Reducing Loading Times in Guild Wars

By coehl ~ 15th June 2010

One thing I’ve heard a lot of issue with since I returned to Guild Wars, from friends, is that every time they go to an area they haven’t yet been to, the loading screen comes up and takes awhile. I’m taking just a second to walk everyone through the most efficient way to remove this problem.

Find your shortcut to Guild Wars on the desktop and copy it. If you don’t have one, find it in your program list, right click to copy it, and paste it to your desktop. Right click that new shortcut and rename it to “Guild Wars Preloader” or whatever. Doesn’t matter what you name it, and it’s not a permanent fixture. This is a one time use thing.

Now right click it again and go to “Properties” and find its target field. Right now the target simply points to the location of your Gw.exe file. For example “C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe”.

All you’re going to do is go to the end of that string of text, after the last quotation mark, hit your spacebar once to create.. well.. a space, and type

-image

So it would look like this

“C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe” -image

Now don’t go copying and pasting the above straight into your target field, as I have no way of knowing where Guild Wars was installed on your machine. Just manually add a space and -image, you’ll be golden. Accept these changes, then double click the shortcut. A window like the usual updater will come up, but that thing will probably run for awhile. Let it. In fact, you’ll probably have to go away and do something else. You Meteor Shower elementalists should be used to this.

Alternatively, you can just log in to Guild Wars and chill on the character selection screen until that little lightning bolt above your ping indicator disappears, which is a little green or orange dot. It could be red too, and that sucks.

There are other things you can accomplish with command line arguments in the shortcut. See this Wiki article for more.