Guild Wars 2

I got this new computer and I wanted to move Guild Wars 2 to the new one. I didn’t have a USB cord with me so I decided to find a launcher online. I found one and downloaded it on my computer. The launcher wasn’t from the site so I’m not sure if it is legal of not.

Why wouldn’t you just use the official launcher?

If you’re thinking about running a launcher whose origin you’re not sure of, I’d be WAY more worried about it stealing your credentials/account then whether or not it’s “legal”.

If you can post on this forum, you can download the legit launcher. Click on “My Account” directly beneath your user name at the top right of this page.

Also, do not use launchers from other sites… that’s a guaranteed way to get your account stolen.

If you have ran that program at all then you should run a malware scanner before doing anything else.

Is it legal??
In theory yes. It is a bit of open software freely available. If the purpose is to help anet with the distribution by posting it on outside sources it is perfectly fine.

HOWEVER!!
Though kind people do exist, I would be highly suspicious bout these kind of things regardless off the source and prefer the launcher on this website. The reason is that it is easy to alter the program slightly to add e.g. some code to intercept your account details (result would be an hacked account) or to give you access to illegal servers (resulting in an account ban for life).

Bottom line. Yes it is ok, but highly undesirable, as others stated, why not download the launcher directly from this website??

There is nothing wrong with downloading multiple copies of the launcher. If you really wanted to you could go around all your friends houses, log onto this site on their computers and download the launcher on every single one and Anet would be 100% ok with that.

This is because the launcher itself isn’t enough to get you into the game. You still need an account code and to get that you have to buy a copy of the game. So making the launcher freely available won’t do any harm to Anet and it’s very convenient to their customers for situations exactly like this.

The risk with what you’re doing is that you have no way of knowing until it’s too late if what you’ve downloaded is a legitimate copy of the launcher or something designed to steal your account details, or a virus, or some combination of all of them.

If you want to be safe I recommend deleting it, running your anti-virus just to be sure and then clicking on the ‘My Account’ link under your screen name at the top of the page, clicking on ‘Download Client’ and getting it that way. Then you’ll know the one you’ve got is official and safe.