Guild Wars 2: Blast-off or Failure to Launch?

Eager gamers finally got what they had been waiting for on Tuesday, August 28th. The much anticipated, super-hyped launch of Guild Wars 2 took the world by storm, and basically shut down several media outlets over the weekend leading up to it while they enjoyed the head-start access reserved for pre-purchasers. Right away people were shocked at the stability of ArenaNet's servers, as very few people encountered any problems logging in, playing with friends, or exploring the world. However as the weekend went on, problems were cropping up. People (especially in EU) couldn't log on at all. Worse, accounts started getting hacked. Support tickets started piling up as the customer service team quickly got overwhelmed. People were experiencing the whole gamut of issues, ranging from mail not sending to guild invites not being received to not being able to access the game at all. It culminated on Aug 31, when ArenaNet officially stopped selling their own game, stating that, until they got some of these issues sorted out, they were disabling first-party digital sales of Guild Wars 2. It's been nearly a week since the game has gone live. Does this mean the launch has been a failure? I don't believe so. Take a look at the history of MMO launches. Let's start with the grand-daddy of them all, World of Warcraft (I'm talking popularity, not age here, OK fanboys?). Blizzard massively underestimated the popularity of their own game, and their servers were not equipped to handle the (at the time) massive number of players logging in. People sat in queues thousands of people long, waiting hours to play, only to have the game client crash 15 minutes after they finally got in and put them at the back of the queue again. Character info was getting rolled back, servers were going down entirely, and Blizzard was trying to patch things up by handing out free play time like old people hand out pennies at Halloween. It took the better part of a month for Blizzard to get their servers up to par, and get things running smoothly on a regular basis. On the other end of the spectrum, Rift had what will probably be remembered as the smoothest launch of all time. The server had very very few outages, all of which lasted a matter of minutes. Most elements of the game worked as intended, with very few bugs cropping up, and the ones that did were relatively minor. Rift maintained that stability from the get-go, however it was launched under much less anticipation. Guild Wars 2 boasted a staggering 400,000+ concurrent unique users over the weekend, and those were only people who purchased the game in full ahead of launch. By comparison, Blizzard reports an average of 800,000 concurrent unique users during peak times, and it is going on ten years old and has sold approximately 20 times more copies. So how does the Guild Wars 2 launch rate? Well, it depends who you ask. My headstart weekend was basically flawless other than a few minor annoyances like mail not working intermittently, a few issues inviting friends to my guild, and the trading post being completely MIA. One of my guild mates in Europe played all day Saturday... and that was it. He couldn't so much as log on until this last Wednesday. Another guild mate had a perfectly fine weekend. And then on Tuesday, his account was hacked. ArenaNet has claimed that most account hacks have occurred because people use the same email address and password as they do on other sites or games. However, this particular guild mate is head of network security for a fairly large casino. He made a unique email address and a password he has never used before for Guild Wars 2, because he knew how susceptible new MMO launches are to hackers. So is there more to the account hacking than ArenaNet is letting on? Maybe. We just have to wait and see. Instability, bugs, and glitches are to be expected with the launch of a new MMO, particularly one as ambitious and anticipated as Guild Wars 2. As far as those technical aspects of the game, the launch has been fairly good. But there is no excuse for lackluster security when it comes to protecting the accounts and information of your customers. Assuming what people are saying is true, it could be the Achilles heel in the story of Guild Wars 2's launch. Players can forgive and forget problems with gameplay, and the game technically has had a fairly strong launch. But not keeping personal information safe breaks the players trust with the developers, and that is much harder to repair.