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Recording WvW logs

Raid logging mostly just works — you hit a boss, you get a log. WvW logging has more knobs: there’s no boss, fights are long, and several settings can silently discard an encounter. This page is the WvW-shaped path through material covered in depth on the installation & files and EVTC format pages.

How a WvW log starts and stops

From the official evtc-logging notes (quoted in full at when a log starts and stops):

pve/wvw: starts on first player combat enter, boss set by first damage event on boss, stops when all players exit combat.

In WvW there is no boss species — the log’s header carries boss id 1, the WvW marker (see encounter IDs). Practically: a “log” is one stretch of continuous squad combat, and a raid night produces many files. arcdps also starts fresh per map, so a single log never spans a map hop (the map id is written once near the front of the event stream — see WvW maps in logs).

Why a WvW log didn’t save

When arcdps finishes an encounter but skips writing it, it says why in its logger window. The full diagnostic list is at when a log is not saved; the ones that bite in WvW:

  • log not saved due to saving disabled — log saving (and WvW saving specifically) must be enabled in the logging settings; the corresponding arcdps.ini keys are boss_encounter_saving and boss_encounter_savewvw (key list on the installation & files page — per-key semantics are not officially documented, so treat the in-game logging settings panel as the interface of record).
  • log not saved due to short duration — WvW skirmishes below the minimum log duration are dropped (minimum_log_duration).
  • log not saved due to unmet condition (enemy minimum) — an enemy-count floor (boss_encounter_minenemy) filters out logs of chasing one roamer, but set too high it also eats real fights.
  • Squad minimum / maximum / percent conditions — participation filters that matter when you log outside a full squad.

If logs are missing, watch the logger window during a fight and the message will tell you which setting to change.

The files

Logs land under Documents/Guild Wars 2/addons/arcdps/arcdps.cbtlogs/ by default (path details at where logs are written), named date-time — e.g. a real WvW file from the machine this wiki is developed on: 20260125-202439.zevtc. WvW files get large: the three real WvW logs inspected for this wiki’s guides held 120k–390k events each (roughly 8–25 MB uncompressed) for ordinary fights, so expect a zerg night to produce hundreds of megabytes.

Version notes that matter for WvW

Recent official changelog entries that change what’s in a WvW log:

  • may.07.2026 — CBTS_WVWTEAMS and CBTS_WVWOBJECTIVESTATUS events added. Logs from older builds have neither; see WvW team colors for the fallback.
  • jun.02.2026 — CBTS_WVWOBJECTIVESTATUS’s pad61 documented as upgrade progress (“yak count”); WvW inactivity check changed to consider squad-out damage only.
  • jul.01.2026 — WvW siege detached from its owner (“differs from operator”) — affects siege damage attribution across builds.

One older build to avoid trusting: community parsers special-case build 20250420, where team-change events fired incorrectly on despawn (see WvW team colors).

Keeping arcdps current matters more in WvW than elsewhere — the WvW-specific events are the newest part of the format and still gaining fields.