Curse

Omega X · Jul 13, 2005, 11:19 PM // 23:19

I've read almost the entire thread and this just reeks of SOFTWARE FAULT. ITs either DX9c or GW. But its most definitely not hardware, Pentium or Athlon.

Frits · Jul 14, 2005, 10:41 AM // 10:41

And Arenanet won't look into it cause they say it's a hardware problem

and i'm getting pretty sick and tired about it

samarium · Jul 14, 2005, 02:41 PM // 14:41

Of course not, they won't look into it. Their rationale is "It works for most people, therefore our software is perfect and everything is the user's fault."

I've run up against this too. I keep getting Hardware Malfunctions, I've tried everything I've seen, I've been bantering back and forth with Support, (which sucks - but then again, ALL tech support sucks unless you have no experience with PC repair. That's all they can tell you to do =P ) and guess what - not fixed yet!

They refuse to look into game-halting bugs like memory leaks and incompatibilities, instead they spend their time nerfing farming spots and adding little 'dings' and rearranging vendor menus.

PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!

-sam

gabby2600 · Jul 14, 2005, 05:59 PM // 17:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nall

On a side note, I've been in correspondence with ArenaNet's tech support service for a while concerning the problem, for which they've continually replied within a few hours each time. After going over basic troubleshooting they accused me of overclocking my system to cause the problems, even though everything was always at factory settings. Now that I've told them that wasn't true and that Guild Wars in beta worked just fine, they've gone silent for 36 hours and counting.

-Nall

I'm on 3 weeks silence after I told them it was fine in the Beta, I beat your 36 hours.

From the information I have gathered about this, the problem seems to lie in the way the Client uses the computers memory. Maybe it's trying to use some of the protected system memory or is just havving addressing usses within it's own programing.

I got a lot of debug reports saying some memory addresses are unreadable. Now this can cause cauntless other issues with the client and the system. If they Kernel and the client are fighting over a memory address then the kernal will more than likely terminate the program or BSoD.

If its putting data in to a section of memory used by antoher program or by the kernal and client gets away with it, then that data will more than likely be changed by the kernal. Hench you get messes saying their are issues with the gw.exe.

I thin a lot of these errors boild down to how the client deals with memory and accounts for it. A lot fo this sugeests a memoey leak deep inside the GW client. Somthing which they cannot solve without a major rewrite of the code.

I will be checking the memory useage of the client later, but the tel tale signs of a memeory leak is the used memeory in task manager gradually increases with play.

If it is the case of a memory leak, and it's somthign to do with the games core memoery handler then it could be a long time before we see a fix. And we will all have to put up with random crashes.

gabby

gabby2600 · Jul 14, 2005, 06:05 PM // 18:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by samarium

They refuse to look into game-halting bugs like memory leaks and incompatibilities, instead they spend their time nerfing farming spots and adding little 'dings' and rearranging vendor menus.

PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!

-sam

I'm beginning to agree it looks verymuch like a memory leak issue, and bits of graphic data and game code are over witing eachother as well as protected system memeory.

However this was only an issue after the retail release. So they have added some code to the client after the beta which is causing these issues.

If this problem is not resolve quickly then I will ahve no option but to write a rather scathing article about his for the review site I work for. Because people are playing money for he game and not getting any satisfaction from it.

gabby2600 · Jul 14, 2005, 07:49 PM // 19:49

Ok I sat watching the memeory sesaw while playing, it would run at a max of aroun 250mb and a min of about 115mb, But each area I went to it seems to agressivly flush any data in the memeory and re allocate it.

Now from what I have seen woth corrupt or the wrong textures being show and the apparant random crasshing and memory allocation errors. I would day their is an issue with the routine they use to deallocate and reallocate memeory.

I have seen corrupted textures get progressivly worse the longer I played which stricks me as saying something is overwriing it in the physical memory storgae and then when it's sent through AGP or refreshed on the graphics memory that texture gets progressivly worse.

This woul also explain the random crashes on quests and mission becasue of a memory alocation error corruping a bit of script or program code. BSoD could be casued by the GW.exe trying to write to a section of physical memory used by the system, whiile the system is using it.

For example is the kernal is told to send Data X to the Graphics card, and it begins to send, but the game does not wait for the kernal to finish Sending Data X, and begin to over write the area of memory used by Data X. Then you will get in a situation wher they data is malformed causing system instability, and therefor the system Halts to stop any hardware bfrom being damaged. This usually always happens when an application dose not deal with dirvers in the correct manner.

THe BSoD error I'm seeing ar consistant with software that cannot use drivers properly, it's nto a falut wiht the hardware or the drivers but more a fault with the programing not working well with the driver.

The BSoD could be caused by any driver on the system, from Sound to a USB drivier. Any part of this game interacts with any part of the system which uses a driver then if the game dose not conform to how things are supposed to be done your going to end up with BSoD's

Now the issues seem to happen on many differant systems, and a very wide range of hardware. So what do thay all have in common, memory, You can have differant graphics cards and differant drivers, even differant types of hard drive canuse differant drivers but usually the memory drivers/handler in a windows system is standard and will be the same on nearly every PC. The Kernal is designed to work with this handler, yet is seems GW can take exception it it at times.

For one you can cuse rambus or DDR and you don't need to install a driver, yet if you change from various levels of IDE or SATA you will need to install windows drivers. So it cannto be tied down to that. it has to be oen common thing we all share. And I think thats the Memory.

Now it seems some peopel have sovled problems by changeing memeory timeing, I sadly cannot do that as my board take that in to it's own hands. So my board will check the memeory and set it to the correct timing.

I also know their is ntohign wrong with my system. I use Photoshop, Freehand and Word every day to produce print quality work, and I never have a problem. TH system is thrashed and the memeory used like an insane thing. Yet the system stays a solid as a rock. As soon as I open GW, it falls over with alarming regularity.

Lets face it it's tnot our PC. and it's nto what we have installed, as we all know many other thigns work with no issues. It's not a wattage or a heat issue as these ahve been ruled out by many people. it's not one type or hard ware or another as the same issuse comes up on many differant configurations.

So lets look at this like a criminal investigations, everything GW clam to be the problems turn up inconclusive and their for not admissable as evidence. yet in every case it seems that these proplems only occur while GW is running, and in many cases only after the retail release. So using my brillinat skills of deduction I would say the GW client got nerfed sometime after release, and A.net cannot or will not fix the error.

I have had a supoprt call open for over a month with this issue, and for the last 2-3 weeks I have had no responce, ever since I told them I had no problems in the beta only when the game went retail. then their responces to me stopped. This simple pice of information proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the GW.exe if nerfed, otherwise why would it be fine for months then all of a sudden after retail all these prolems appear.

Come on A.net admit their is a problem that has been casue by some code added for the retail release, then at least you can start looking at what ws implimented at release but not properly tested.

gabby

StephenD · Jul 14, 2005, 09:39 PM // 21:39

The weird thing is, upping my AGP Aperture to 256MB and the update which was released yesterday seems to have done the trick, I'm not longer getting a BSOD, I sometimes get an Err=7 problem, but only once tonight, in the middle of an Ascalon Arena battle in which my team won 20 times in a row!

PowarMetal · Jul 15, 2005, 01:31 AM // 01:31

how do u increase the agp aperture size? mine currently is at 128mb. thx

StephenD · Jul 15, 2005, 07:12 AM // 07:12

Go into your computers BIOS, then look in something like 'Advanced chipset options' or similar, enter that menu, then look for AGP Aperture and it should have 128MB next to it, use your keyboard to go onto it and change it to 256MB. I'm not saying this will work for definate, but it certainly has for me.

StephenD · Jul 16, 2005, 07:23 PM // 19:23

Well, this is bloody brilliant. Thinking I had solved the problem and due to a problem in another game, I installed the latest ATI drivers, and then I played GW. Soon after this I began getting the BSOD's again, and thus I used system restore to go back to a day in which GW was functioning perfectly. I played, thinking everything was fine and then I got a BSOD.

The Windows error report said a device driver problem, but it's so frigging annoying, I just want this to be fixed altogether...I am definately not buying the next chapter if the problem is not fixed when it comes out.
Arenanet support= Poor.

artd1 · Jul 16, 2005, 09:34 PM // 21:34

I have had the same reboot problems since the last update.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+, not overclocked
Sapphire Radeon 9800XT 128 mb
Asus K8ne-deluxe Nforce 3 chipset
Windows XP sp1
1 gig Kingston memory
onboard sound
Artic cooler w/artic silver thermal paste

This system reboots constantly, In addition some of my desktop icons are reversed. The left half of the icon is on the right side and vice versa. This corrected itself when I uninstalled Guild Wars, and was backwards again when I reinstalled Guild Wars(Retail version}

To further confuse the problem, Guild Wars runs perfectly on my other computer which is:

AMD Athlon Barton 2600+, overclocked to a 3100
Asus A7n8e-deluxe nforce 2 chipset
Windows 2000 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 w/256 mb
512 mb Kingston memory
on board sound

I Love the game, I'm just tired of having to play it on a lesser computer in my bedroom.

PowarMetal · Jul 17, 2005, 05:08 AM // 05:08

its not the hardware, my friend has teh exactly same specs as mine, same drivers, same updates. yet it runs fine on his comp.

Omega X · Jul 17, 2005, 09:10 AM // 09:10

Like I said before, this is a software fault and should be treated as such. I think that everyone experiencing should bombard the Areanet support site with this issue. Eventually they will have no choice but to take notice and have the programmers fix the issue.

moonlitfire · Jul 17, 2005, 11:49 AM // 11:49

I'm having the exact same problem most everyone is describing. Here are the symptoms.

#1 This problem didn't start happening till after the most recent update on 13-Jul-05.
#2 After about 20 minutes of play(give or take a few minute) the game either exits with a GW.exe fault telling me to send the message to arena.net support, BSODS and restarts quickly, or exits with no GW.exe fault.
#3 The fault messages - when I get them are - are random. One thing they all have in common is thread, stack, and trace, dump messages followed by long strings of hexidecimal and ascii code subsections.
#4 The BSOD when I get it flashes to quickly across the screen to be read.
#5 When I play....in the experience bar...sometimes the "20" thats normally there doesn't appear.

My system specs are as follows.
Hypersonic-pc Aviator AX6 laptop computer
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1 Gigabyte of DDR memory
80 Gigabyte Seagate hard drive
VIA KT800 Chipset
CMedia Onboard sound
ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 Series
Vid Mem128 MB

I've tried both the manufacturers drivers and the omega radeon drivers to remedy the problem to no avail. I've also tried VIA hyperion drivers rather than the manufacturers drivers to no avail as well.

other steps I've taken:
I've tried running everything on lowest settings, upping vid mem, the -nosound flag

This afternoon I will try running guildwars on my pentium 4 desktop....I will make sure to post my results here.

Sprites · Jul 17, 2005, 02:06 PM // 14:06

the same ... :/

i crash , bluescreen

Message d'erreur : STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x00000000, 0xb2000000, 0x00020151) ...

but i don't understand why some run the game without problems , the technical service appears not better than a bot

moonlitfire · Jul 17, 2005, 11:36 PM // 23:36

I'm running it on my desktop now with no problems.

When I first installed it, I had issues with freezing, using the CMedia onboard sound drivers provided by my mother board manufacturer(soyo p4x400). I swapped those drivers out with the ones that are offerd on windows update, and the freezing stopped.

My laptop makes use of CMedia drivers as well, but the crashing I was experiencing there versus the freezing I experienced on my desktop were two diff stories.

I have not yet tried the windows update provided CMedia drivers on my laptop, to see if that remedies the problem. I don't believe those are the source of the problem there though.

Lion Wilson · Jul 18, 2005, 05:14 AM // 05:14

This may sound like a really dumb and obvious solution, but it worked for me...

Do a complete uninstall and reinstall. I don't mean just pop the disc in and select "Reinstall" from the AutoPlay menu. Go through Windows Add/Remove Programs, complete uninstall, find all the folders Guild Wars is associated with and delete them, and run a hard drive and registry cleaner to remove any orphan files or registry entires relating to Guild Wars. Then reinstall from scratch.

Like I said, this way probably a first resort for many of you, but for those that haven't tried it, it worked for me.

StephenD · Jul 18, 2005, 08:28 AM // 08:28

Cheers for the tip Lion! I'll try that later on, and will see if it works for me. If it does, you're a superstar

StephenD · Jul 18, 2005, 08:53 AM // 08:53

Nope, no luck. I really want to play this game; but I can't because of this problem

Come on ArenaNet, put out a fix for this damn thing!

Sprites · Jul 19, 2005, 12:22 AM // 00:22

hmm... without winamp running , GW seems to crash less