Guild Wars 2 dev reflects on launch security concerns: "We're not done"

Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet saw the launch of its MMO hit by a string of server crashes, trading loopholes and security concerns, and gamers - as are wont to do - gave them hell for it. ArenaNet's game director Colin Johanson has shared his thoughts looking back at the game's launch, & has talked about how it has learned from what occurred to improve the game's stability moving onward.

As part of an interview you could read right here subsequent week, Johanson attempted to give the inside story on Guild Wars 2′s launch troubles, and to underline his studio's commitment to stable, reliable play.

"It's one of the hardest items you will ever do in the game market," he stated of MMO launches. "There are times where I am envious of developers who get to make offline gw2 gold games that don't have to cope with these sort of concerns, it's insane how complicated it is.

"Although we had a few hiccups on launch, for the most part I think we had an incredibly smooth launch once you contemplate the sort of player login rates we saw, & how rapidly we were able to respond to those issues. Our biggest issues at launch simply came from the sheer amount of concurrent users hitting each part of the game, even in our beta tests where we had rather big player populations we never were able to reasonably test any method with the kind of numbers we had for launch.

"Our betas led us to think everything was completely stable, although when we cruised past specific numbers places like the trading post, & one or two problems with the servers reared their ugly heads. Account thieves took their turn as well taking well known account names & passwords they had stolen from other games forums & employing them to attempt and get their hands on peoples accounts that did not defend themselves with distinctive passwords."

Indeed, a lot of 11,000 passwords were supposedly at the mercy of hackers at 1 point, although whilst the developer managed to clear up all difficulties in the end, Johanson remains firm that there is no room for ArenaNet to get slack. In truth, its work must continue apace.

"Looking back on those days," he recalled, "basically everything has not only been stabilised, though our capability to deal with them as improved considerably as well. Complications with connectivity, the trading post, and so on are now astonishingly rare. We've setup many account security measures and added the capability to restore accounts in the uncommon case something occurs, which is now extremely uncommon.

"We set a legacy with the very first Guild Wars we are going to live up to with Guild Wars 2, the total down time for the first game over seven-plus years is so small it is insane, and we have to be even better in Guild Wars 2. We hope you go your complete lifetime of the game with Guild Wars 2 & never see the message "Guild Wars 2 is right now down for maintenance".

"We are not done though, our security team, IT team, server programming team, and client support team will all continue to work proactively to make these parts of the game even more structurally sound than they already are. We don't ever want to stand still and say "great adequate, mission accomplished" we'll keep finding approaches to make our already extraordinaryly stable technique even more robust."

What's your view on the Guild Wars 2 gold launch backlash? Were a number of gamers to hasty to pass judgement on AreneNet without realising the scale of launching an MMO of its size, or must such a collapse have actually been pre-based upon the team? Let us know beneath.