Guild Wars 2

I’m in NA and I got a couple friends in euro from gw1 and that I have met on forums/online and it’s sucks that we can’t play with each other. Weird though how we can group together, chat, and even send items/gold back and forth – almost as if ANET is teasing us lol. Is there anyway to play with them or will there ever be?

Would be awesome if we could guest together or have a overflow map where we can somehow play together. It would a great change to the game, more so than any new race or armor skin imo.

It would be nice, but, as I understand it, the way the server infrastructure it set up makes it fundamentally impossible. I don’t think there’s anything Anet can do about that, at this stage.

Server farms are separate so all the large chunks of data are separate. Mail and communications aren’t as bandwidth hungry as moving an entire character database. Also if a data packet vanishes mid ocean it is easier to track/reconstruct a mail than a character.

The two groups can’t play together on the same maps because the account data is stored in 2 different places, the NA servers in Texas and the EU servers in Germany. This setup means only the members of each group can play together.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World
“Region: This indicates the location of the data center that stores your account information; it has nothing directly to do with your geographical location. Players from one region cannot enter the same maps as those from any other, e.g. those with NA home worlds cannot play with those based on EU ones. Players can transfer from NA to EU worlds and vice-versa, but not between China and the EU/NA regions. Similarly, the EU & NA regions share a Trading Post while the China region has its own.”

I think members can cross talk or send email because this is only a small transfer of information between the 2 groups. To play together requires transfering the whole account to the other data storage center, which means backing out to character select and waiting up to a half hour while the information transfers over.

I have a degree in network engineering and I can tell you the whole “account data stored in 2 different places” cop out is complete BS. I can think of 5 different solutions right now that would allow EU+NA to play together with little or no cost to the company. But whatever I guess.