Guild Wars 2 Forum

I'm trying to install GW2 on Mac OSX 10.8 using Crossover and it's a piece of crap. Mostly the software seems to be working but it was built for... gaming machines? Not sure. Or there's some key step that I'm missing. At this point I have like 5 bottles, three from the original install discs (pieces of plastic that I have in my hands, purchased authentically with the SERIAL CODE), and two bottles from the #1 seeded torrent on PirateBay. If there's some key element I'm missing in the install then redoing it over and over and trying some sort of dynamic crossover compression probably wouldn't work. On the other hand, if you're running some specific version of like Arch or whatever fancy custom OS the nerds do these days then maybe that'd work? Problem is it doesn't install the first time you try it.

Crossover doesn't detect the physical discs as recognized software, but as GW2_DVD1 and GW2_DVD2, which is odd b/c there's a TieOver for the game.

I'd previously been trying Wine but that was buggy, loopholey, backdoor hackable and nightmarish as a bag of stale bread.

If you have any pittance or advice or whatever I'd love to hear. I have a couple months of OS X developer experience so I could maybe chime in, too.

Guild wars 2 can be undoubtedly be frustrating in CrossOver. One thing about the installer is that I don't think the CDs will do you a lot of good - it appeared to me, last time I tried, that the game was bound to download essentially all of its content (17G or so) all over again, even from a fresh CD install, and even right when it was released (when the CDs might have been relatively up-to-date). So, first off, I'd suggest simply logging into your GW2 account and downloading the installer from there.

CrossOver 12.5 also lacks some of the hacks which made GW2 work as well as it had in 12.2 & a couple of earlier versions. In particular, the mouse and the gem store (the in-game store) are hokey. If you have an account with us (Codeweavers, that is), you can pretty easily log into our web-site and find, in your 'my downloads' section, a version of CrossOver 12.2 to use with Guild Wars 2. That will probably work better than 12.5 in that the mouse & gem store should work. (In CrossOver 13, due out in a few weeks, both of those things should be fixed.)

The installer is a pain to run. If you are using a downloadable installer from ArenaNet, it will stop and re-start many times, but make small progress each time and eventually get the game installed. (The progress bar will start over from zero each time, but if you look carefully, the amount of data remaining to be downloaded will lessen on each run, and eventually one of the runs will succeed). There isn't any way to tell ahead of time how many runs it takes to get the whole thing downloaded, nor any way that I know of to tell when it has finished successfully. Therefore, if you use CrossOver's installer, it will loop the installer "automatically" 15-20 times or so (I don't recall offhand precisely how many), just so you don't have to baby-sit it and re-start it yourself quite so much when you first install. If the game isn't finished downloading by then, you'll have to manually re-start it a few times until you get the whole thing.

I don't know to a certainty, but I doubt the DVD installers are much better on windows, at least in the sense that you'll end up downloading the whole game regardless of whether you install from DVD or from the downloadable installer.

Sorry it's a pain.