Haven't played for 2 years, what happened?!

As the title states, i haven't been online on GW for several years.
i always enjoyed playing, so i went to check out the (as far as i know) packed towns like kamadan for example.
but it seemed so empty... no spammers selling or what so ever nothing.

what happened? is the game just not so active anymore as it used to be.
or am i just looking in the wrong places.

do know that everywhere i go i got 'xxxx' files remaining on loading screen but that should be over soon.

i want to start playing again, but just concern about the activity now.

can someone tell me a bit whats going on now a days in the land of GW?

Go to the american districts, they're still pretty full. A while ago everyone moved over.

And so i changed district and indeed found more activity thank you!
Still what is the main activity in GW lately? still the same PvE title hunting and SC or mainly PvP now?

Well, for many people it is about Hall of Monuments: http://hom.guildwars2.com

So it is still PvE title hunting, some farming/speed clears.

PvP got some more attention recently.

They added new content last year - War in Kryta & Hearts of the North, and now will be releasing more new content in the next few weeks - Winds of Change.

Other than that just see the posts above.

yeh the american districts are where pretty much all trade is done and PUG groups formed.

You could have a read through the updates page on wiki and just flick through the main bits.

You can download all your missing files in 1 go if you like and put an end to it lol
go to Start and type "run" into the search box and open the run command
Right click you gw desktop icon and select properties for the location of it on your HDD and enter it into the run command looking something like this
"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image

the -image command will then download every file your missing, repeat after major updates.

another thing, windows defrag sucks and won't touch big files like your gw.dat file at near 4Gb, but you .dat file is likely seriously fragmented and "might" be causing you some lag soyou might wanna try this...Inde did a guide for it years ago but i think its disappeared now, fortunately i put it on our forums at the time

Download Power Defragmenter GUI and save it where you can find it easily (Such as the Desktop).

Unzip PowerDefragmenterGUI.zip. Unable to decompress the zip file? You can use 7-Zip to decompress files with ease.

Download Sysinternals' Contig to the same location you saved Power Defragmenter GUI.

Unzip Contig.zip. Browse into the Contig directory and copy the Contig.exe file into the Power Defragmenter GUI folder. The reason? Power Defragmenter GUI is designed to work extremely well with Sysinternals' Contig.

From the Power Defragmenter GUI directory, double click the Power Defragmenter GUI.exe file.

Click Next, then select PowerMode(TM) Disk Defragmentation and click next. The Contig window will open as your hard drive is defragmented. Once Contig completes, the Windows Disk Defragmenter will open in the command line window and defrag your hard drive as well, putting things in the order it sees best fit for your computer. When everything is complete, Power Defragmenter GUI will tell you that it has completed all of its work. You can click Quit/Finish to exit the program.

NOTE: This process can take anywhere from minutes to hours! It is best to let the defragmentation process complete for optimal performance. If need be, let this run overnight.

NOTE: Unless you specifically direct it at your gw file its gonna take a while to do its job as its doing your whole HDD (preferred) which will include any movies, music, images, windows/virus updates etc. After you've got that first -image and defrag out of the way next time it should fly through them pretty quick. Watch for you gw.dat file coming round, repeat the defrag until you get down to 1 fragment if you can.

Welcome Back Son!

Listen UP, game changed. Poor became rich, the rich became even richer. There is a class strugle. It's do or die.

"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - "No, you move."

You have 4 options:
1) PvP god boosted since new Stronghold boxes which are reward. Nice new minipets and weapons.
2) Come back to PvE do missions lore and extra.
3) Do titles, its easier now most people just do titles.
4) Farm, join sc guild. Do Dungeons-Sc or fowsc, doasc, uwsc.

Peace.

/close

Or buy a SSD and put your games on it :-P

Unlike a regular hard drive, fragmentation does not degrade performance on a SSD, so you never need to defrag.

Sometimes you DAT file ends up with with lotsa extra stuff over the years that isnt needed, so having a clean install then -image every so often actually makes sure your file doesn't get near 4GB.

I highly recommend (as boring as it could be) reading through the game update notes

Ouch, no need to torture yourself and your computer. Defrag makes very little difference to begin with, and modern filesystems (such as NTFS) are designed to make fragmentation a non-issue. Only if you still use FAT as your filesystem (I don't see why you would, but let's assume) it might help a little to defragment it once every few months; but don't get obsessive about it. If you have your harddisk working overtime, buying more RAM and/or reinstalling the system if it's old (and switching to Windows 7 if you use XP) are more likely to improve performance than defragmenting ever will.

All much thanks for the replies.
So the poor me just stayed poor over the years ah... unlucky me.
And to be honest I am glad they banned Botters, pissing me off in the days i remember very well.

Well i am gonna download all the images at once now, i am not very clever when it comes to computers. i just want to play my game .

EDIT: how i find the Run command, as i type it in the search box i don't find anything but songs ah...
EDIT2: nevermind this computer hero found it lol

Yeh it pretty much depends what kinda system your running as to how much you will benefit, but for those into pvp especially, anything that reduces your lag/reaction times is worth the effort even if its minimal. It doesn't matter how fast your HDD is, if its fragmented its taking longer to access files than if it isn't, USB sticks have much faster access times but i don't know of anyone who's ever tried running gw on one.

I agree no need to get carried away. I'll -image after a big update only nowadays. As for powerdefrag, well i make gw movies so i tend to use it to help clean them up mostly and do gw at the same time. Helps when using lots of clips to reduce lag in Sony Vegas preview window from my experience. My systems 3 1/2 years old now vista64 intel quad 2.4 4GB ram 768mb8800GTX, its still ok but obviously not as fast as your new i7 gaming systems. If your system spec is lower than my system you can expect to see "some" benefit (depends how messed up it is to start with). We all experience lag but its best if you can clean up your own side before complaining about anets servers. You might not see much benefit after successive defrags but thats not cos its not working, its cos your keeping on top of your system.

EDIT: There is no cost to this simple procedure as opposed to buying RAM (cheap but limited on some systems) or W7 (expensive - we don't all use a hacked OS and i wouldn't recommend you do either, i'd rather use a full older official version than a newer incomplete hacked OS that doesn't get updates)

Obviously, if you haven't completed any of the campaigns or eye of the north, do that first... but then..

The two main things I'd do, coming back, is work on your hall of monuments (and you don't need to focus on one character, since everything you dedicate in HoM counts as account wide), and work on the Guild Wars Beyond content, which is the War in Kryta, and Hearts of the North, and soon Winds of Change and eventually an Elonian Guild Wars beyond package involving Palawa Joko? (not sure about that one).

You have Eye of the North right? If not, I guess none of this matters.. but it could be a good tour for anyone else in your situation that DOES have Eye of the North. Anyway through EotN you'll have your account linked to your future GW2 account.

So.. you have all the campaigns, and Eye of the North, your accounts are linked, and you've beaten all the campaigns... what then? First I'd suggest the Guild Wars Beyond Content, War in Kryta, and Hearts in the North. I think because it'll help you in the Hall of Monuments building, as Guild Wars Beyond content will get you Oppressor Weapons which you can dedicate for your valor monument, and will also give the chance at some hero armor items (via Keiran's scavenger hunt), and some rare minis (via drops from Peacekeepers/White Mantle, or via Royal Gifts) which can earn some more HoM points.

After that, things you can look to do for your HoM... now, try to earn most of these rather than just buying them out of Kamadan, as you'll see later, this will take you through quite a bit of the content Guild Wars has to offer.

Get 1 Vabbian Armor set on any character, 1 Obsidian (Fissure of Woe) armor set, 1 elite Kurzick or Luxon armor set (4 points)

Along with those oppressor weapons from War In Kryta, get at least 1 destroyer weapon, and 1 tormented weapon. (4 points)

Since you're coming back after a long time, you probably have minis coming out the ears now, you might sell some, but try to hold on to at least 1 gold and 1 green mini if you have them. If you don't get a green mini, get a black moa chick mini pet (actually do that anyway if you never have), but dedicate that 1 gold, 1 green. (3 points)

Make a new perma pre-searing character. It doesn't require death leveling now because of the new added vanguard quests. You can only do 1 a day, and I find that between the quest reward xp (1000) and mob kill exp (about 1000 a day unless you repeatedly farm it then it's obviously higher) it takes about a month of doing that to get your character to 20 for Legendary Defender of Ascalon.

Go work on a pvp title, any pvp title, gladiator from random arena, try the codex arena (that might be new since the last time you played. it's a "sealed deck" based team arena, not really my favorite, but it's interesting), at least try all the different arenas since there's account based quests for them with strongbox rewards to give you a taste. With this, the LDoA statue, and the statues for having completed all 3 campaigns, you'll have bare minimum 5 honor monument statues (11 points)

Acquire some hero armor for at least 1 hero, or dedicate MOX. Then get either a black moa, black widow, or imperial phoenix pet, and dedicate that (My vote is for the black widow since it gets you in Underworld). Then just get any random pet, and level it to 20 (you can use the Zaishen Menagerie to do this fast if you want, spending balthazar faction or zaishen coins (not sure if the Menagerie is new since you came back, but it could be)), dedicate that. (3 points, possibly 5 points if you get more hero statues or get the other 2 rare pets (which I'd do anyway))

That adds up to 27 points, you almost have enough to have all the items you can get from your HoM in GW2. After that, it's just more stuff, get some more minis, more hero statues, more dedicatable weapons, more elite armor, more titles/statues to get your 30+, and then you can keep going for some titles in GW2 if you want.

This isn't the most efficient way to do it, I'm sure people do Speedclears to make money to buy most the points, and speedbook for the max titles.. but

Look at it this way. When you're done doing it that way, you will have gone through all campaigns, EotN, Presearing Ascalon to LDoA, UW, Fissure of Woe, Domain of Anguish, Sorrow's Furnace, all the Guild Wars Beyond content, etc.

Oh, and since your timing is good, hit up the boardwalk and do some rollerbeetle racing

Guildwars beyond:
New enemy's, new quests, even some new area's. Story line that is ment to connect GW1 with GW2

Hall of monuments:
Not that the hall is new but everything that is put in there is rewarded with points that unlock items and titles in GW2. So besided becomming GWAMM a lot of people are aiming to get 50/50 in the hall (50 points is the max). on the GW2 site you can see what you already did and what you have to do to get the rest of the points.

Title changes:
Survivor title: Instead of needing 1337000xp without dieing ever, now when you die, the experience counter just resets to 0, so even with 1,337,000 deaths on your characters name, you can still let that character earn survivor.
Alcoholtitle: Now points are earned on consuming alcohol not on how many minutes your drunk, so go spamming your booze.
LDOA (pre searing title): for characters who reach lvl 10 in pre there are now daily rotating quests (cycle of 9) with foes that increase in lvl when you lvl up and a solid reward of 1000xp/day. Making LDOA a lot easier to achieve.

I have no idea why everyone is on their hind legs about defragmentation and gw.dat file size. My gw.dat has been at nearly 9 GB size for the last couple of years and I never defragment my drives. No lag issues unless the ISP gets some notions of grandeur and starts being silly.

To answer your question, guild wars beyond offers many options to defrag your.....wait what was the questions?

I highly recommend the new Hard mode quests that just came out. Truly challenging to do with only heroes (I know not hard for some of you cause you are "leetsauce" or something) and great fun to do with friends/guildies. So far Villany of Galrath and Titan Quest have been given the "Hard mode" upgrade.

WOW 9Gb seriously? don't think i've ever seen mine go above 4 and i -image
You can say it causes no issues and defragging it is a waste of time but how would you know unless you try it? Be interesting to see what latency fps difference it would make, although its relative to the system you use. My brother plays GW rarely on his old AMD 1800 so i seem to be one of the minority who still appreciates that some people are still getting away with playing GW on toasters lol so its one of those things that will hugely help some, but less so others. But its one of those things that really is only a pain to do the first time and no big deal after, i usually do a defrag while i'm in the bath or making somet to eat and its finished when i get back, its just good housekeeping that you just do as a habbit every once in a while, like a spring clean, or just live/play in a pig style if you want lol

We did try it, that's how we know. And I don't see what defrag has to do with FPS anyway. If you count on defrag to improve any kind of performance you might as well get a rabbit's foot and rub it on your screen.

Question has been answered.. and as this thread is now derailing into a debate about defragmenting your HD...

Thread Closed.

PS. If you want to discuss HD Defragging, please take it to the Technician's Corner Forum.