Update 7

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

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!

Customer Support
Our customer support team is prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests. If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions.
We have now completed prioritized requests submitted prior to Sunday, September 2. If you have an older ticket for a hacked account or blocking login issue that has not been completed, that means it's not correctly prioritized. Submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, "Blocking Login - Ticket submitted <date> - Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx" (fill in the date and ticket number of your existing ticket), and we will prioritize your existing ticket.
EDIT: we have a modified procedure for ensuring that your ticket is correctly prioritized. Please read this thread for instructions.

Email Authentication
Once you validate your account email address, we help protect you from attempted account hacking (even if the hacker guesses your password) by sending you an email every time you attempt to login from a new location, asking you to approve or deny the login attempt. Keep in mind, if you receive an email asking you to approve or deny a login attempt and you didn't make that login attempt, that means a hacker knows your password. Change your password immediately.
Be sure not to flag an email authentication message as spam; if you do, your email provider may prevent future email authentication messages from reaching you.
If email authentication is preventing you from logging in, contact our customer support team following these instructions and we'll disable it for your account.

Trading Post
We've addressed capacity constraints, and the Trading Post is now available for all users!

Gem Purchases
Some customers who purchased gems experienced a delay in delivery of those gems to their account. This issue has now been fixed and all gems have been delivered.

Parties & Guilds
We're working on capacity constraints causing issues with parties and guild functionality, including symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working. We will deploy a software update tonight and another tomorrow night that will improve these issues.

PvP Tournament rewards
We're still working on the issue with missing PvP tournament rewards.

World v. World event rewards
We're temporarily disabling rewards on Dolyak caravan escort events in World v. World while we work on rebalancing them.

Storyline Steps
In last night's software update we fixed issues with the storyline steps "The Battle for Fort Trinity" and "Shell Shock".

Item descriptions
In tonight's software update we'll fix issues with item tooltips and chat links. Tooltips will now properly show names of item upgrades. Chat links will now properly show names of transmuted items, weapon/armor suffixes in names, and quantities of stackable items.

Forums
This afternoon we brought the official support forums online for testing. We'll roll out additional forums in the coming days.

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
We're making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We'll publish the next software update tonight at midnight Seattle time. We'll perform a significant update tomorrow night at midnight Seattle time, during which the game will be unavailable for approximately 60 minutes.

Update 6

Monday, September 3, 2012

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!
Today a Guild Wars related fan site announced that its account database has been breached. That's important but just one of many apparent breaches of other games and web sites that hackers have been collecting email addresses and passwords from. Protect yourself by using a unique password for each game and web site account you care about, and especially be sure to use a unique password for your Guild Wars 2 account.

Customer Support
Our customer support team is prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests. If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions.
We have now completed prioritized requests submitted prior to Saturday, September 1. If you have an older ticket that has not been completed, that means it's not correctly prioritized. Submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, "Hacked Account - Ticket submitted August xx - Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx" (fill in the date and ticket number of your existing ticket), and we will prioritize your existing ticket.
In the past 24 hours we helped 2,574 players with hacked accounts and 2,867 players with other blocking login issues get back into the game.

Email Authentication
Once you validate your account email address, we help protect you from attempted account hacking (even if the hacker guesses your password) by sending you an email every time you attempt to login from a new location, asking you to approve or deny the login attempt. Keep in mind, if you receive an email asking you to approve or deny a login attempt and you didn't make that login attempt, that means a hacker knows your password. Change your password immediately.
Be sure not to flag an email authentication message as spam; if you do, your email provider may prevent future email authentication messages from reaching you.
If email authentication is preventing you from logging in, contact our customer support team following these instructions and we'll disable it for your account.

Reset Password
We will leave "reset password" disabled until further notice. We don't want to allow hackers who compromise an email account to use that email account to steal the associated Guild Wars 2 game account. If you forget your password, please contact customer support.

Network Connectivity Issues
We experienced network connectivity issues today between our North American and European data centers, which caused intermittent errors with login, character creation and deletion, and guild manipulation. These issues should now be resolved.

Parties & Guilds
We've made progress but still have capacity constraints causing issues with party and guild functionality, including symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working. We're working on a fix and will provide a further update tomorrow.

PvP Tournament Rewards
PvP tournament rewards are currently not functioning properly. We're working on a fix and will provide a further update tomorrow.

Trading Post
We've been expanding the Trading Post's capacity to handle the huge volume of requested trades. After our test yesterday, we've been working to resolve some issues reported by players. We expect to have the Trading Post online for all players this evening (edit: after tonight's software update).

Storyline Steps
In last night's update we fixed blocking issues with the storyline steps "Stealing Secrets" and "A Grisly Shipment". We're preparing to fix issues with "The Battle for Fort Trinity" and "Shell Shock" for tonight's update.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Update 5

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Account Security & Hacked Accounts
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!
We're prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of customer support requests. If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions.
As of this writing we have completed all prioritized support tickets for hacked accounts and other blocking login issues submitted prior to Friday, August 31. If you have an older ticket that has not been completed, that means it's not correctly prioritized. Submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, "Hacked Account - Ticket submitted August xx - Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx" (fill in the date and ticket number of your existing ticket), and we will prioritize your existing ticket.
Over the past three days we've received approximately 8,500 new support tickets related to hacked accounts and other blocking login issues, and we've resolved issues to get approximately 9,500 players back into the game (most from tickets submitted prior to Friday, August 31). We're aggressively ramping up our customer support team, with 28 new support representatives starting today and more coming online in the next few days, to provide the fast response times our customers expect.

Scanning Accounts & Email Spam
Yesterday, three malicious users each changed the account names of their own Guild Wars 2 accounts thousands of times, scanning through lists of email addresses stolen from other games and web sites, presumably to determine which email addresses were available (not already used for a Guild Wars 2 account) and which were taken. It obviously shouldn't be possible to change your own account name so frequently. We temporarily disabled account name changes and have now restored but limited them to prevent this.
To the thousands of people who received emails stating, "the email address for your Guild Wars account has been changed," and are not even our customers, we sincerely apologize for the spam. Please be aware that your email address is on a list of account credentials that hackers have apparently stolen from other games and web sites and are systematically scanning.
To Guild Wars 2 customers whose email addresses are being tested by hackers but not stolen, thank you for protecting your account by choosing a new, unique password for Guild Wars 2. Even though your unique password should protect you, we think you deserve to know if hackers have your email address on their list of credentials stolen from other games and web sites, so we'll send you periodic notifications when we see hackers testing your account.

Reset Password
We're leaving "reset password" disabled for now. Please contact customer support if you forgot your password.
We believe hackers also have lists of compromised credentials for email accounts, and we don't want to allow them to login to a compromised email account and then use "reset password" to steal the associated Guild Wars 2 game account.

Email Authentication
Once you validate your account email address, we help protect you from attempted account hacking (even if the hacker guesses your password) by sending you an email every time you attempt to login from a new location, asking you to approve or deny the login attempt.
Because you have to first validate your account email address by clicking on a link in email in order to enable this feature, you should be able to receive email messages from us. If you don't see email authentication messages, check your spam/junk folder. Be sure not to flag an email authentication message as spam; if you do, your email provider may prevent all future email authentication messages from reaching you.
If email authentication is preventing you from logging in, contact our customer support team following these instructions and we'll disable it for your account.

PvP Tournaments, World Transfers, Character Creation/Deletion
We experienced multiple outages of PvP tournaments, world transfers, and character creation/deletion today, and ongoing issues with PvP tournament rewards. We're working to address these problems.

Parties & Guilds
We've made significant improvements today to capacity constraints that have caused issues with parties and guilds. However, players will still notice some intermittent issues with party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working.

Trading Post
We're still working on expanding the Trading Post's capacity to handle the huge volume of requested trades. We had the Trading Post down for maintenance earlier today but currently it's online and available to all players. We're still working on some issues, in particular buy and sell commands sometimes appearing to hang although they actually succeeded. We know the Trading Post is a big part of the game and we're working around-the-clock to restore full functionality to all players.

Storyline Steps
Players have reported blocking issues with certain storyline steps. We're preparing fixes for "Stealing Secrets", "A Grisly Shipment", and "The Battle for Fort Trinity", hopefully for tonight's update, and are investigating issues with other storyline steps.

Worlds & Overflow
We created three new worlds in each data center this week, and are periodically increasing the capacities of existing worlds 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.

Exploits
As promised by lead producer Chris Whiteside, this afternoon (72 hours after the bans) we removed the account bans from those customers who were involved in the karma weapons exploit and who correctly submitted appeals agreeing to delete the items. Anyone who remains banned, follow the instructions in the linked post and we'll get you back in the game quickly.
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.

GM Actions
Here's a summary of recent GM actions to police the game. In the past 24 hours we permanently banned 292 accounts for RMT-related botting and spamming, and suspended 23 accounts for using very offensive language or names.

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.

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.

Update 4

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Account Security - Read this! If you don't want your account hacked, don't use the same email address and password for Guild Wars 2 that you've used for another game or web site. Hackers have big lists of email addresses and passwords that they've harvested from mal-ware and from security vulnerabilities in other games and web sites, and they're systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.
We're doing everything we can to protect you. But to protect you in this case, we have to start with, "the hacker knows this person's account name and password; now how do we keep him from stealing the account?" That's hard to protect against. Don't let it get to that point. Please immediately change your password to a new, strong, unique password that you've never used anywhere else.

Hacked Accounts - Our customer support team is prioritizing tickets from customers with hacked accounts or who are otherwise blocked from logging into the game. If your account was hacked, please follow these instructions for submitting a ticket, to make sure that your ticket is correctly prioritized and to make sure you're submitting all the information we need to restore your access.
For hacked accounts, expect a response within 72 hours. As of this writing we're working on tickets submitted August 30. If you submitted a hacked account ticket on August 29 or earlier, and haven't received a response yet, your ticket may not be correctly prioritized. In that case, please submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, "Hacked Account - Ticket submitted August 2x - Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx" (fill in the date and ticket number), and we will prioritize your existing (August 29 or earlier) ticket.

Reset Password - We're leaving the "reset password" feature disabled for now. If you forgot your password, please contact the customer support team.
We're leaving this disabled for now because we believe that a significant number of customers are unaware that hackers have the passwords for their email accounts. If we enable "reset password", a hacker who can get into an email account can use that access to get into the associated Guild Wars 2 game account.

Email Authentication - A feature we use to prevent hackers from gaining access to an account even if they know the account name and password. We suffered an outage of email authentication mails today, preventing players from authorizing logins from new locations. This is now resolved. When you receive an email authentication message, or any other email from noreply@guildwars2.com, do not mark the email as spam! If you do, your email provider may prevent you from seeing any future email authentication messages.

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, party members not joining dungeons together, and guild invites not working.

Trading Post - We're periodically opening the Trading Post for testing. This morning it was open to all players for six hours. As of this writing, the Trading Post is offline so we can apply further bug fixes and performance improvements.
This morning during testing, some users purchased items and didn't immediately receive them, or sold items and didn't immediately receive the gold. We do have record of these transactions and are working on completing them. Check the "pick up" tab on your commerce panel to see if your transaction has completed.

PvP Tournaments - tournaments were temporarily disabled today. We have now restored them.

World v. World - matches are now updating daily. We're running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Worlds - We added three new worlds in Europe on Thursday, and three new worlds in America on Friday, 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 and exploits - It is our policy to permanently ban accounts engaged in botting and exploits, and we're ramping up to do that. 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. (This email address is for notifying us of emergency exploits. We cannot respond individually to questions sent to this address.)

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.

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.

In the beginning, God created Tyria

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