Game updates/20060313

Update - Monday March 13
A note to players:

As you may be aware, we experienced some technical issues that resulted in the need to conduct an approximately one-hour roll-back of Guild Wars on Monday, March 13th. What prompted our decision to do the roll-back was the fact that the game economy was at risk, because during a brief window of opportunity, a huge number of items had been purchased for ridiculously low prices. This infusion of items into the economy would have devalued all the items in the game, and would have crippled the game economy.

We have an absolute commitment to take whatever means are necessary to protect the game economy, and by extension, to protect the items that you possess on your account. We apologize for any inconvenience that the roll-back may have caused.

We will continue to investigate the situation to assure that a repeat of today’s incident does not take place.

Thank you for your understanding,

The Guild Wars Team


 * Corrected error in Hero's Ascent [sic] Map that prevented teams from progressing beyond the first level.

Guildwiki Notes
This update erroneously introduced a severe bug that caused prices at all traders to be reset. Most runes and rare crafting materials were set to 250 gold. As soon as players found out about this, they rushed to the traders and purchased copious amounts of these usually fairly expensive items. As the price of the Ectoplasma had remained, many proceeded to sell all of their Ecto to get more money to buy the cheap products. Within 30 minutes, the matter had raised enough red flags that ArenaNet moved to correct the problem. They disabled all traders (none of them had any more goods to offer), then shortly after, map travel was disabled. The entire global network of game servers was shut down for maintenance around 3:00 p.m. PST (23:00 GMT). The servers were back up around 10:20 p.m. PST (06:20 GMT).

The following notice on the official Network News page notes the issue and the implemented remedy.


 * "Due to a server error, Guild Wars experienced an unintentional reset of the traders. For nearly an hour, traders were selling items at unrealistically low prices. Due to the harmful impact that such an event would cause to the game economy, we are rolling back the entire state of the game to shortly before the problem began, that is, to 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 21:00 GMT. We estimate that the game will be accessible at approximately 11:00 p.m. PST tonight (07:00 GMT)."