Arenanet – Page 6 – MMO Fallout

Guild Wars 2 Megaserver Is Complete

Arenanet has announced that the Megaserver technology has been fully implemented in all PvE maps and Heart of the Mists.

Although we’re excited that you have more players than ever to explore the open world of Guild Wars 2 with, our work is not yet complete. Our megaserver team will continue to monitor the performance of the technology on live and evaluate your feedback. We will continue to tweak and update the way the system works until it is providing even better megaservice!

(Source: Guild Wars 2)

Guild Wars 2 Rolls Out Megaserver Tech

Arenanet has rolled out the first areas for the new megaserver technology. As reported a couple of weeks ago, today’s patch saw the launch of new megaserver technology in Guild Wars 2, allowing players to fight alongside each other in certain zones regardless of their home world. No more dead zones and no more overflow.

The update is still in the process of being rolled out. The following zones have been activated at the time of this publishing. Check out the forum post here for more details.

The Grove
Heart of the Mist
Black Citadel
Timberline Falls
Southsun Cove
Rata Sum
Straits of Devastation
Fields of Ruin
Brisban Wildlands
Hoelbrak
Iron Marches
Blazeridge Steppes
Dredgehaunt Cliffs
Lion’s Arch
Lornar’s Pass
Kessex Hills
Diessa Plateau
Metrica Province

Guild Wars 2 Reveals…Bobble Heads!

Why does everyone have tiny heads? If you have to ask, you don’t know the answer. Luckily, ArenaNet is here to solve this age-old question, of which you are apparently the only person who has yet to figure out. Starting today, Guild Wars 2 players will find that their heads have been inflated to a more normal size.

The procedure is not optional, by order of the Red Queen.

Guild Wars 2 VIP Membership Discovered

Dataminers on Reddit unearthed the above information regarding a VIP membership for Guild Wars 2. Although no price is detailed, membership includes a bundle of extras, including bank and inventory space, convenient banking/trading, and more. There are at least 20 tiers, going by the VIP badges found in the Mists beta client. Mark Kerstein, Head of Global Community, commented on the forums to point out that the VIP member is an internal experiment and is not intended for western gamers.

This is a testing branch. We conduct internal experiments for various territories on our testing branches. This particular experiment is not being tested for the West.

Whether or not VIP will make it into Guild Wars 2 in any territory will have to be seen.

(Source: Reddit)

[Community] Guild Wars 2 Authorized Logins

This week’s Community Concerns is all about Guild Wars 2, primarily questions about emails you may have received from ArenaNet regarding attempts to access your account. Guild Wars 2 utilizes a security method of email authentication whenever you attempt to log in from a new computer. Aside from being an excellent incentive to keep your passwords unique to each account, this method also acts as an early warning system that someone somewhere, has your password, and that you should change it immediately.

The top question I receive on this topic is how to know if these emails are legitimately from ArenaNet. The answer is that you should always assume that these emails are legitimate, change your password and possibly even run your anti-virus program just to be safe if you receive one. Never click on the authorization link unless you are explicitly expecting the email (you logged in and the game blocked you) because if the email is not legitimate, you will end up at a fake website and expose your computer. If the email is legitimate, all you accomplish is to authorize a thief to log in and ransack your account. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose by clicking the authorization, again unless you are explicitly expecting contact.

The second most asked question is how to know if the email is real when you do actually have to authorize your computer. If you receive two emails at the same time and both are asking for authorization, close the client and wait a few minutes, then log in again and the system will email you again. There is roughly a .00001% chance of a fake authorization just happening to be sent to you as you log in for real, and if you are blocked and receive only one email with your location details, you can safely assume that it is legitimate.

This is what the email looks like. Make sure to doublecheck the city, region, and country, before authorizing.

A log-in attempt from the following location is currently awaiting your authorization.

Address: [IP Address]
City: Hamburg
Region: NY
Country: US

This location is approximated based on information provided by your Internet Service Provider. If in doubt, deny the request and try again.

If you are certain this log-in attempt was not made by you, then someone else knows your log-in credentials and you should change your password immediately via Account Management.

For security purposes, we alert you each time your account is accessed from an unrecognized location. To authenticate this log-in attempt, please click the link below:

https://account.guildwars2.com/login/allow?token=[string of numbers & letters]&request=[string of numbers and letters]

Need help or have questions about your Guild Wars account? Visit our support site: http://en.support.guildwars2.com/
Thanks!
–The ArenaNet Team

MMOrning Shots: Twilight Assault

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Arenanet, and offers a glimpse at the upcoming Twilight Assault update set for October 1st. Twilight Assault, which I originally assumed would involve raiding a Barnes and Noble and burning some Stephanie Meyer books, actually involves players assisting in the raid of a secret facility. A secret facility for what, exactly? For the printing of Stephanie Meyer books.

Guild Wars 2 Unlikely To See Expansions

Guild Wars 2 was originally envisioned to follow in the footsteps of Guild Wars: A buy to play game supported through microtransactions and through the sale of expansion packs. With production steadily increasing on the sequel’s ongoing living story, ArenaNet quickly changed its focus to providing world-changing content on a regular basis for its players. Nowadays, the Living Story has four teams rotating and keeping content churning out at a regular pace. As a result of the focus on the living story, the odds of an expansion are becoming slimmer according to Mark Zadorojny, Lead Content Designer at ArenaNet, talking to Eurogamer.

“It’s something that’s on the table but it’s not something we’re focused on, because what we want to do is – our idea here is that with Living World, we can do what expansions would have done but do it on a more regular basis.”

You can read the entirety of Eurogamer’s article down below, where ArenaNet assures us that the box sales and gem sales are more than enough to sustain Guild Wars 2.

(Source: Eurogamer)

Guild Wars Is In Maintenance Mode

I think most of us got the hint that this was coming around the time that NCSoft stopped listing Guild Wars on their quarterly financial releases. With the rousing success of Guild Wars 2 and the ever advancing age of Guild Wars, Arenanet has posted today to reveal that their ongoing updates to Guild Wars have had a secondary purpose: To teach the game to run itself. With Arenanet’s views moving elsewhere, Guild Wars is being updated to run on automation, or maintenance mode as many of you know it. The game will no longer be updated, except to better service the automation.

So what does this mean for players? Foremost, handing out trims at tournaments and the map rotation of the tournaments themselves will be completely automated. Weekend events will be extended to full week events and run on automated rotations as well. Basically everything that used to require the hand of Arenanet to start will be fully automated. The goal is to get Guild Wars to a point where it can operate mostly by itself, allowing the game to run in maintenance mode for “years to come.”

(Source: Guild Wars)

Guild Wars 2 Flame And Frost Finishes This Month

Flame and Frost is a multi-part living story in Guild Wars 2 which began way back in January and is currently on part three of four. The story so far is that back in January, the sky began falling in the northern regions, resulting in entire villages being destroyed and families left homeless. Players were asked to aid refugees making their way south through Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau, rebuilding destroyed signposts and aiding wounded refugees, as well as collecting personal belongings and returning them to their owners. The Flame Legion and Dredge, two races that had previous stayed in the background, now began assaulting Tyria.

Each update brings with it some pretty major changes to the game, for those who don’t care about the story, including the end of culling, major changes to the achievement system, and more. The final part of this mini-series is coming April 30th, according to Arenanet, and tasks players with striking at the heart of the Molten Alliance of the Flame Legion and Dredge. Attack their foundries deep beneath the Shiverpeaks, and perhaps face some frickin sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

Check out the main Flame and Frost page below.

(Source: Guild Wars 2)

Less Than 200 Banned For Guild Wars 2 Snowflake Exploit

I hate writing articles on bans related to exploits, they just serve to confuse players and just those who found some interest in the article. Terms like “mass ban” and “widely exploited” are thrown around when the actual numbers of how many people were using the exploit, and consequently how many were banned for it, is much less impressive than the terminology surrounding the announcement. So let’s dive in and try to not confuse those of us who haven’t been playing Guild Wars 2 recently. I’m going to try to explain this the best I can, but don’t take the description of events below as 100% accurate. Ultimately all you need to know is what is quoted by Arenanet.

Wintersday is the event Arenanet holds in place of Christmas, and just like its real life counterpart, we can’t get through the holidays without someone getting stabbed (unless that’s just my family). According to what I’ve seen in news reports and from players, an exploit surfaced early on in the event which allowed players to use snowflakes from the event to convert several absurdly cheap items along with a black lion salvage kit, to generate endless amounts of ectoplasm, which is used in creating many of the high-level items. The exploit was closed and when Arenanet came back from holiday vacation, the team set off banning the worst of the offenders.

As I’ve already said, less than 200 were banned according to Arenanet. According to the North American Community Team Lead Regina Buenaobra, the banned players knew exactly what they were doing:

The number of accounts terminated as a result of this exploitative activity is actually very small—fewer than 200. However, these people are the very worst offenders, and engaged in this exploit to egregious levels—hundreds and even thousands of times. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew that their activities would damage the economy.

Gaile Grey, Arenanet Support Liason, posted to explain why the exploit should have been obvious to anyone making use of it:

Any time you take one thing and can make two, and then four, and then sixteen… ya gotta know that’s just wrong. (I won’t quibble on the odds, but overall, that form of doubling was not outside the realm of possibility.) And to perform that action hundreds and hundreds of times? That’s call “exploitation,” and that’s against the User Agreement, the Rules of Conduct, and all that is holy.

(Source: GW2 Forums – Number banned)
(Source: GW2 Forums – Understanding Exploits)

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