GW2 State Of The Game Update: 1st September 2012

ArenaNet have posted the first significant ‘State Of The Game’ update to the official Wiki. There’s a range of interesting stuff mentioned, replicated in full below.

It’s worth taking notice of the password and bot warning in particular. There’s a few bugs/glitches discussed as well, and I have to say I like the overall approach to fix these whilst minimising disruptions.

Here’s all the details:

This is the current status of the most important issues we’re tracking with Guild Wars 2 live service.

Account Security – Protect your account! We’ve seen hackers systematically scan email addresses and passwords harvested from other games, web sites, and trojans to see if they match Guild Wars 2 accounts. We’ve taken steps to protect our players from this, but we need your help too. Make sure that you use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else. For best security, use a unique email address too, and see our blog post for more tips.

Email authentication – We now have email authentication enabled for all players who have validated their email addresses. This feature sends an email whenever it detects a login attempt to your account from a location you haven’t played from before, asking you to allow or deny the login.

We’ve learned of an incompatibility between email authentication and older versions of Internet Explorer. We’re working on a fix, which we expect to deploy tomorrow.

If you’re not receiving account verification emails or account authentication emails, please check your junk/spam folders, and add noreply@guildwars2.com to your safe senders list.

Parties, guilds, etc. – We’ve made significant fixes to parties and guilds. However, you may still see intermittent outages. These outages cause symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, party members not staying in the same overflow servers as they travel between maps, and guild invites not working.

Trading Post – Yesterday we opened the Trading Post for a random, rotating 50% of users. After gathering data from yesterday’s tests, we applied a number of fixes and performance improvements, and are preparing a larger-scale test today.

Tournament Rewards – We believe we’ve addressed the problem with tournament chests not appearing. Let us know if you still see any issues with this.

World v. World – We’re aware the world v. world matches have not been resetting properly. We’re preparing an update to fix this. Once the issue is fixed, we’ll start running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Worlds – We added three new worlds in Europe yesterday, three new worlds in America today, and increased the population limits on all worlds.

Overflow – 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. If you want to play with a friend, but you’re not on the same overflow servers, you can form a party together, then right-click on your 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.

Botting – We suspended accounts of 750 players running bots. We’re ramping up and will soon apply permanent bans for cases of substantial botting.

Exploits – If you discover an exploit in the game, do not exploit it or publicize it, but instead please notify us immediately at this new email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net.

Forums – Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.

Wiki – We increased wiki server capacity to address issues users are seeing. We plan to start posting these updates to the wiki, as long as the wiki can handle the traffic.

Next software updates – We’re making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We’ll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.

Over to you: are you still having a great GW2 playing experience, and are any frustrations covered off in the above info for you?