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

Drithius

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

http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-the-guild-wars-2-beta

the number of people who pre-purchased the game far exceeded our expectations, and we had to temporarily disable pre-purchases. In the end that wasn’t enough, and even with 48 worlds we didn’t have enough server capacity to meet the huge demand.

And news of an upcoming stress test this Monday, albeit only 7 hours long:
Stress Test on Monday May 14th to test some changes we’ve implemented. This 7-hour test event, which runs from 11 AM to 6 PM PDT (-7 GMT) is open to all players who have pre-purchased Guild Wars 2.

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

http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-the-guild-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*
 
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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 :)
 
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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.
 
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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)
 
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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.
 
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