Guild Wars 2

How long will pre-purchase be available? Don’t want to miss my chance, but need to tweak budget if window is closing sooner than later.

Thanks for any help!

At a guess you have until the end of July, based on the cutoff for … um. Refunds? Loyalty slots? … from the Community blog.

They haven’t announced release day yet, so no one knows. However there are supposed to be more than one beta weekend, and also anet is supposed to reveal the rest of elite specializations before launch – as well as apparently talk about some major content regarding ‘more challenging content’. In short, there’s a lot of things that should still be revealed and done before launch, so it would be safe to say that there are at least several weeks left.

Donari.5237:

At a guess you have until the end of July, based on the cutoff for … um. Refunds? Loyalty slots? … from the Community blog.

That doesn’t really have anything to do with release date or prepurchase though. It’s a common mistake on HoT forums that people mix up the pre-purchase, and the actual game refund without HoT purchase. It’s actually a nice special offer they didn’t even need to make – they are basically saying if you bought the game any time after late January from their website, you can play it free for free until after summer (up to half a year in some cases), then return it and say ‘thanks for the ride’ – and get full refund of purchase price.

source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pre-purchase-community-address/

If you purchased the core Guild Wars 2 game from our website and registered it between January 23, 2015 and June 16, 2015, and you no longer want to play Guild Wars 2, we will refund your core game purchase price and close your account provided you make the request by July 31, 2015. Please contact our Customer Support team to make this request.

The July 31 is not related to release of HoT. They simply wanted to make a finite deadline for people who bought the game, yet want to get their money back without investing anything further.

Those people are currently playing the game ‘for free’, so it’s reasonable to say that if they decided they don’t want to buy the game, or play it after all – they should contact anet and tell them to close the account – rather than continuing to play the game until the release day of HoT which is yet to be determined. Their decision has nothing to do with pre-purchase, or release date of HoT – and thus neither should their ‘deadline’.

Pre-purchasing will be available until launch. From 3rd party retailers, pre-purchasing will be available as long as they have boxes remaining, assuming ArenaNet still accepts them as pre-purchase codes.

Launch likely won’t be for another 2 months at the earliest, 3-5 more likely.

True all that. I should have written “at least until the end of July.” I expect launch in late August but some hopeful sorts assume the July 31 cutoff means Aug 1 launch.

If launch is Aug 1 I’ll be playing on an old computer without any sound, and not have a ton of time in the day to play, so I am rather selfishly hoping it’s not until late August.

Healix.5819:

Pre-purchasing will be available until launch. From 3rd party retailers, pre-purchasing will be available as long as they have boxes remaining, assuming ArenaNet still accepts them as pre-purchase codes.

Launch likely won’t be for another 2 months at the earliest, 3-5 more likely.

I wouldn’t count on that though.

For our long-standing fans and loyal players, we would like to say thank you and show our appreciation. For all players who registered the core Guild Wars 2® game prior to January 23, 2015 and who upgrade their account by prepurchasing and registering any Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns edition before Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns‘ launch, we will add one additional character slot to your Guild Wars 2 account. The process of delivering your additional character slot will take us some time, but rest assured we will get it to you as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about the specific timing soon.

The wording is pretty specific about needing to actually register the game before launch date.

I was a little off with my earlier post, however.

For all players who purchased the Guild Wars 2 core game from our website and registered it between January 23, 2015 and June 16, 2015 in anticipation of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we will automatically refund what you paid for the core game should you decide to pre-purchase Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns from our website or in-game store any time through July 31, 2015. If you take advantage of this refund and pre-purchase Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, all of your current account progress will be kept intact. We’ll provide further details on when refunds will be processed in the next couple weeks as we set up this process.

So the whole refund deal for people who bought between Jan and Jun, is tied to July 31 (although it still has nothing to do with release date). Technically I see one slight loophole here. If you bought from web store between Jan-Jun, you get automatically refunded if you pre-purchase HoT from web store before July 31. However, this doesn’t mention that you’d actually have to apply the code to your existing account.

So technically you could prepurchase HoT from web store, and get refunded for your original purchase – but still keep that account active, and instead use the HoT code standalone to get a second account (fully upgraded to HoT). Of course you would then have to ‘start over’ on that account, while your old ‘main account’ wouldn’t have access to HoT.

To further complicate matters..

If you purchased the core game from a third party, we are unable to provide a refund. However, if you registered the core game between January 23, 2015 and June 16, 2015 and upgrade it by prepurchasing any Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns edition before Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns‘ launch, we will add one additional character slot to your Guild Wars 2 account.

If your Jan-Jun purchase was from third party, the character slot bonus is again tied to launch date, instead of the Jul 31 date. My guess is this is just to simplify the process – since this way they can simply lump anyone who bought from third party prior to Jun 16 together with ‘veterans’, and offer them the same extra slot deal.