Guild Wars 2 Junkies » game update

Game Update: 10 September 2012

Draegan — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:13:50 +0000

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! If your current password isn’t unique to Guild Wars 2, change it today! Do not under any circumstances use the same password for Guild Wars 2 as you do for your email account.

We’ve observed hack attempts against hundreds of thousands of accounts that don’t even exist. To protect those people in case they purchase Guild Wars 2 and create an account, we will now disallow customers from picking passwords that we’ve previously seen used in a hack attempt.

See this article for more tips on choosing good passwords and keeping your account secure.

Customer Support: Our customer support team is prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests. We’re currently responding to prioritized support tickets within 48 hours, and will soon be responding within 24 hours.

To reset a password or disable email authentication on your account, follow these instructions. Be sure to read all security guidelines before performing either of these steps.

Game Updates: Check the forum links below for details on recent game updates.

There is no game update scheduled for September 10.

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.

Game Update: September 7, 2012

Draegan — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 13:25:50 +0000

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.
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.
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” t

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.

Game Update: Monday, September 3, 2012

Draegan — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:23:08 +0000

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.

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.

Game Update: Saturday, September 1, 2012

Draegan — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 16:21:23 +0000

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 malware 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: Email authentication is 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 [email protected], 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: PvP tournaments were temporarily disabled today. We have now restored them.

World v. World: 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.