Guild Wars 2

Sorry if this has been asked before. I did try to look it up myself, but either I have deficient Googling skills or the information is simply buried — I can’t seem to get a straight answer from the internet at large, which seems to be more interested in the differences between the Chinese/Western clients, rather than how available each of those clients are to various people.

The issue is that I have an English-speaking friend in China who would like to play with me. She doesn’t yet have GW2. I am on a North American server.

I know that at ONE stage it was possible for Chinese players to have and use the normal client, and play on NA/EU servers — presumably before the Chinese client came out. Now, I’m not sure whether or not that’s still the case, and she doesn’t know which game type (digital/boxed) to get in order to allow her to play with me. Neither of us have any idea whether she can, in fact, even get a non-Chinese client now.

If it helps, she’s somewhat savvy with VPNs (naturally), so if any twiddling is necessary in that regard, she might be able to pull it off.

Any help is appreciated! :)

You can only play on the american and european servers with a non-chinese GW2 license (You should still be able to register a non-european CDKey in China). The GW2 license you can purchase in China can only be used to play on chinese servers.

The Ministry of Culture as far as I know did not ban access to the NA and EU GW2 servers. However, I do not know whether ArenaNet/NCSoft is contractually required to ban Chinese players from entry into the NA/EU servers. (Riot is contractually required to ban Asian players from entry into the non-asian servers of League of Legends thanks to Garena). You can test this using a chinese VPN server. (Change your password and de-authorize all IP addresses immediately after testing)

Also, the chinese and non-chinese clients are fundamentally different. You cannot use the chinese client to connect to NA/EU and you cannot use the NA/EU client to connect to the chinese servers.

Also note that chinese language is not available on the NA/EU client.

The use of VPNs is deprecated on GW2 due to how authentication works. If your chinese friend still wishes to play behind a VPN, she somehow has to get Google Authenticator on a mobile phone (I do not know whether this tool is banned in China) and use mobile authentication while never saving her network, because some hacker can abuse the saving methods by using the same VPN service as your friend and then could skip authentication.

TL;DR:

• GW2 bought in china:
  • Usable on chinese servers only
  • Usable inside China only
• GW2 bought in non-european, non-chinese region:
  • Can only be registered outside of the European Union (due to tax regulations)
  • Usable on american and european servers only
  • Usable everywhere, unless the MoC banned it or ANet is contractually required to ban access inside China
• VPNs:
  • May breach GW2’s authentication security
  • If you use one, never save your network because a hacker can abuse that using the same VPN service to skip authentication if he has your password.
  • Use mobile auth definately if you wish to use a VPN. You can access your phone faster than your mail account which can be a hassle because you should not save your network.

Maybe you can buy and gift an account to her?

Chinese laws concerning internet access is restrictive though. It’s always possible they will stop her from accessing the EU/NA client so that needs to be researched first.

I’m not sure why the above poster has that part about ‘non-EU’ versions. You can purchase an EU-region version of the game and register it anywhere (other than China, perhaps, I’m not conversant with Chinese law). The NA/EU clients are no longer region-locked even for registration.

What will be affected is purchases within the game, etc. (Euros vs. dollars, etc.)

Thank you all for the answers — I’m sorry it took so long to get back to this thread, but I had a bunch of stuff blow up on me in RL and totally forgot I’d even posted this.

To clarify in case anyone else has the same issue: my friend was, as Gaile mentioned, able to purchase the NA/EU client from GW2’s website and join my (NA) world. I have no idea how she’s accessing the game via VPN if Ettanin is correct about how it works, but somehow she’s managing just fine! Possibly she doesn’t need the VPN? I’ll have to ask and post here again.

Ettanin.8271:

Also note that chinese language is not available on the NA/EU client.

Wrong! I see Chinese Characters (and by extension Japanese Kanji) being able to be typed with Microsoft IME all the time on my end by other players, either being serious or fooling around.

It just occurred tonight and Korean can be used as well and recognized by NA clients bought overseas.

Yet for some reason my IME is broken and I can’t to JPN, Chinese, or Korean if I even wanted to and if I could type/speak it. (I do plan to learn a multitude of languages with a new PC as I think this one is the problem).

I believe they mean the game’s language in Chinese. You can only have the NA/EU game’s text and audio assets in English, French, Spanish and German. However a player can chat in any language the Windows’ support. The Chinese language version of the game is only available on the Chinese version of the game that runs on the Chinese servers.