Guild Wars 2 hits million users

Not many games can claim to have one million users at launch, but Guild Wars 2 has received this honour although not without incident.

The MMORPG launched just hours ago, with ArenaNet officials announcing one million users had already played it from Saturday through to Monday in a three-day head start program.

Those with pre-order copies of the game were allowed to commence gaming on Saturday, with the number of players online simultaneously reaching a staggering 400,000.

Unfortunately with stats like this comes heavy server pressure, with some buckling under the weight as players reported issues of lag and login problems, while others discovered the online item trading function to be offline.

ArenaNet responded to the issues with the following statement:

“We currently have a couple serious bugs with one of our important back end systems…we are very sorry for this inconvenience and are currently working around the clock to try and remedy this error.”

If you’re a fan of online RPG’s, these problems will be all too familiar – Diablo 3 experienced similar issues at launch, as did BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Many users have also found out the hard way that ArenaNet doesn’t take too kindly to racism and offensive language, with accounts being blocked before they even start going.

“To keep Guild Wars 2 a pleasant place to be, we take action against racist names, hate speech, and other unacceptable behaviour,” ArenaNet says.

“We have suspended some accounts involved in the use of offensive character names or inappropriate chat.”

Foul language is worthy of a three-day suspension, while inappropriately named characters are forced to adopt a less offensive handle.

The popularity of Guild Wars comes from its approach to profits – rather than demanding monthly payments to play the game, users simply pay a one-off fee to install the game.

The rest is free. It’s almost like the customer gets what they pay for. Who knew that could ever work?

Are you playing GW2? Experiencing difficulties? Let us know what they are in the comments section below.