ArenaNet have found their own horn this morning and begun thoroughly tooting it, with the news that Guild Wars 2 has passed two million units sold. With the game only being out for two weeks, that’s a fairly staggering one million per week, even when you take into account their decision to suspend digital sales temporarily.

“Despite temporarily halting first-party sales and replenishing retail stores to maintain an optimal player experience, Guild Wars 2 surpassed the two million sales milestone shortly after turning sales back on,” reads the press release excitedly. It took the original Guild Wars just over a year to achieve the same sales figures, an impressive improvement by anybody’s standards.

The launch of Guild Wars 2 has been far from perfect, with server stress issues, widespread hacking, and the ban of over 3,000 players due to taking advantage of cheap vendor items. But to make it to two million in such a short time is well done indeed — hats off to ArenaNet!

Source: Press Release

The crafting system in Guild Wars 2, while pretty simple, is tuned in such a way that actually leveling it up at the same rate as your character takes some planning and a little discipline on your part. Nick Kolan walks you through the best way to stay on top of your crafting and make sure you’re always at peak efficiency.

On August 31, 3,000 Guild Wars 2 players were banned from the game for exploiting a bug: an in-game vendor was selling an item for far too cheap, people bought it (repeatedly), and then sold it on for profit. ArenaNet wasn’t amused. They quickly deployed an emergency hotfix, banned the offenders permanently, and only reduced these bans to 72 hours upon receiving a commitment from the offenders not to do it again.

This caused a bit of a stir at the time. The players weren’t hacking the game, and only taking advantage of one of the few bugs that made it into the final release. Still, ArenaNet justified their actions based on the argument that the players knew they were being bad. ArenaNet then said that any future exploiting would be met harshly, and that they wouldn’t be so quick to pardon lifetime bans in future. So what else could you get banned for?

Every MMO has a honeymoon. The world is new, lauded by critics and fans alike. Then… cracks appear. The hype wears off. The game goes free to play, and EA announces that it tanked.

Guild Wars 2 launched two weeks ago, and yet in many ways is well past its honeymoon. With the length of its beta test rivalling Longcat himself, many have already been playing the game for months. And honestly, in all this time, the game’s barely changed.

So when I loaded Guild Wars 2 on release, my first impressions were laced with cynicism. Fortunately, I’m now enjoying the game, even if it’s not the promised, overhyped revolution. Let’s look at what Guild Wars 2 brings to the MMO table.

If you’ve been waiting for the digital gates to re-open after ArenaNet suspended digital sales of their game to prevent overflow, then your time is now! Sales of the game through the official site have now resumed, and new servers added to cope with the load.

To celebrate, ArenaNet have released the live action ‘Our Time is Now’ trailer and it’s, uh. It’s certainly something. I reccommend you watch it for yourself and certainly, as the lovely Ms. Hillier of VG247 points out, do try not to be confused when you realise it’s not a trailer for The Secret World.

Source: VG247

Between lost passwords, hacks, and other account locking issues, ArenaNet has been hit by a massive number of requests for assistance logging into Guild Wars 2.

“Over the past three days we’ve received approximately 8,500 new support tickets related to hacked accounts and other blocking login issues,” ArenaNet said last Sunday afternoon. “And we’ve resolved issues to get approximately 9,500 players back into the game (most from tickets submitted prior to Friday, August 31).”

ArenaNet then promised to “aggressively ramp up its customer support team” which seems like a thing you’d definitely want to do in that situation, and started smacking the ticket queue. On Monday, the team said it had “helped 2,574 players with hacked accounts and 2,867 players with other blocking login issues get back into the game”.

In the meantime, the team has stopped posting details of how many tickets it has received and actioned, but its continuing warnings to protect your Guild Wars 2 account suggest phishing and hacking are still a problem.

Source: ArsTechnica

The world-versus-world system of Guild Wars 2 has even long-time PVP-avoidant James Pinnell diving in again and again for more. Read on for a primer on how to get the most out of your world-versus-world experience.

If you’re one of the many who have been trying in vain to use Guild Wars 2‘s auction house and having it flake out on you, ArenaNet would like you to know that you are now good to go. “We’re increasing world capacity as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game,” writes ArenaNet on the Guild Wars 2 wiki.

“We’ve made progress, but still have capacity constraints causing issues with party and guild functionality, including symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working,” ArenaNet continues. “We’re working on a fix and will provide a further update tomorrow.”

Source: Eurogamer

So many people are playing Guild Wars 2 that ArenaNet has stopped selling it; when you hit those kinds of numbers, problems are inevitable, but the developer is working hard to meet demand.

“The magnitude of this launch just dwarfs everything we have done in the past, and there are certain things you just can’t predict. Certainly right now none of us are sleeping very much, as we make sure we iron out everything that our customers are running into, and trying to make this launch as smooth as possible,” ArenaNet founder and president Mike O’Brien told GamesIndustry.

“There are so many people playing right now, our servers are under such stress. And they’re holding up pretty well, but there are little things going on all the time that we need to chase down. And so we’re literally working around the clock trying to make sure that all our players are having a great experience.

“Right now it’s all hands on deck. We’re in the middle of a launch, and we want to make sure that the game is off to a great start. We want to make sure that players are having a flawless experience in the game, so as things crop up that we need to address we’re working around the clock to address them. We’ve got the whole company focused on the live game and addressing everything that comes up.”

Source: GamesIndustry

In a somewhat unprecedented move, ArenaNet have announced on their Facebook page that they will be temporarily suspending all first-party digital sales through their website — effective immediately.

“Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority,” reads the post. “We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.”

“Effective immediately we have disabled sales via buy.guildwars2.com. To be clear, box and digital sales are still available via our retail partners. We are tracking our concurrency closely while expanding our infrastructure. We’ll re-enable first-party digital sales as soon as we feel that we can do so safely.”

Source: Facebook (Thanks, James)

I recently had the pleasure of playing a few games that reminded me why I continue, in the face of adversity, to be a PC gamer.

Sleeping Dogs and Guild Wars 2 are both stand out examples of what happens when you use the PC as a template, rather than just another avenue for revenue — or, at the very least, put enough effort into respecting what is the oldest and most technically affluent community of gamers by providing a version that actually takes advantage of the cutting edge hardware we spend many hundreds of dollars maintaining and hours tweaking.

But despite this, many developers are still focused on wringing the last drops out of the dying console market — and this needs to change.

Five years after its initial announcement, Guild Wars 2 is officially live. You are no doubt chomping at the bit to start killing gigantic fire elementals, but before you step into Tyria and leave all your Earthen friends behind indefinitely, there are a few basics you should be aware of.