ArenaNet Outlines World and Regions in Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet clarifies how regions will work along with server choice at launch in Guild Wars 2.

There has been a lot of conjecture over how things will shape up when choosing servers at launch for Guild Wars 2. Will region locking mess up those who have to travel a lot? How will the typical server crunch of launch be handled?

Thankfully, ArenaNet released a handy post to clear up a lot of the questions.

The three regions - Europe, North America and Other - are outlined and it is confirmed that those in the Other category will be connected to the NA data centers.

Pre-purchasers through ArenaNet will automatically be assigned their region whereas those who receive their copies from other retailers will have to enter their code at a registration site, which will then assign the correct region.

Once selected, your region does not tie you down as you can access the game from anywhere in the world - a concern voiced by fans before, which they will be happy to have allayed.

Though you will be given a list of servers that is linked to your region, you can simply select another region's servers and play wherever you like.

At first glance, there would appear to be a disappointing omission at launch: guesting.

Actually what ArenaNet is implementing should lead to an improved experience in the long term. To help with server migration and to aid players in avoiding the problem of overloaded servers, it will be very easy to transfer to different worlds at launch. Then when world populations have settled, the cost of server transfers will go up and guesting will be activated.

If guesting had been available at launch it may have skewed the migration of players across servers and hampered the final populations causing issues down the road.

I think the approach taken makes a bundle of sense. How about you?

Finally, in somewhat related news, Arawulf has tested out the account name change and it works!

For all your Guild Wars 2 news stay tuned to ZAM; there's a lot of exciting things heading this way...

                                                                           Scott "Jarimor" Hawkes, Editor In Chief