Guild Wars 2 beta tidbits: "hundreds of thousands" of pre-purchases
 

Some inspiring information in a recent blog post by Mike O'Brien, President of ArenaNet.

http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrie…ld-wars-2-beta

And news of an upcoming stress test this Monday, albeit only 7 hours long: So, if you're interested in what I can only describe as an incredibly fun and fresh online gaming experience, I heartily recommend you consider pre-purchasing and logging in on Monday :)

I hate you.
My MMO of choice was Secret World. I got in beta and, though it has good features, it didn't convince me, so canceled that and said 'ok, so what do I do with the $50 I already had planned?'. Then remembered GW2 had good things going on from this forum, so went ahead and pre-ordered it (by the way, you can preorder it for $53 in several places). I said, "it's weekend! I can test it now!"… what the hell is that about a 'weekend test' on a Monday? In what calendar is Monday part of the weekend? *grumble grumble*

In this case, a pre-order is actually a different mechanic than a pre-purchase.

Pre-purchase gets you access to all subsequent beta events and a 3 day headstart on the official launch date. You pay in full ahead of time.

Pre-order gets you no beta event access on its own, but a 1 day headstart on the official launch date. You only need put a down payment down until launch.

Regardless of which option you chose, congratulations on your GW2 decision :)

Monday isn't a weekend test, it's a stress test. They actually want everybody to get in and crashes the servers so they can find bugs and fix them.

well, got in the stress test (only for 3 hours, stupid test sessions during the day on a working day are stupid). Game is definitely in better shape than The Secret World. It was a lot of fun indeed. Though I'm not sure if it's because it's unfinished or maybe I didn't get to the part where you get it explained, but the crafting part could use some tutorial or starter quest line. I got to the city as part of my 'main quest' and saw lots of NPCs. Saw an artificer trainer, trained, but couldn't craft anything. No explanation of anything anywhere that I could see.

One thing I missed was any sort of chat channel (global, regional, whatever). I know they can be spammy but usually you can hide them when you don't want them. But I couldn't find how to activate them (didn't try in the settings option, just tried right-clicking the messages tab but nothing happened)

I was in a chat channel … think it was local though. I wasn't paying to much attention but I know I saw other players chatting.

I had trouble with crafting but then I only spent about 10 minutes on it :) Otherwise the stress test went well and was a lot of fun. had some freezes here and there but otherwise was smooth.