
To test the resilience of AWS servers for its persistent maps, in September 2017 ArenaNet began a hybrid deployment of the game. A crash in a map server is very disruptive to players,” Clarke-Willson shared. But for MMORPG’s like Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 we needed a higher level of reliability because map instances can stay running for weeks at a time. The same is true for games with shorter play sessions. We felt AWS was originally designed for highly transactional web-style content: if one machine goes offline, the load balancer routes around it to a different instance. The big question for us was whether AWS could host these multiplayer maps for extended periods of time,” Clarke-Willson explained.“Our biggest concern with moving to AWS was the length of time any one server instance would remain up.

“We had some familiarity with AWS as we already used Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront services. The team had to consider the best way forward – a big capital expenditure for new hardware? Move to leased hardware? Or go all-in with a cloud system like AWS? And even without failures, we were somewhat stuck where we were – if we wanted to experiment with faster hardware, or more RAM, or faster drives, or better networking we had to order and provision it ourselves which is a huge impediment to experimentation,” said Dr. “Our hardware was purchased in 2012 and was starting to fail more often – especially the disk drives – and fixing this was simply not the best use of our time. This was originally accomplished for both games in the franchise using internal datacenters (IDC) located in Dallas and Frankfurt. They strive for 100% uptime which they achieved for three and a half years starting in August 2017 until March 2020 when they had a 14-minute outage due to a configuration error.Īs a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) it is important to the engineering staff to keep the game available to players at all times. Located in Bellevue, Washington, the engineering team at ArenaNet is responsible for building out the core gameplay systems as well as ensuring players can access the game anytime. After launch, Guild Wars 2 became the one of the fastest selling MMORPG’s of all time, and that success has continued for years, with the release of two expansions and regular ‘Living World’ episodes which are free to owners of the game. Guild Wars 2 took the franchise into a fully rendered and explorable 3D world. Guild Wars (released 2005) and the successor Guild Wars 2 (released 2012) both focus on player skill and horizontal player progression where players mix skills into novel builds in cooperation with their friends.
GUILD WARS 2 FREE TO PLAY SEVER SERIES
The first time you can transfer is 7 days from then.ArenaNet is the wholly owned subsidiary of Korean online game publisher NCSOFT that developed the critically acclaimed series of games in the Guild Wars franchise. If you decide to delete the characters on your account, Customer Support cannot restore them, in whole or in part.When all characters are deleted, your guilds, coin, and bank contents will not be lost.Īs a clarification if you’re a new account less than 7 days old, when they say once every 7 days the timer starts when you select a world and log on. Transfers to any game world - whether free or paid for with gems - are allowed only if the population of the world is at less than capacity.Transfers to any game world - whether free or paid for with gems - are allowed only once per seven days. The next time you log on without any characters, you will be prompted to choose a new home world. You can also transfer without cost if you delete all your existing characters.

This allows players just starting out to change to another world that is not full. The transfer fee is waived for accounts without any active characters.
