There comes a time in every MMORPG player’s life when they have to make that hardest of choices: which server do I play on? It used to be that you were 100% locked to that world after making that decision, and only through a convoluted process (that usually involved a fee) were you able to change your mind.

Guild Wars 2 is attempting to be more lenient. Here’s how ANet’s system works.

Home Worlds

Your home world in GW2 is exactly what it implies. It is the server you attach yourself as an online entity to. It is tied to your account, not to individual characters, so the home world of all your characters is the same. There’s a list of the EU and NA home worlds to the right. For the purpose of an example, I’m going to say my account is bound to the “Far Shiverpeaks” home world. (I have no idea yet which world I’m rolling on.)

I have five characters on my account. Their home server for WvWvW is the Far Shiverpeaks. I can move my account and all its associated characters from Far Shiverpeaks to the much-cosier-sounding Ring of Fire by paying 1800 , purchasable in the cash shop.

(That’s pretty expensive if we consider the leaked cash shop prices from a few weeks ago – $1.25 for 100 . It’s over $20. But again, those were leaked and probably in no way reflect current prices.  However, judging by the “known issues” page in the GW2 forums, it sounds like the cash shop is going to be in BWE#1, so we’ll have a chance to check it out for real.)

All my characters would get moved to the Ring of Fire world, and and subsequent characters I make will belong to that world. It’s also the world I’ll represent in WvWvW PvP.

Guesting

Here’s a not so hypothetical situation. I have a friend who I played FFXI with. He lives in Canada. He is quite likely to get GW2. In most games if we wanted to play together, one of us would have to suffer the consequences of being too far away from the game’s servers. If I played on NA servers so we could play together, I’d suffer lag, and vice versa.

And even then, the timezone would often get in the way, so we’d suffer latency issues all the time for only a couple of hours benefit per week when we get to play together.

GW2 does away with this through its Guesting system.

Because friends lists and guilds are account based, I’ll know when he logs in regardless of what world we’re on. He could roll on a NA server like Sorrow’s Furnace and happily play there during his play hours, with decent latency etc. If I was to log onto Ring of Fire and saw him also playing, because we’re on our account-bound friends list, I could “guest” over to Sorrow’s Furnace and we could play together for a short time, depending on timezone difference.

This allows us the opportunity to play together, albeit with a bit of latency, without sacrificing the quality of our gaming experience for the rest of the time. We could even alternate if the experience isn’t great, but still want to play together.

Guilds and Guesting

The biggest question I have about the guesting system right now is about how guilds work with it. We know that it is our account that joins a particular guild, not a singular character. Does that mean that I could invite my friend to An Unlikely Krewe despite being on different servers, because it is account bound, or are guilds going to be limited to individual worlds?

If it is the former, this is a massive stride forwards for international guild communities, who can play on their own world to take advantage of their regional latencies, but still get together on one or the other world server for guild/community events.

If it is the latter, it is a step back from GW1 with its thriving international guilds, which came about because of how that game’s server structure worked. Plus it really cuts down on the freedom the guesting system otherwise seems to offer.

This morning’s blog by Martin Kerstein says that we can play on any world “where you have friends” — does he mean people on your actual account friend list, or is he just saying that you can go and play with people in your guild if it is possible to split them across worlds?

I think this is very much another instance of where a tiny bit more clarity on their blog would have cleared up much community confusion. Here’s hoping for some clarification from MK or someone else on the team about how and if this affects international guilds, and in fact how guilds and guesting work in general.

~Demajen