While many might disagree with me, this was one of the smoothest launches I've yet seen. Even though there was intermittent outages of the login server, the servers themselves never went down. Once we got through that and into the game, we could play.. with a lot of bugs. Still it was tolerable and didn't impede gameplay too much.
I could forgive them all the bugs based on how much I enjoy the game but what I had the hardest time forgiving and maintaining my patience with, was the utter lack of a Trading Post for weeks following the launch. While the economy is slowly stabilizing it could have already been nearly stable in setting the value of finite resources at the very least. Instead, we're seeing things at or below the vendor price still because people, myself included, saved things to sell while it was down and flooded the market. I give ArenaNet props for their solution to the overstock, though. The incentive to toss the excess into the Mystic Forge for goodies is working to bring down the volume finally.
Hackers and gold sellers are a problem for any MMO but I wasn't quite prepared for the amount of gold sellers that would be in GW2. The logical part of my brain, and admittedly stupid part in this case, thought they wouldn't bother trying. After all, ArenaNet put in an in-game currency exchange that was safe and easy. Why would anyone use a gold seller at all with the risk of losing their account, their personal information, etc all for the sake of saving a few bucks? I underestimated the tenacity of the gold sellers and their strict avoidance of logic.
I give a lot of props to ArenaNet for their handling of hacking attempts and gold sellers but (there's always a but), the email authentication should have been ready immediately when the game pre-launched. Being unable to authenticate my account and then unable to change my password to a more secure one to put my mind at ease really bothered me.
Last but not least, a small rant. One of the things that has gotten under my skin the most since the game launched is the population, especially on my server, that act like spoiled children when the game needs to be patched and/or maintenance done. Every restart patch, every 10-20 minutes of downtime was met with outraged cries of "Are you serious!?" They're trying to fix the game for us as fast as humanly possible and more than that, they're doing most of it live and trying NOT to cut into our game-time. The complaining went on to "it's at a bad time." Really? Midnight PDT is a fine time, regardless of the day it is until the game is fixed. Does no one remember consistent 8 hours or more downtime in WoW every time a new, big patch came out or an expansion released or what we went through at the launch of vanilla WoW? Grow up and learn some fucking patience.
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