In maybe one of the more…curious twists of the pre-order business, Guild Wars 2 sold out of digital copies on Friday in the moments leading up to its open beta weekend event. Note the word digital, as in, no physical copies. Oh, did I mention this is also a pre-order?
Its just a curious problem, apparently ArenaNet has elected to shut out new purchases for the moment as they have sold out of server capacity. That’s…pretty damn cool actually. Its so rare to see because typically games like this will oversell a ton. Apparently ArenaNet would like to avoid the pitfalls of the typical day 1 server downtime.
Admittedly it seems to have worked. The few times I logged in over the weekend I had no trouble jumping on and creating a new character or questing.
Now, one thing I noticed about the game was that its a multi-tier server, unlike the original Guild Wars, which used more of a hybrid central/multi/instanced approach. But basically in the original you didn’t choose your server, there was only one server to speak of. In this game you do choose your server outright, like most other MMOs games, and that brings ArenaNet to a better position here. They can easily add more server blades and sell more copies with this approach. Whether they chose to or not is still up in the air, but it sounds like they are already working on it.
I’d expect several more beta events leading up to the game’s eventual release (which still has us all a little nervous with a “TBA 2012″ sticker). The game is definitely fun from what I played and I only got to the tip of the tip of the iceburg, pretty much just enough to make a snowcone. Hopefully this is an early indicator of the Guild Wars 2 team’s commitment to excellence.