I know this is a bit old, but its justa epic scene from Supernatural!
Reserving your name for GW2
Source: http://www.arena.net/blog/reserving-your-character-name-for-guild-wars-2
Ever since we announced the Guild Wars 2 Pre-Purchase program and Headstart Access, we’ve had a lot of questions about how name reservation will work for existing Guild Wars players. Here’s how it will work:
Character names in the Guild Wars universe work differently than they do in most other MMOs. Whereas in most MMOs character names are unique only within their world/server, in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, character names are unique across the entire game. In Guild Wars 2, when a player acquires a name like Wizardex, he or she is acquiring it across all worlds. Clearly this places more importance on grabbing the name early.
Today no one actually has the name Wizardex, because all character names from the original Guild Wars were two words or more. All one-word names will be up for grabs at the start of the Guild Wars 2 Headstart Access period. But there are currently 20 million two-word names in use by existing Guild Wars players. We need a policy that allows dedicated players to hold on to their established names, while freeing up the bulk of names for the rush of Guild Wars 2 players who will come into the game at launch.
Thus our policy will simply be as follows: to preserve your character name from Guild Wars into Guild Wars 2, you must be an active Guild Wars player (more on that below), and you must create a Guild Wars 2 character with the same name as your Guild Wars character during the Headstart Access period or on launch day.
After launch day (and after we work through support tickets filed on launch day), we’ll free up the millions of unclaimed names for new Guild Wars 2 players to use.
To implement this name reservation system, we need to build a list of the character names of active Guild Wars players that we’ll reserve through launch day. We actually need to build that list a few weeks prior to the launch of Guild Wars 2.
So we’ll use the following very generous definition of active: Guild Wars players will be considered active—thus having their Guild Wars names reserved and available to claim during Headstart Access and on launch day—if they have logged into the game at least once between January 1, 2012 and the day we build the name reservation list.
We’ll warn the community before we build the list, but that’s irrelevant, because there’s no reason for anyone to wait. If you want to reserve character names from Guild Wars into Guild Wars 2, log in to the original game now so we know you’re active!
We’ll see you in-game,
The Guild Wars 2 Team
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500k followers on teh GW2 FB!
Here is the concep art for hitting 500k followers on the GW2 FB page!
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A thank you from ArenaNet for the Stress test.
Source: GW2 Facebook
Monday’s stress test draws ever nearer. We want to thank you in advance for helping us test Guild Wars 2. How can you best help with the test? Well, our first Beta Weekend Event gave us a mountain of great feedback about gameplay, and ou…r developers are hard at work on that aspect. Rather than game play feedback, the goal for the stress test is to gather technical feedback. We want you to rush the servers and crowd into Tyria, and you’ll probably come across connectivity and performance problems. Be patient as you help our team find those bugs. Again, thanks in advance for helping us chase those out and crush them for good! To give you even more to look forward to, this charr guardian is waiting to give you a “friendly welcome.” Good luck! ~RB2
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Mike O’Brien on the Guild Wars 2 Beta
Source: http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-the-guild-wars-2-beta
The other week we hosted our first Beta Weekend Event, when hundreds of thousands of players who pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 got their first chance to play the game. This was a huge milestone for ArenaNet; with no NDAs and no press embargoes, the beta version of Guild Wars 2 would have to stand on its own before the full force of the Internet.
I think it’s safe to say that the response was overwhelming in more ways than one. Firstly, the number of people who pre-purchased the game far exceeded our expectations, and we had to temporarily disable pre-purchases. In the end that wasn’t enough, and even with 48 worlds we didn’t have enough server capacity to meet the huge demand.
Fortunately, the vast majority of players were able to get into the game and experience Guild Wars 2 in all its glory. Seeing Tyria come alive, with players interacting with dynamic events or engaging in epic World vs. World battles, was an amazing experience. We’ve highlighted some of the great coverage coming out of the Beta Weekend in another blog post, but suffice it say that we were blown away by the reaction from the community. The positive feedback just strengthens our resolve to deliver the best game possible.
This was definitely a real beta, designed to find problems, gather player input, and learn what work still needs to be done before we ship the game. We’ve listened to your feedback and we’re making some important improvements to the game for the next Beta Weekend Event.
At the same time, we’re also working on server capacity to make sure that we’re prepared for the even greater flood of players who will participate in the next Beta. To that end, we’ve announced a Stress Test on Monday May 14th to test some changes we’ve implemented. This 7-hour test event, which runs from 11 AM to 6 PM PDT (-7 GMT) is open to all players who have pre-purchased Guild Wars 2. The good news is that we’re not wiping characters for this test; we’re using the same build that we used in the first Beta Weekend Event, so you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off. For more information about the Stress Test, log in to the Beta Forums. Please join us on May 14 if you can.
I want to thank each and every one of you for your support—every time you participate in our test events you help make the game better. We’ll see you in-game!
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