Leamas.5803

If you're still having this issue and haven't fully resolved it, try downclocking your video card (5-10%), even if it's a factory overclock. I had this exact same issue years ago, same freezing with a colored screen and audio loop, requiring a hard reboot. I fought with it for a LONG time and went through all the same debugging steps with temperature monitoring and load testing various pieces of hardware, and even brought it in to the shop for service and bench testing...twice, since it was still under warranty. Nothing was ever found other than some bad memory, which was replaced. GW2 seems to be "sensitive" to overclocked hardware and there used to be an old posting from Arenanet somewhere on the forum that says as much. Downclocking, not only improved, but completely resolved the crashing issues for me. If it crashed it was because I forgot to do the downclock. I used a program called nVidia Inspector to do it. Not sure if it's been updated or works on newer cards, but any software that lets you adjust the GPU clock would be fine. Really, can't hurt to try.

Restarting my router seems to have fixed it, even though my Internet was working for everything else. 🤷‍♂️

As the subject suggests, the client won't update. Just sits there with a high CPU/power usage and says "Downloading 0KB (0KB/sec)". I tried adding the "-repair" flag and no good. Any ideas? Is Arenanet having issues, maybe? Behaviour is the same on both my PCs and my laptop. I don't play every day, but I know it was working last week some time.

Try downclocking your video card slightly. 5-8% reduction. When I was having crashing issues with GW2, this completely stabilized the game for me...absolutely zero crashes. To to this I used nVidia Inspector, but any tool that can adjust GPU clocks should be sufficient.

The other option, of course, is that perhaps my ISP changed, or fixed, something on their end. That would explain the behavior and living in rural Canada, would explain the lack of activity about this on the forum, but you'd think that would have affected other games or Internet services as well.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 @TheQuickFox.3826While there were no mention of crash fixes in yesterday's update release notes, it seems to have resolved the issue. Synapse does not appear to have been a factor as it was not installed on the 3rd machine, yet the crashing went away after the patch none the less. No other changes were made to this 3rd machine. GW2 appears to now be working properly on all 3 machines. It's running on my laptop now as a test as I have had the crashing go away briefly before, only to return the next day.

So, I'm unsure what the cause was as there was a large game update today, however, after the update, and removing Synapse on both the main PC and the laptop the game seems to have stabilized. Both have remained up for over 30 minutes without a black screen. On the laptop, I did attempt to the launch the game after the update, but still encountered the greyed out start button on the character select screen. That went away after I removed Synapse, but removing Synapse fixing it might have been a fluke. I'll have to exit and reenter the game a few times as the greyed out start button was a random issue. That said, if Synapse was the cause, rather than the patch being the fix, then the game has an issue than needs to be addressed. Synapse should not affect the game like that. I'll leave the laptop running for a while, then I'll test the 3rd machine and leave Synapse installed.

Do we know which ports need to be open and connectable? I recently installed updates for my Ubiquiti router and switches. I wonder if that update did something...although everything else works...Apex, Rust, Minecraft, etc...

Yes, it looks just like that, but nothing software-wise has changed on any of these machines, especially the laptop since literally all I use it for is GW2 and Zoom, and certainly not all at the same time, unless it's related to a Windows update. I'll check the thread out and see if I can can track it down. Thanks.

I've tried removing it from one machine to test, but my son's headset is Razer so it will need to be reinstalled.

I've tried both repair and removing the local.dat. Nothing particular between the 3, other than Steam and the nVidia software, and I typically keep Steam shut down. Razer Synapse, might, be on all three, but that shouldn't affect it and a network issues should give errors, one would think, so I'm kind of at a loss.

It appears the issue I am having is most certainly related to the game in some fashion. I've finally gotten around to testing it on my other machines and all 3 of my machines exhibit the same behavior. DesktopAMD Ryzen 7-3800XnVidia 2080 Super DesktopIntel i7-7700knVidia 1080 LaptopIntel i7 - Early 1st-2nd gennVidia 445M In the screen shot, you can see the screen is black, but I still have a GW2 pointer, which is not frozen and I can move it around and the music still plays in the background, and it will sit like that indefinitely. Action buttons don't do anything. The game is not completely locked up and I can exit via ALT-F4. This will usually happen within a few minutes of loading in to a map. There is a secondary issue which occurs occasionally, where I cannot get past the character select screen. I choose a character, press the start button, which then greys out, but never actually loads a map. So, it would appear, in my thinking, something was changed in the game, back a month, or so, ago, and it doesn't like something with my network or ISP. My ping times are generally decent, averaging under 50ms to Google, my connection speed is more than ample (~25Mbps/16Mbps) for what GW2 requires. Other on-line games that my kids play don't have issues, such as Apex Legends, Rust, Roblox, Minecraft. With the laptop, I have tried running the verify, deleting the local.dat, I've run both Spybot and MalwareBytes. NOTHING ever gets written to any of the log or dump files and nothing applicable seems to be in the Windows event log. I'm kind of at a loss as to what to look at next since it affects all 3 of my machines. Thoughts?

Strangely, it worked all day yesterday after the Spybot scan, and now the black screen is back today, after the update. Running Spybot again to see if something snuck its way back in. The machine was shut down with GW2 yesterday and started up today specifically to run GW2. :s

In that case, you should make sure there is no malware or virus on your system... You should also check the GW2 dump file to see what caused the crash. I think the file is located here (%AppData%\Guild Wars 2\Coherent Dumps) or in the GW2 game installation folder (Crash.dmp). To open it, follow these instructions: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1357225#Comment_1357225 (You could also check your OS health status by following the instructions further down: DISM, SFC.)Hmmm, there was something there that S&D cleaned and the game seems to have stabilized. It's really odd that it would suddenly come up like this. The only things this machine is used for are GW2 and just recently Zoom (Since before XMas). I wonder if there was something pre-existing that a recent game update became sensitive too, or something invasive left behind by the Flash uninstaller.

I don't have any firewall or antivirus installed on that machine, other than what comes with Windows. Nothing has changed on that front and I've used this machine for years. Why would it suddenly become an issue? I also tried running in administrator mode, same issue.