GW2 Game Status Update: 8th September 2012

Another day, another game update with a nice bunch of fixes, particularly with some storyline steps.

Interestingly, you can now also choose to not be prompted to join your home world if you’re wanting to play on overflow indefinitely.

The update in full:

 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Account Security
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!
When accounts are hacked and then used for botting or spamming ads for gold sales, we ban the accounts until we can return them to their rightful owner. If you login and see the message, “this account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement,” and if you’re not a gold seller, it’s likely that your account was hacked. Please contact customer support using the instructions below.
If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn’t initiate and from someplace you don’t recognize, that’s a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account. You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.
You can find more tips for keeping your Guild Wars 2 account secure in this article.
Customer Support
Our customer support team is still prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests.
Hacked accounts – If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions. Clearly state that it is a hacked account, and provide as much information as possible, including your account email address, your account display name or character names, and your 25-digit Guild Wars 2 serial code.
Email authentication – Email authentication allows you to approve or deny each login attempt from a new location, which can help protect your account even in the event a hacker discovers your password. However, some customers are finding email authentication messages are being filtered by their email provider or are otherwise having difficulty receiving these messages. You can now turn off email authentication by following these instructions. If you turn it off, be especially sure to use a unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else.
Password resets – If you’ve lost your password, you can now reset it by following these instructions.
Last Night’s Update
    • Fixed the issue with parties not staying together as they travel into dungeons.
    • Fixed issues with the storyline steps “A Light in the Darkness,” “Estate of Decay,” “Explosive Intellect,” “Rumors of Trouble,” “The Lost Chieftain’s Return,” and “Tribunes in Effigy.”
    • Added an option to stop queueing for your home world, for players who want to remain on an overflow server indefinitely without being asked.
Today’s Back-End Work
    • Fixed PvP tournament rewards.
Tonight’s Update
    • Will add the ability to report in-game mail.
    • Will reset monthly achievements for players who have been stuck at 100%, to help those whose achievements didn’t reset correctly on September 1. (Note that daily achievements reset each day at 00:00 GMT and monthly achievements reset on the first of each month at 00:00 GMT.)
    • Will include fixes for various blocked events and skill challenges.
Reporting exploits
If you discover an emergency game-breaking or economy-breaking bug, do not exploit it, but please notify us immediately at this email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. You may also use this email address to report suspected security vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who has sent reports. However, note that we cannot respond individually to emails to this address.
Worlds & Overflow
We’re increasing world capacity as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game.
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”. We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.
Next software updates

The next software update will be tonight at midnight Seattle time. We don’t expect significant downtime; however players may experience some connectivity issues at this time.