The last time ArenaNet held a closed beta weekend for the press, GuildMag posted an aggregation page for all the articles and videos that were published once the press embargo was lifted. Our readers were very happy with that, so we’re doing it again for the most recent beta test weekend.

My weekly column at GuildMag has been posted: This week in Guild Wars 2. The big issues roiling the community this week revolve around microtransactions, but there’s plenty of discussion of other topics in blog posts, videos, and podcasts.

My weekly column at GuildMag is up: This week in Guild Wars 2. Big stories include the pre-purchase program, ArenaNet’s new community approach (including official forums), and lots more blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.

(Cross-posted from GuildMag:

Martin Kerstein has a post at the ArenaNet blog, discussing their community building plans for Guild Wars 2. The information he emphasizes in the post is:

Let me point out the two biggest changes in the ways we interact with our communities between the original Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 right up front: we will have official forums, and we will not have a traditional fansite program.

The large and growing fan community — including GuildMag and our friends at other Guild Wars 2 fan sites, blogs, and forums and in the social media world — have become too diverse for ArenaNet to support in the same way they did for Guild Wars: we’re “victims” of our own enthusiasm. Instead, ArenaNet will be introducing their own official forums.

As the community round-up writer here at GuildMag let me give a hearty endorsement for that. When I started doing a weekly newsletter of what was new in the Guild Wars 2 world a couple of years ago, I could easily do it in about 10-15 minutes, visiting the usual sites and checking for new material. Now, I gather posts from the official site, from traditional gaming sites, from fan blogs, from forums, from Twitter, from RSS feeds, from our community email, and I still get tips from guild and alliance members to articles I didn’t find using my usual tools. We are a very talkative, inquisitive, and eager horde! And I’m just linking to this stuff … I can’t imagine how the ArenaNet community managers find time to sleep with all that activity to stay on top of and respond to it all.

To achieve our goal, we also need our fans in all the different communities to be proactive. By working together, with you bringing amazing and great community projects to our attention and us highlighting them for the broader community, we will be able to build something great and lasting that will benefit each and every one of you. To help facilitate this, we will give you tools like our wiki and specialized forums that allow our passionate players to freely collaborate and share assets and ideas.

Being proactive doesn’t seem to be a problem for Guild Wars 2 fans! But our community is now so widespread and fragmented that nobody can realistically keep track of everything (believe me, I try).

And now the challenge ArenaNet is hoping to take on with their new approach:

Our ultimate goal is to create an environment that is respectful, welcoming, inclusive and friendly. We want to create a global community where people will feel at home, and an environment that will foster both creativity and collaboration.

The main goal is to be inclusive, not exclusive, to encourage collaboration between communities, and to generate an atmosphere that is helpful, friendly, and above all, respectful. There is an unfortunate tendency in some online communities to encourage behavior that is detrimental to the fun of a lot of players by allowing a rather toxic and unwelcoming atmosphere. We want to set a new standard and make the Guild Wars 2 community a mature, friendly, helpful and inclusive one that is recognized throughout the industry as being so.

While I fully support their goal, it is going to be a major task for them to discourage the griefers and trolls that are far too common in the gaming world. I hope they can achieve this without resorting to heavy handed tactics.

We’re encouraging fans to submit their articles about Guild Wars 2 character diversity for the next Blog Carnival at GuildMag. Now that we’ve had some opportunity to digest all the new information that came out after the press closed beta test weekend, it’s time to let the fans express themselves about what we’ve learned about the game.

We still don’t know when the game will be launching, but at least we can finally stop throwing wads of cash at the monitor … Our summary of the details at GuildMag:

It seems as things are slowly coming together, today, ArenaNet has released an image detailing the contents of three of their launch versions of Guild Wars 2: the Collector’s Edition ($149.99), Digital Deluxe ($79.99) and the Digital Edition ($59.99). You can start purchasing these versions of the game starting April 10th on a special dedicated page on the Guild Wars 2 website

My weekly column at GuildMag is up: This week in Guild Wars 2. There was no major news from ArenaNet — although sure as fate, something will be announced right after I post — but there’s lots of articles, videos, and podcasts from the fan community.

I liked this video, and not just because the ranger in the game footage is a clone of my own ranger, Raphia Naon.

My weekly column at GuildMag is now posted: http://www.guildmag.com/this-week-in-guild-wars-2-12. This week, there’s less raw gameplay footage from the press closed beta weekend and more analysis and further spectulation as we wait for the next Guild Wars 2 beta event later in March. More than a million eager players are watching their email inboxes for one of those treasured beta invitations (although a million applied, ArenaNet is inviting an unspecified number to take part in the next beta event).

After the leap of faith, I’d posted a recounting of my most recent vanquish in Guild Wars to Facebook and thought one or two of you might be interested…

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My weekly column on news, commentary, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com. This week’s column is somewhat truncated, as much of the news was being tracked on an ongoing basis in an aggregation post that Dutch and I began on Monday and Dutch has been adding to over the last few days.

Beta requests were approaching one million (the counter was still spinning when I grabbed this screenshot) and the site had issues keeping up:

They extended the beta request period for just long enough to break the one million barrier.

There’s been so much material posted after the ArenaNet closed beta test event last weekend that there’s no way to summarize it. Over at GuildMag, Dutch Sunshine has been aggregating everything into a very long post (probably the most comprehensive list out there, he said modestly). I helped out with gathering material on Monday, and Dutch has been busy since then, adding more and more to the list.

Top-posting Update: The beta program is being widened. You can apply to join the next phase of the Guild Wars 2 beta at beta.guildwars2.com. No guarantees that you’ll get in, however, as they will be looking for people with various hardware configurations and (probably) different gaming backgrounds. Also note that this is not an open beta: it’s a closed beta and you have to sign (and be governed by) a non-disclosure agreement — which means the first rule of Guild Wars 2 beta is that you don’t talk about it if you’re in. Beta FAQ page is here. <End of update>

Just to give a sense of the (overwhelmingly positive) press reaction to their weekend access, here’s Sardu at Ten Ton Hammer:

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I’ll be busy for much of this morning, working on a big aggregation post over at GuildMag (Dutch Sunshine is the author, I’m just assisting in the background). Today is when the press embargo will lift for this past weekend’s press beta event. I’ll eventually update this post with information from there.

Update: Of course, we’ve been so busy with the aggregation that I didn’t even notice a typo in the headline for several hours…

Update, the second (21 February): I really had intended to come back and update this post with some of the highlights from the beta event, but there is literally too much material to go through. Dutch Sunshine and I worked all of yesterday, and we’re still finding more to add to the post today (actually, Dutch is doing that … today isn’t a holiday for me). All I can recommend is going to the updated post at GuildMag for what I believe to be the most comprehensive collection of links.

My weekly column on news, commentary, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.

There’s a massively informative article up on the ArenaNet blog discussing the “World versus World” PvP format, including lots of details about how up to 300 players will be able to contribute to their side’s efforts regardless of each player’s current experience level:

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