You'll probably see what players have had to endure for some time.