There has been a rash of phishing emails, scams and hacks that have plagued GW2′s launch. Well, Arenanet has not been sitting idly by as they are working on different solutions. They have come up with a list of precautions that you should take and are actively working on something that should help secure your account more.

Guild Wars Account E-mail Authentication is a new feature that we’ll be introducing to Account Management that will provide you with extra security by requiring you to verify every login request from a new location with your e-mail account.

Whenever you attempt to login from a new location, we will send an authentication request e-mail that contains both a description of where you are logging in from, and a link you click to authenticate the login request. We decided to implement this as a mechanism that anyone can benefit from, since it’s free and easy for anyone to sign up for a secure e-mail account. Keep in mind, when you click on your authentication request e-mail, we will never ask you to enter any login information. Verification requests are only sent after you attempt to login, not before.

See the Account E-mail Authentication article in the Guild Wars 2 Knowledge Base for detailed instructions on how to take advantage of this feature.

You can find the rest of the article here.

With any new major release, there are always performance tweaks and ways to make your game perform better. GW2 is no stranger and you will want your rig operating at peak performance because you will be battling 100s of people in World vs. World. Bill Freist gives us the inside scoop on driver optimization with Nvidia cards.

At present, Guild Wars 2 has already received a massive amount of optimizations. This means that players who have suffered from poor performance in the past should see an improvement to their frame rate. But there are still discrepancies between individual systems. As we investigate those, it leads us to discover interesting bottlenecks. For example, here’s a chart showing how much of a difference a graphics driver version can make. (This data is aggregated from all players who participated in recent stress tests.)

Check out more over on GW2′s website.

Looks like Mike Furguson was hanging out in the Heart of the Mists yesterday during the stress test and decided to answer some questions. Tibincrunch took some screenshots and posted them on Reddit yesterday. Thanks to him and the Reddit Community!

Mike Ferguson was hanging out in the Heart of the Mists and a bunch of people were asking questions so I decided to take some screenshots of his answers. Some of this stuff may already be known but I tried to ask some questions that were unconfirmed.

Keep reading for the full Q&A transcript.

Get ready for some Friday Evening Stress Testing! One more stress test for this week, now East Coast friendly!

Just a reminder for everyone! Hopefully we’ll find any balancing changes we’ve been hearing about for the Thief, Necromancer and Mesmer.

Scavenging through the internet we’ve found a list of changes, tooltip corrections, fixes that people have reported they’ve noticed since BWE3. We’ve heard from Jon Peters that the Thief, Necromancer and Mesmer classes are some of those that need the most balancing. We see a bigger push for Necromancers with this update. What we see that is lacking are Thieves and Mesmers. Time is winding down and we hope Arenanet can get it done! Of course, we have faith that they can.

If you know of any other changes that aren’t listed here, drop them in the comments section. Here is what we’ve found so far thanks to the GW2 community:

Engineer 

Inventions

• Elite Supplies The Supply Crate has extra med packs and a rifle turret. supplies, Elixir X lasts longer, Mortar has increased range.

Tools

• Armor Mods Gain +50 Toughness and 33% chance to cause Retaliation for 3 seconds on critical hit.Gain 3 seconds of Retaliation when critically hit. 30 second recharge.
• Power Wrench Tool kit skill recharge 20% faster.
• Speedy Gadgets Gadget recharges are reduced by 30%. 20%.

Continue reading to see the rest.

Today we get a fifth video discussing all the aspects of Guild Wars 2, and as promised, we get the the last concerning World vs. World vs. World.

Guild Wars 2 Game Designers Matt Witter and Mike Ferguson talk about World vs World (WvW), where three teams battle for control over objectives across four massive maps. Each team represents an entire server, so literally hundreds of players take part in wars that last for weeks. It’s PvP combat on an epic scale!

Hit us after the break for the video.

Arenanet has published another dev blog, but this time in the form of Video! Keep reading to watch the videos, or you can find them on Anet’s dev blog page.

Earlier in the development of Guild Wars 2 we released our MMO Manifesto video, a high-level look at the philosophy behind the design of the game. As we approach the launch date, now is the perfect time to talk about the outcome of that design philosophy with a look at the core ideas that the game is built on: personal story, dynamic events, combat, and PvP.

The only video missing is for WvW! But Anet is promising that is coming soon.

Yesterday, Mike Zadorojny, a content designer at Arenanet, answered a ton of fan questions on Kotaku. Did you get your question answered? Here’s what we learned.

PWNy
How the PVP works in Guildwars 2? i saw some videos but i didn’t get it. Can you explain a bit more about it, Like World PvP or just battle grounds, and is the PvP a big role in GW2?

Mike Zadorojny
With any of your characters you can visit the sPvP lobby that will bump your character up to level 80 and unlock all traits, skills, armor and weapons for you to use. From here you can jump into any of the on going sPvP matches. For WvW, any player can open up the score window and jump directly into any of the 4 maps (1 central and 1 home for each world) in the ongoing battle. In WvW your character is scaled up to level 80 (not a true 80) and you have only the items and skills you’ve unlocked available to you. In WvW you can level your character just like in PvE by doing events and killing monsters/players to unlock additional skills and traits.

Keep Reading for the full Q&A list.

In the wake of BWE3 we get a new Dev Blog telling us all about how Arenanet tells stories in their world.

The biggest story is the “Story of the World,” which is portrayed on the largest canvas. This is the tale of awakening of the Elder Dragons, and the threat that they pose to Tyria.

At low levels, near the starting areas, this is distant thunder; each race is absorbed within their own problems and threats. Some of these threats are related to the Elder Dragons, but you’re not fighting dragon minions every time you set out from Divinity’s Reach or Rata Sum. Challenges in these areas are more local. As you move into higher levels, the threat of the dragons becomes greater and greater, “…the central theme of the game: pulling people together to face more difficult challenges.”until at last, at the highest level, you reach Orr and the lair of Zhaitan, the Elder Undead Dragon.

Read more over at Arenanet’s blog page.

One more Dev Blog has been released, ramping up our excitement for this week’s BWE. This blog talks about the opening sequences and tells you a little bit about them.

Regarding Humnas:

We wanted to establish several key points in this cinematic: humans were once the predominant race, a people with many kingdoms spread all across Tyria, but now they are in decline; and despite these dark times, they still have faith, even if it feels more distant. Visually, we wanted to show the amazing vistas of Divinity’s Reach and the last great human nation of Kryta.

The second half of the cinematic is set by a player’s choice of social class—is your character a member of the gentry, a hardworking commoner, or do they hail from the streets? The moving imagery in each option is very different, and the writing is designed to convey the mood and give you a distinct feel for each background and setting.

Find out about the Norn and the Charr over at Arenanet.

We get some pretty good information with the latest dev blog for this weekend’s BWE. Here are a few tidbits that should help out your guild’s strategy launch.

To help account for the rapidly fluctuating populations at launch, we’ll initially use the 24-hour match format until world populations settle down a bit and we are able to get some data that will help avoid having two-week-long extreme mismatches. Once most worlds are reliably matching up against worlds of similar strength, we will switch over to playing the two-week-duration match cycles.

What this change does it hyper-inflate the initial competitiveness of launch. Established guilds were most likely aiming to control maps from day 1 and over the course of the first two weeks, stake a claim for world dominance. Initially this gave them some breathing room. Now with this change, it appears worlds will be reset and you will have to repeatedly claim W3 territory every day.

This should provide for some amazingly competitive battles and PVP rushes as guilds attempt to claim influence every day until things settle down.

The second piece of news is:

As you’ll see, there will be fewer worlds available initially than we had during BWE2. Why do we have fewer worlds for a much larger beta event? There are a few different reasons for this, ranging from being able to have a larger player limit on all worlds, to a shift in focus for how we utilize our server power.

Larger server populations! This should definitely help head start angst about getting locked out of the server of your choice. We found that many guilds were focused on a few different servers. Hopefully now players won’t be stuck on another server not being able to play with friends and waiting on server transfers to open up.

You can read the rest of the dev blog on Arenanet’s official website.

If you’re getting ready for this weekend’s BWE then you’ll want to read this latest dev blog and find out what is new.

Introducing the first minigame activity playable in a beta weekend—the wildly popular, incredibly macho norn pastime known as Keg Brawl!

Activities like Keg Brawl are fun minigames that are available in many Tyrian cities. In the great norn settlement of Hoelbrak, players can speak to the Brewer NPC in the northwest corner to begin the game.

In Keg Brawl, two teams attempt to score points by toting a full keg of ale across an icy lake and turning it in to the Ale Collector that belongs to their team. Participants are free to tackle, pummel, kick, and otherwise rough up competing players in order to seize control of the keg.
Keg Brawl—you’ll never look at a keg of ale the same way again!

There is much more, including Vistas! Make sure you read the whole blog.

This week brings us a new episode of Tales of Tyria.

Episode 40:

• 10:30 – Feedback: Role Playing
• 11:40 – News: End Game / Lgendary Weapons Video, Trivia Contest
• 46:20 – Mailbag: Too many Legendaries, Whistle Blowing in MMOs

Question of the Week – How long would you bother spending to craft a Legendary?

Continue reading for the video.

German Community Guild Wars 2 Manager, Ramon Domke, made and released a video tour today of the ArenaNet studio. In the video, he makes the rounds and chats a bit with a large number of the game’s developers and staff members. The team, overall, seems very enthusiastic about the fun they had during the beta weekend events, and thanks fans of the game for all the feedback that is given during this crucial time in development.