Territory

A territory refers to an area of the real world which forms a gaming community within the game world of Guild Wars. Each game account belongs to one territory. It is assumed that a player joins the territory she is living in (or which fits best to her actual location), but this is not mandatory.

The affiliation to a territory affects a few things:
 * The territories reflect the technical server structure of Guild Wars. These servers are ideally optimized to service people in that territory. Playing in a territory that is hosted far from the players actual location may cause lags while playing.
 * Players may access the districts of their home territory while in a town. Players can not enter the districts of another territory, but there is the international district, which is neutral and does not belong to any of the territories. It can be accessed from all players.
 * Players in the same territory will most likely speak the same languages and use the same character set for names and messages.
 * Players in the same territory will be around in the game at roughly the same time of the day.
 * Only players from the territory that has the Favor of the Gods has access to all the benefits of that favor.
 * Territory plays a major part during the qualification stage of official tournaments like the GWWC.

List of territories
At time of release, there were only three territories in the game:


 * [[Image:Europe_30x18.png|Europe]] Europe
 * [[Image:South_Korea_30x18.png|Korea]] Korea.
 * [[Image:North_America_30x18.png|North America]] North America

With their launch early 2006 two new territories joined the world of Guild Wars:


 * [[Image:Japan_30x18.png|Japan]] Japan
 * [[Image:Taiwan_30x18.png|Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong]] Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong

Further territories will join the game once they are recognized by ArenaNet.

Choosing a territory
When the game is first installed it will ask you to configure this. If you play in either the North America or Europe territory, you can also change to the other from the game's startup screen after login (click Edit Account then choose Change Territory then click Next). You can only change your territory five times.

Visiting the international district does not count as a change of territory, which means it is not restricted to five times.