Gratis for All: The West: The most realistic fantasy MMO

There's something distinctly unfair about being an American fantasy fan. Should you take pleasure in all the movies or run around in all the splendid fantasy landscapes you will speedily notice how un-American the inhabitants are. Sure, monsters or knights in a fantasy MMO do not honestly belong to any 1 nationality or time, however they're more likely to sound like they are from England rather than Lengthy Island. It's not fair. What do Americans have in their past that's something as cool as knights and swords?

The West is one of those games & Innogames is 1 of those publishers that on the whole causes readers to shrug when they read a story about either. Although if Facebook "likes" are any indication, The West isn't just a further tiny indie game that doesn't exist for the reason that you have never heard of them. 107,000 likes on Facebook shows a Guild Wars 2 gold game with a pretty powerful community, no matter the publisher. (Take many time to compare like numbers from exclusive games, you will be shocked.) In comparison, Guild Wars 2 has 863,000. Grepolis, a further Innogames title, has 385,000. Hardly scientific, nevertheless nonetheless a neat comparison.

Innogames has been doing really well for quite a while & they effortlessly fall into the category of one of my favorite publishers. I love their method to development; they want to make MMOs for basically every type of player on practically any piece of technology. The eventual objective, according to an interview I did with them at GDC Online 2012, is to make each game available across PC & mobile. They also design gw2 gold games that may be casually hardcore, meaning that a game like The West may be enjoyed in 15-minute chunks or epic eight-hour sessions. I are apt to play it only a variety of occasions a day however still manage to get quite a bit done.

Guild Wars 2 Live Stream Summary for online worlds

Our colleagues from Onlinewelten.com have published a comprehensive summary of yesterday's live streams coming to Guild Wars 2 content.

In the past few days we have repeatedly reported on upcoming content at ArenaNet's hit MMORPG Guild Wars 2. At yesterday hosted the developer a comprehensive live stream event where also turned back all about the future of the dynamic MMORPGs. If you missed the show you should, you can watch the archive of the live stream to hear a recording. Should you, however, only be interested in the facts, we put you the comprehensive summary of our network partners page Onlinewelten.com his heart. There Anja Gellesch has compiled all the highlights of the stream.

excerpt
"How ArenaNet announced already, the development team not only new content and features, but also the existing zones and dungeons dedicated to be revised so that the players will be motivated to look at all areas in the gw2 gold game. Among others, new achievements, including new rewards for the achievements in the game. specifically, well adjusted once the daily and monthly achievements. Moreover come specially recruited for guild news. Overall, over one hundred new rewards are planned to be connected to the successes and guilds. come with the next patch changes and new rewards for Orr. "

Guild Wars 2: death knell for free server transfer

ArenaNet implemented a feature which allows you to play outside of your server with your friends, while providing the ability for free server transfers.

In the past,gw2 gold players of Guild Wars 2 jump on your mood from one server to the next home and looked like most, faced with the limitation to the chance this can only perceive every seven days. From 28 January 2013, however, the transmission of a character with additional cost to the customer of ArenaNet will be connected - as it actually was from the outset in planning for the MMORPG. However holds ArenaNet is a loophole allowing so-called playing as a guest, which it is planned to introduce parallel.

It is understood that in this context the question of where this is the difference with the previous situation. Well, actually there are some limitations. Server guests will not have access to the World vs. World, nor can they often visit a day different realms. Moreover, the probability is higher, in a well-filled overflow server to land on card. Total also just visit the same regions of servers is allowed. Anyone who has been entrenched in Europe which makes the leap across the pond no.
   
You are on the lookout for more news, trailers, screenshots and articles about Guild Wars 2? Then look have a look on our gw2gold.net.

The game at the end of Guild Wars 2, revisited

I are inclined to dislike the term "endgame" since I suspect most folks have scribbled out their own definition of the word and that any individual who dares to use it in reference to something outside of that definition is summarily dismissed and excommunicated. I'm never quite certain what it's I'm being excommunicated from, mind you, though there's definitely a feeling of being suddenly, inexplicably, apart. Alien. Other.

Anyway, I hope we can agree that endgame is what happens at the, well, end of the game -- after the game has been, in a lot of way, finished. We all know that this really is ludicrous, right? As lengthy as you are playing the game, the game is not ended, & expecting that it will change substantially sufficient to be classified in a new way is sort of silly. Although men and women persist in making use of the term, & they persist in differing over when, precisely, the endgame starts. Does it start when you've hit the gw2 gold game's level cap, if there is 1? How about when you've finished the game's storyline, if it has 1?

You might've realised that I'm type of endgame agnostic. Regardless, let's go ahead & speak about Guild Wars 2's.

If you are an extremely long-term & faithful reader of this column, you may bear in mind that we addressed this subject a lot of months before launch. Before the game was a substantial thing. Before, in simple terms, we were in the know. We are now in the know, & as I have hit 80 (twice!) & finished the principal storyline (once!), I suppose that what I'm doing is, if not endgame appropriate, at least incredibly endgame-like.

What you do in the endgame zone depends on what you need from the game. That might sound silly, however the moment I say, "Well, you need to start doing this thing over here," I just know that a person is going to share "Although I don't need that; I want to do this other thing!" You know what? You do whatever factor makes you content.

Let's say shiny gear makes you pleased. Well, then you'll possibly be going into the Fractals of the Mists quite a lot. Individuals have reached staggeringly, mind-blowingly, astoundingly high levels in the Fractals dungeon. I'm at, like, 5. Potentially six. The scenario is that I'm at 5 or six however I have been in 20 or 30 times thanks to the complete thing where you could only go in at the highest frequent level, and I'm genuinely poor at being picky about those kinds of items.

Happily for folks like me, a alter is a-comin'. ArenaNet's Isaiah Cartwright lately revealed 2 vast, astounding changes coming up. The very first is that the current problem of disconnected gw2 gold players being unable to rejoin the party (made all the worse by the high amount of disconnects from that dungeon) will have a workaround. The 2nd & possibly more astonishing adjust is that parties will have the ability to enter at the highest tier available to any 1 member of the party. If I were to enter with a lot of buddies who had, say, level 22 unlocked, we could enter in at that level. At the end of the round of fractals, everyone who was at or beneath that level would go up a tier.

But we weren't honestly talking about that, were we?

So you figure out what you need to do & you start doing items that assist you get there. I assume that if dungeons or replays or dynamic events or PvP are your factor, you have pretty much got the basic fundamentals handled. If your "endgame" is just "more of the same stuff you've been doing this complete time because that was basically kind of fun, you know?" then you're set. The endgame is before you, & I'll be darned if it ain't behind you, too.

There are a considerable amount of methods to get what you need. I'm going to go under the assumption that most folks' PvE endgame translates, although roughly, to "make an exorbitant volume of revenue &/or accrue an impossible quantity of other in-game resources and/or currencies." After that step there could or could not be a step where you spend it on stuff. I'm not here to judge.

Mike O’Brien on Account Security

I’d like to take some time to talk about account security: how you can help keep your account secure, and what we’re doing to help keep your account secure.

If you take one thing from this blog post, it should be this: in today’s security environment, you must use a unique password for any account you care about. If you currently use the same password for Guild Wars 2 gold that you use anywhere else, immediately change your Guild Wars 2 password to a new, unique password.

How Hackers Steal Accounts

Most of the security advice we've all seen through the years has focused on how to choose a strong password. You might therefore think that the primary way hackers break into accounts is by preying on accounts with weak passwords, perhaps scanning every word in the dictionary looking for matches. That’s rarely the case.

The basic truth is this: hackers steal game accounts because they already know the account name and password. They know them because they stole them (via security breaches or spyware) from another game or site where the person used the same account name and password.

So unfortunately, if the lesson you’ve learned from security advice through the years is to pick a single complicated password, memorize it, and then use it everywhere, that’s exactly the wrong lesson for today’s security environment. To keep accounts on different sites secure in today’s environment, you need to use a unique password for each account.

We have some ability at ArenaNet to watch hacking attempts live, and it tells a fascinating story. We watch as hackers use tens of thousands of different IP addresses to scan through millions of attempted account names and passwords, almost all of which are for accounts that don’t even exist in our database, looking for matches. They’re not guessing or brute-forcing passwords; they’re trying a very specific account name and password for each attempt. For example, account name “joe.user@example.com”, password “alligator101″. If they don’t get a match immediately, they may try a variant like “alligator100″ or “alligator102″, then they quickly move on to the next entry on their list. And it’s interesting to see that the passwords on these lists are mostly quite good passwords. For every one account on the hackers’ lists with a password like “twilight” (real example, ಠ_ಠ), there are dozens of accounts with good strong passwords. So the world at large clearly knows how to pick good passwords; the reason people are still getting hacked is because they use the same passwords on multiple sites.

The security environment has certainly changed. We didn’t see hackers testing these vast lists of stolen account names and passwords when we launched the first Guild Wars. But in recent years, a truly staggering number of game companies and web sites have had their account databases breached. These reports of security breaches — 77 million accounts, 25 million accounts, 24 million accounts, untold millions more — may seem abstract, too big to be real, but they’re obviously not. The information stolen from database breaches is worth a lot of money to hackers, who can take the stolen account credentials and use them to attack each new game that’s released.

So if it ever seemed safe to memorize one strong password and then use it for multiple accounts, it certainly isn’t safe anymore. Today it’s critically important to use a unique password for each account you care about and want to keep.

Email Authentication

We have a feature in place, email authentication, that’s designed to help keep your account secure even if a hacker does know your account name and password.

Here’s how it works. When you first login, we ask you to validate your email address. After that, whenever you attempt to login from a new location, we send email asking you to approve or deny the login attempt.

So keep in mind, if you ever see an unexpected email asking you to validate a login attempt from a location where you’re not playing from, that means a hacker already knows your account name and password! The only thing that’s keeping him from logging in as you is the email authentication system! Change your password immediately.

Unfortunately, even with this system in place, people still get their accounts hacked. Here’s how. First, about a third of players haven’t verified their email address yet. We can’t require email authentication for players with unverified email addresses. Second, in many cases hackers have stolen credentials for the player’s email account too, and thus can access the authentication email message and approve their own login attempt. In particular this happens because people use the same password for their email account as they do for their Guild Wars 2 account and other accounts.

So, to be protected, be sure to verify your email address, and be sure to use a different password for your email account than you use for your game account.

Two-Factor Authentication

With email authentication in place, you can further protect your account by setting up two-factor authentication on your email account. Which, honestly, is a good idea anyway. Using email authentication this way protects your account in a very similar way to typical gw2 gold game implementations of two-factor authentication: the game will challenge any login attempt from a new location in a way that you’ll have to use two-factor authentication to approve.

We know customers also want a native implementation of two-factor authentication, and we want it too. This is an area where we should act faster as a company, and we’re going to. We had our own homegrown implementation of smartphone two-factor authenticator in testing, but we’re going to pull it back and instead integrate Guild Wars 2 with Google Authenticator, which already has robust authenticator implementations on most major smartphone platforms. We expect to roll this out in the next two weeks.

Two-factor authentication is a great tool for security-conscious customers to protect their accounts. But we know it will take time to get a significant portion of our customer base to adopt two-factor authentication, and in the meantime people are getting hacked every day by creating accounts with account names and passwords that hackers already know. So we need a solution that can protect everyone, not just the most security-conscious, and do it quickly. Thus we’re rolling out our next initiative, password blacklisting.

Password Blacklisting

Since we’ve been observing hackers constantly scanning accounts that don’t even exist yet, waiting for someone to create those accounts, we obviously want to make sure that if those new customers do join the game, they don’t use the password that the hackers are waiting for. Thus we’re building a blacklist of all the passwords that hackers are scanning for — it’s already at 20 million passwords and growing — and we’re preventing new customers from choosing any of those passwords. (The blacklist contains passwords only, not account names.)
This system has substantially eliminated hackers’ ability to steal new accounts, as all new accounts now cannot possibly match what the hackers have been scanning for. The rate of account hacking was about 1.5% for accounts created before this blacklist was in place, and is about 0.1% for accounts created after.

Because this has been so successful at protecting new accounts, we want to extend it to protect existing accounts too. But it’s harder for us to know whether passwords of existing accounts are known to hackers: it’s difficult to distinguish between a login attempt by the real customer and a login attempt by a hacker. So we’ll take the safe approach and ask all existing customers to change their passwords, and blacklist everyone’s old password in the process.

This all leads to the following request. All existing customers, please change your password. When you change it, the system won’t allow you to pick your previous password, or any password that we’ve seen tested against any existing or non-existent account. Thus, after changing your password, you’ll be confident that your new password is unique within Guild Wars 2. (However, your password only stays unique if you then don’t use it for other games and web sites, so please don’t!)

In the coming weeks we’ll ramp up this call for players to change their passwords, and may require a password change for those users who haven’t already voluntarily changed their passwords.

By the way, if you have trouble thinking of a new unique password, now that millions of possible passwords are blacklisted, we advise you to build a password out of four random words, as shown in this comic strip. Use a password like “correct horse battery staple”. As the comic strip calculates, even if everyone selects their words from the same 2,000 most common words, that’s still 16 trillion possible passwords. We’ll soon introduce a random password generator to suggest passwords like that.

Database Breaches

We’ve seen some players theorize that hacked accounts were due to a Guild Wars database breach. We have very strict blocks in place to keep network attacks from reaching our customer databases, and a team constantly monitoring for any signs of intrusion, and we’re confident that there has been no such breach.

We take security very seriously. Perhaps you can tell from this blog post. And of all the things we protect at ArenaNet, we protect our customers’ data most of all.

Companies like Blizzard and Valve presumably also had a commitment to security, yet they ultimately suffered breaches of their account databases. One day will we become such a target that a hack attempt will finally overwhelm our defenses?

If that ever were to happen, we’d be up-front with you about it, and we’d take immediate steps to ensure that it didn't lead to widespread account hacking. And here’s something else to think about. Because we’re requiring all Guild Wars 2 players to use unique passwords for Guild Wars 2, there’s actually nothing a hacker can steal from Guild Wars 2 to help attack other games or web sites. Using unique passwords benefits you both ways. In general, making a commitment to use a unique password for each account you care about is the best way to protect yourself, not only from being hacked today, but also from being hacked as the result of any future security breach of any company you deal with.

Commerce Security

We’ve seen a very few cases where hackers purchased gems on accounts after hacking them. This is an uncommon type of attack because we do have in-game restrictions in place to prevent wealth from being transferred off an account in a case like this.

We’ve deployed new restrictions to prevent hackers from using stored credit cards on stolen accounts in this way, and we also now provide users the option to delete stored credit cards.

Of course, if any customer finds that a hacker has created unauthorized charges against his credit card, that player can contact our support team to get the charges refunded.

Best Practices

This blog post has focused on hackers using stolen credentials to compromise new accounts, because that’s primarily what we’re seeing today. But the more we solve that problem, the more hackers will turn to other tricks, so it’s important for everyone to remain vigilant in other forms of account security.

Phishing – If an email links you to a site that asks you to type in your password, don’t type in your password. It could be a fake site. Go to the real account management site by typing “account.guildwars2.com”, or use a bookmark.

Social engineering – If someone claims to work for ArenaNet or NCsoft and asks you for your password, don’t tell them your password. Our customer support team doesn't need your password.

Trojan horses and spyware – Don’t download and run software, or open files attached to emails, from a source you aren't 100% sure about. Malicious software can install a keylogger on your system to record your passwords and transmit them.

Email security – Keep the email address associated with your Guild Wars 2 account secure, just like you keep your Guild Wars 2 account itself secure. Use a strong, unique password there too, which you've never used anywhere else.

The Root Cause

Why do hackers work so hard to steal accounts? Because they make money from it.

Real-money trading companies want to sell you gold for cash. To do that, they have to collect the gold, and they have to advertise it. They collect gold by looting it off stolen accounts, and by using stolen accounts for botting. They advertise it by using stolen accounts for spamming.

If people wouldn’t buy gold from these real-money trading companies, the cash incentive to steal accounts would disappear. We’d see almost no account hacking, account looting, organized botting, or spamming ads.

We used to think wistfully about that with the original Guild Wars, and posted challenges to our players to stop supporting the real-money trading companies. But we knew that it was ultimately a lost cause. You can’t stop people from buying something they want to buy.

So with Guild Wars 2, we legitimatized buying gold, but did it in a way that puts the power in the hands of the players, not in the hands of the real-money trading companies. Players who want to buy gold can now do it in the game, in an open market with other players, trading gold for gems, which the receiving players can use to buy any microtransactions they want but can’t convert back to cash. As long as players purchase their gold this way, there isn’t a flow of cash back to the real-money trading companies, and thus there isn’t a profit incentive to hack accounts.

So the roots of our protection go deep into the design of Guild Wars 2, and we’ll leverage that design to keep Guild Wars 2 a safer environment than traditional MMOs.

But nothing is black-or-white. No matter how much we remove profit incentive, the fact remains that Guild Wars 2 is a popular game, and any popular game will attract hackers. So we keep security at the forefront of everything we do. We introduce new features, such as email authentication, two-factor authentication, and password blacklisting, to help keep accounts secure. We maintain an open dialog with our players about what the real threats are, so that players know how to protect themselves. And we have a team of GMs standing by to help those who do get hacked.

Security is all about details, so thank you for reading this far. Please change your password and use the other tips in this post to protect your account. And we’ll maintain our focus on account security, and work tirelessly to protect our customers.(Original post)

-Mike O’Brien

http://glamourrunway.com/blogs/entry/Where-Guild-Wars-2-goes-wrong-

http://imperialementvotre.org/v2/member/blog_post_view.php?postId=1057

http://ftlif.com/blog/21008/unwrapping-the-mystery-of-gw2s-wintersday-boxes/

Survey on technical problems of Guild Wars 2

In a few days, Guild Wars 2 will be out for four months. However, many community members continue to report technical problems.

To see a little better the impact of these problems on the community, a survey was launched on the forums Guild Wars 2.

Are you experiencing technical difficulties on Guild Wars 2?
No problems, everything works!
Some clipping issues but it's still playable.
Some lag issues and clipping, but nothing crippling.
Major clipping issues affecting my enjoyment of the gw2 gold game
Major clipping issues and lag affecting my enjoyment of the game
I pay a subscription to a VPN to play again in Guild Wars 2.
I'm already gone just because of these technical problems.
It seems that if the modem is oriented towards Seattle wrapped in a slice of ham, one moonlit night, GW2 works!

ArenaNet bans some users from Guild Wars 2

Some players of Guild Wars 2 has been banned permanently after having used an exploit Wintersday event introduced, linked to the Christmas holidays.

The flaw allows gw2 gold players to multiply the ectoplasm using the process of crafting, which has reduced significantly the market price of the rare ingredient.

As often happens in these cases, many users banned protested saying he could not know that the procedure was illegal, but ArenaNet was adamant.

"When you use something, and if they receive two, then four, then sixteen, and so on, you know very well that it is simply wrong," replied the users in question Gaile Gray of ArenaNet.

MMO-ing: Is Now the Time to Rediscover The Secret World?

The Secret World might not get as much attention as World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, or Star Wars: The Old Republic, however the Lovecraftian MMO is nonetheless alive and well.

Thanks to the gw2 gold game's elimination of a necessary subscription and its appearance on Steam's Winter Sale, the financial barrier for entry is at an all-time low.

So... ought to you let the hugely-multiplayer survival horror title acquire dust in your Steam library? Or should you make it your new MMO of choice?

We'll try to get to the bottom of that in this week's MMO-ing...

Fashion Over Function

The way an MMO toon looks is nearly always useful. Not only do we have to stare at them for hours on end, but pals & strangers will be checkin' 'em out too-it is a long-running tradition in MMOs to evaluate a player's experience level by quickly eyeing up their gear.
Back in the old days, you can tell which WoW hunters had put in their time at Blackwing Lair & Molten Core by the ridiculous purple armor set they rocked with pride. In the event you spotted those giant purple shoulderguards on the Zeppelin to Undercity, you knew you were in the presence of a celebrity.

The elimination of armor sets is one more way that The Secret World attempts to break the MMO mold.

Sure, you will get equipment that raises your stats, however your outfit is entirely unrelated. If you wish to rock a halter top & many skinny jeans, the in-game retail shop can make that take place.

Despite the fact that our characters in The Secret World may not look as epic as some of their MMO counterparts, their duds suit their surroundings. This really is a world of secrets & shadows, so running around in chail mail doesn't precisely scream subtlety.

Yet what the game loses in readily recognizable high end gear, it makes up for in personalization. My character may look like a common punk rocker, however he still feels distinctive; there are not 500 other toons running around wearing the same armor from head to toe because it provides the greatest agility expand.

New outfits might be bought at in-game shops or earned by way of the completion of missions and battles.

Guild Wars two pulls off a similar trick with dyes & its own in-game retail store, however ArenaNet's game offers considerably less duster coats.

'Guild Wars 2' Says Goodbye to Wintersday Content In New Update

The world of Guild Wars 2 returns to standard with the removal of Wintersday content.

Wintersday is over, and Guild Wars 2 gold has been patched up to remove the content that seemed like a permanent fixture in the world of Tyria for close to a month. The presence of Toymaker Tixx & his presents and toys made up a immense part of the Lion's Arch experience.

With Christmas over & done with, a brand new update has been issued to remove the aforementioned content, so you will not find mysterious presents spawning in the middle of nowhere now that they are gone. Furthermore, you won't have the ability to purchase Wintersday items from the Black Lion Trading Company Gem Retail shop anymore.

Then again, ArenaNet notes that the Wintersday Merchant will remain in Lion's Arch for a while longer, so gw2 gold players will have a last chance to exchange their old socks and hats for Wintersday gifts.

The update comes with a little resolve for the Mesmer, whose Shatter capabilities now share a global 0.25 2nd recharge, to quit a number of shatter effects triggering on the same illusion. The Mesmer's Shattered Strength trait now grants 1 stack of may per illusion shattered, so the character ought to be a tiny beefier in combat.