NEWS
by Mark Barley
ArenaNet talks about Guild Wars 2 launch issues
Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet has spoken out about issues that have plagued the title since the game's launch.
Server crashes, trading issues, security pitfalls, and more have set the game back since its launch, and gamers aren't letting ArenaNet get away with it. In a recent interview with VG247, ArenaNet's game director Colin Johanson gave his thoughts on Guild Wars 2's launch among other things.
“It’s one of the hardest things you will ever do in the game industry,” he said of MMO launches. “There are times where I am envious of developers who get to make offline games that don’t have to deal with these kind of issues, it’s insane how complicated it is.
“Though we had a few hiccups on launch, for the most part I think we had a very smooth launch when you consider the kind of player login rates we saw, and how quickly we were able to respond to those issues. Our biggest issues at launch simply came from the sheer volume of concurrent users hitting each part of the game, even in our beta tests where we had very large player populations we never were able to reasonably test any system with the kind of numbers we had for launch.
“Our betas led us to believe everything was totally stable, but when we cruised past certain numbers areas like the trading post, and a few issues with the servers reared their ugly heads. Account thieves took their turn as well taking well known account names and passwords they had stolen from other games forums and using them to try and get their hands on peoples accounts that didn’t protect themselves with unique passwords.”
The game faced security issues when supposedly hackers got their hands on over 11,000 passwords for user accounts. “Though we had a few hiccups on launch, for the most part I think we had a very smooth launch when you consider the kind of player login rates we saw, and how quickly we were able to respond to those issues. Our biggest issues at launch simply came from the sheer volume of concurrent users hitting each part of the game, even in our beta tests where we had very large player populations we never were able to reasonably test any system with the kind of numbers we had for launch.
“Our betas led us to believe everything was totally stable, but when we cruised past certain numbers areas like the trading post, and a few issues with the servers reared their ugly heads. Account thieves took their turn as well taking well known account names and passwords they had stolen from other games forums and using them to try and get their hands on peoples accounts that didn’t protect themselves with unique passwords.”
“Looking back on those days,” he recalled, “basically everything has not only been stabilised, but our ability to deal with them as improved dramatically as well. Issues with connectivity, the trading post, and so on are now extremely rare. We’ve setup countless account security measures and added the ability to restore accounts in the rare case something happens, which is now incredibly rare.
“We set a legacy with the first Guild Wars we’re going to live up to with Guild Wars 2, the total down time for the first game over seven-plus years is so tiny it’s insane, and we want to be even better in Guild Wars 2. We hope you go your entire lifetime of the game with Guild Wars 2 and never see the message “Guild Wars 2 is currently down for maintenance”.
“We’re not done though, our security team, IT team, server programming team, and customer support team will all continue to work proactively to make these parts of the game even more structurally sound than they already are. We don’t ever want to stand still and say “good enough, mission accomplished” we’ll keep finding ways to make our already extremely stable system even stronger.”
Are you a Guild Wars 2 player? Did you experience any of these reported problems? Let us know in the comments.
“We set a legacy with the first Guild Wars we’re going to live up to with Guild Wars 2, the total down time for the first game over seven-plus years is so tiny it’s insane, and we want to be even better in Guild Wars 2. We hope you go your entire lifetime of the game with Guild Wars 2 and never see the message “Guild Wars 2 is currently down for maintenance”.
“We’re not done though, our security team, IT team, server programming team, and customer support team will all continue to work proactively to make these parts of the game even more structurally sound than they already are. We don’t ever want to stand still and say “good enough, mission accomplished” we’ll keep finding ways to make our already extremely stable system even stronger.”