Guild Wars 2 is officially released august 28th, but pre-purchasers have a three-day head start and started playing yesterday. Although ArenaNet has been testing quite a lot, open betas and stress tests, the unofficial launch didn’t go well. I’ve heard a lot of people who compared it to the Diablo 3 last may.
The servers were planned to go live around 9:00 CET, it was possible they might open them early so they could fix some issues before everyone would storm the gates. It didn’t help. When I checked twitter around eight, shortly after I woke up, there were already messages about connectivity issues, black screens and tutorial bugs. Error 42 became the new error 37.
The “cannot connect”-error wasn’t the only launch problem. There are still features of the game that don’t work as they should. The parties, guild system and the Black Lion Trading system aren’t working as they should. ArenaNet has given themselves an opportunity to find and fix these problems before the real launch. I really hope that when the rest of the world with normal orders, everyone can still play without too much problems. It would be very bad if the connection issues return tomorrow.
Expect some more this week. I’ve tried to gather some screenshots of the vistas. I’ll put them in a gallery for everyone’s view pleasure.