Friday, September 7, 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!
When accounts are hacked and then used for botting or spamming ads for gold sales, we ban the accounts until we can return them to their rightful owner. If you login and see the message, "this account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement," and you're not a gold seller, it's likely that your account was hacked. Please contact customer support using the instructions below.
If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn't initiate and from someplace you don't recognize, that's a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account. You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password 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.
Hacked accounts
If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions. We're resolving prioritized hacked account tickets within 72 hours. If you have an older hacked account ticket that has not been resolved, it may not be properly prioritized, or the ticket may not contain enough information for us to address it quickly. Please update your existing ticket, clearly state that this is a hacked account ticket, and provide as much information as possible, including your account email address, your account display name or character names, and your 25-digit Guild Wars 2 serial code.
Email authentication
Email authentication allows you to approve or deny each login attempt from a new location. With this feature, hackers can be prevented from logging into your account even if they guess your password. However, some customers are finding email authentication messages filtered by their email provider or are otherwise having difficulty receiving these messages. Tomorrow we will provide a secure method for customers who are having trouble with email authentication to disable it on their accounts. We ask that you use this new self-help system, and only submit a support ticket if that doesn't work for you.
Edit: The self-help system is available now for testing. Follow these instructions if you need to turn off email authentication on your account. Keep in mind that, with email authentication off, your account security relies on you using a unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you've never used anywhere else.
Password resets
Tomorrow we will provide a secure method for customers who have lost their passwords or whose passwords aren't working to reset their passwords. We ask that you use this new self-help system, and only submit a support ticket if that doesn't work for you.
Edit: The self-help system is available now for testing. Follow these instructions to reset your password. Please choose a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you've never used anywhere else.
Support forums
The official support forums are now online, and we have a new forum for players helping other players.
Last Night's Update
We largely resolved the capacity constraints with parties and guild functionality, which were causing symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travelled between maps, and guild manipulation not working. Note that, while capacity constraints are now addressed, there are still some specific issues we're working on with parties and guilds. In particular, there's an issue with parties not staying together as they travel into dungeons, which we plan to address tonight.
We fixed issues with the storyline steps "Fury of the Dead," "Grisly Shipment," and "In The Ruins."
We changed the downed mode camera to maintain a more consistent distance taking race into account.
Tonight's Update
We'll fix the issue with parties not staying together as they travel into dungeons.
We'll fix issues with the storyline steps "A Light in the Darkness," "Estate of Decay," "Explosive Intellect," "Rumors of Trouble," "The Lost Chieftain's Return," and "Tribunes in Effigy."
We'll add an option to stop queueing for your home world, for players who want to remain on an overflow server indefinitely without being asked.
We'll add an option to report an account for sending spam or otherwise inappropriate in-game mail. Edit: This option will be added in tomorrow night's update, not tonight's update.
Coming Soon
Some players' monthly achievements didn't correctly reset on September 1 at 00:00 GMT. To allow those players to collect the next monthly reward, we will reset the monthly achievement of any player who is already at 100% for the month as of tomorrow night's update.
We're working on a fix for PvP tournament rewards.
Trading Post
Trading Post item and gold delivery was slow for part of the day today due to a network connectivity issue between data centers. Delayed gold and items are being delivered; check your "pick up" tab.
Gem Purchases
We found some cases where players didn't receive items after purchasing them on the gem store. We have records of all occurrences and are in the process of refunding gems to all affected players. Note that refunded gems will simply be added to your account's gem balance.
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
The next software update will be tonight at midnight Seattle time. We don't expect significant downtime tonight, but the game may be unavailable for 20-60 minutes during a software update.