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 he/she is living in (or which fits best to his/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 lag while playing.
 * As of the August 23, 2007 update, players may access the districts of both their home territory and the districts of another territory while in a town.
 * 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 day.
 * Territory plays a major part during the qualification stage of official tournaments like the GWWC.

Choosing a territory
When you set up a new account, you can choose one of five territories.

Since you can visit all districts in the game, the choice is of no great consequence. However, European and American accounts cannot use letters other than A-Z for guild and character names.

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


 * 🇪🇺 Europe
 * Korea
 * North America

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


 * Japan
 * Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong (collectively referred to as Taiwan by Guild Wars officals)