Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Why do you think it’s bad that they did this?

Experienced players tend to have enough skill points they can consume to buy whatever they want. New players tend to get what’s given to them and don’t look for a new skill point every level.

By the time you’re level 40, you generally have bought all the 1 point skills you need anyway, so 1 skill point isn’t very helpful.

That’s why they did it.

Hi Vayne, how have you been doing? Still hanging around here?

For new players, especially low level ones, every single skill point counts, as it helps you to unlock the earlier sets of slot skills (given that Skill Challenges are now also locked until you reach level 13). So as a lower level player I will go up several levels without receiving a single skill point, whic hmeans I don’t get to unlock any new slot skills, which again means I don’t have a choice in which slot skills I want to use for any given situation.

I really don’t understand ArenaNet’s need to ‘dumb down’ the level-up process for new players. Leveling never was hard to begin with, and all they did was make it more confusing (I get new players in chat asking: “this game doesn’t have a main story quest?”) and take away the choice from players who want it. So much for their “play how you want to play”. I can no longer do zone completion until after level 13, I can no longer do a personal story step beyond my current level (I can’t even see the next step on the minimap if I’m not at the appropriate level), and I can’t even get a single skill point at level up to unlock a new slot skill? sigh

ExiledDiclonius.1653:

@CelebrityX From moment megaservers went online it will alway be like this (as long as developers wont find solution for this issue). All waypoints that can be contested are always seen as contested if you are sitting on another map. Game simply dont know what map you will end up if you teleport. You can end up on map where one waypoint can be contested or on map copy where it’s not.

But what about on the SAME map? If you want to teleport from one WP on the map to another one – on the same map, why does it have to use this same system of contested waypoints? Why not simply make sure that you stay on the same world… after all, if I teleport within a map, I usually do NOT want to end up on a completely different world… and I assume most players feel the same.

Astralporing.1957:

And as far as trying to get people interested in other game modes – reward tracks do it way better for pvp. Forcing people there through dailies on the other hand has a completely opposite effect on me – i absolutely hate such heavyhanded “marketing”, and may decide to drop PvP/WvW completely just to get my point across. Maybe PvE dailies as well (and then i’d have less reason to log in every day).

I very much feel the same. Before this feature pack went live, I was actually looking forward to it… on paper, much of it sounded great. Now that it’s live, I run into several issues, and this is definitely a big one for me. I’m a PvE player… I don’t like PvE, never will, and the more I feel I am forced into it, the less I enjoy playing. On top of that, I have very limited time on weekdays, so things like dungeons are out of the question for me… even gaining 3 skill points on my level 80 characters often takes me more of my evening than I can spend on this game.
Before, I used to enjoy the dailies, and often that was the only thing I did on an evening. I was almost always able to pick whichever 5 or 6 PvE dailies I liked and was able to do within the time I had available. Now, I don’t even have a choice anymore. Which means doing dailies has stopped being fun, and is now just a chore. And I simply can’t bring myself to do them anymore.
Which means I haven’t actually played the game at all, since the patch went live. I’ve played around a bit with dyes, the wardrobe, and the traits that I already have (I hate that trait unlocking is now attached to mega group events… those traits will definitely have to wait until the weekend). Maybe I’ll just shelve this entire game on weekdays, and only play it during those weekend days that I have more time for it.

So I very much agree with the other people here… I don’t understand the point of restricting our choice in dailies, and I hope ArenaNet will reverse that decision.

This has probably been mentioned before by someone somewhere, but instead of handing out 2 points at levels 66, 72 and 78, why not hand out only 1 point at those levels, and start earlier… hand out 1 point at levels 16, 20 and 26? That way people on their way to level 80 can actually see some progression on their character, they can see the strength increase of their character at earlier levels, and leveling up becomes less of a chore.

As there appears to be no separate dye feedback thread, I assume this thread was meant for feedback on the dye conversion as well. So just a warning to others: just before the feature pack went live, I registered a couple of dyes (I always kept very good track of which dyes I registered on which character). I just discovered that those dyes are gone from my dye list. What I registered after the feature pack went live (due to duplicates), is there, but the ones I registered just before it went live, are gone.

I created a support ticket… hope they can help me. But just in case other people here have also registered dyes briefly before the feature pack went live, and didn’t notice yet that those are gone… be sure to double-check!

I thought they said that “all existing characters created before this feature pack will have all previously existing major traits unlocked”, and now I find that I still have to go through this whole expensive process for all my lower level characters.

I refuse to pay that much for the trait guides – does anyone have a full list of which events give you which traits?

I just want to say thank you, ArenaNet. Improved trait system (and free trait point refunds), account wide dye system, the wardrobe… this is the kind of changes to the game that I’ve been waiting/hoping for for a long time! I definitely hope you continue along this line!

would appreciate it if some dev could hang up an in-game clock in LA

I was in overflow on Desolation… nothing there either. And judging from the feedback on the GW2 Facebook page, lots of people on lots of different servers had the same issue.

After the full re-download I had a couple of days without crashes. This morning the game installed a patch, and since then, the MainCli.cpp problem has returned, and I have just had my second MainCli.cpp crash (after the patch, the game crashed, then I did a full repair, played for half an hour, and now it crashed again… both times because MainCli.cpp was corrupted). My original statement stands… it should not be possible to corrupt your main game and crash because of that… that’s just bad programming!

OmniPotentes.4817:

THE best thing you can do is to delete the game and download it from scratch.

Thanks for the advice. I deleted and re-downloaded the entire game… over the coming days I will see if that makes a difference.

I have constant problems with corruption of the MainCli.cpp file in the gw2.dat. Just about every other time that I run the game, it crashes about halfway through a play session, informing me that MainCli.cpp got corrupted, and that I need to repair the archive. A full repair will then indeed only update 1 file. A quick search on the forum showed many other threads in the past from people suffering from similar problems with this file.
If this file is so susceptible to corruption, then couldn’t you take it out of the gw2.dat archive, so that the game doesn’t need to check a quarter of a million files every time this happens? Or better: separate ALL data that is written/updated from all the actual game data (put the game data in a read-only file), so that the game data cannot get corrupted while playing and we don’t suffer from constant crashes. Personally, I consider a program that crashes a case of bad programming, and something that deserves highest priority to fix. Crashes are more frustrating than any in-game bug will ever be.

As of this moment, for me there is simply nothing in this game worth doing at max level (I don’t like pvp, and I’m not interested in gear grinds). So right now I just don’t consider the game “fun”. Although a couple of the things Chris said in the AMA sound good (“At the end of the day we want to make fun content for all of our different player types to enjoy, in which they can earn the same rewards as other types of players, through activities they enjoy playing the most”), I will first have to see what kinds of incentives they come up with to make people want to return to all the lower level zones in the games to keep them relevant, and what kinds of motivation (other than gear) they can come up with to make people interested in doing stories and dynamic events in all the zones again.
If they do manage to make the game ‘fun’ again for players like me, then yes, I may very well return.

I have stopped playing the game entirely, as it just stopped being fun for me. There’s just nothing worth doing at max level for a pve-er if you don’t care about gear grinding (ascended, legendary, or whatever). I explained my reasons in this post, which will already be familiar to some of you. Basically, the ascended gear announcement was the final splash (definitely more than a drop) for me, although it’s far from the only reason. I’m definitely watching where ArenaNet go with this game, and in time, if I like the changes they make, I may return to playing.

Oh, believe me, they care. This has grown way too big. Even after this patch and the trial weekend, the number of active players on their servers is dropping noticably. ArenaNet will surely realize they’ve made a mistake. They just don’t have a good reply yet. Telling us “sorry guys, we messed up and we know it” won’t solve anything if they can’t also come up with a plan for the future that will keep all parties satisfied. There have been several good suggestions in these threads on how all this could be improved. But I believe that Nexon has a big influence in the direction this game is currently heading into (just like EA was the driving force behind Bioware’s downfall), and unfortunately, I doubt that ArenaNet will be able to change things around without approval from Nexon… meaning they have to be able to convince Nexon, with actual figures, that this approach isn’t working, and that they can come up with an alternative that would work. I’m prepared to just lay this game down, wait 2 more weeks, and see what ArenaNet has come up with. I hope you can do the same.

Guys, although I’m just as unhappy about this whole situation as you are (and haven’t played the game ever since the announcement), let’s not overreact and start dealing out awful reviews on amazon or metacritic. Let’s give ArenaNet a week or 2 to come up with a plan that can work for all parties involved… us, those interested in some kind of endgame progression, and NCSoft/Nexon. If, after that, they still haven’t responded and they still stick to their current plans of endgame content with gear requirements and gear grinding, then by all means go wild on the reviews.

ASB.4295:

You will regain this freedom once ascended infusions have been released, whether that’s in a year, or in 5 years. If they haven’t introduced another tier by then, chances are this is going to be the best in slot gear for good. Until then, your sense of permanence and freedom has to yield.

… well, “for good” only until the expansion in which they give you the announced raising of the level cap.

the level cap will be 80 on the initial release of the game, and we absolutely will increase it further into the game, probably through expansions, that’s the most likely place we would do that.

Has anyone considered what will happen when they DO increase the level cap? It wouldn’t make much sense to increase the level cap while all the gear stays at level 80, so at the latest by that time, all your Ascended gear will become obsolete again, and the grind starts from scratch.

Lt Latency.7415:

Yes we do.

2 million vs 10 thousand if every posters was unique (which it’s not)
keep cutting it in 1/2
1 million
500k
250k
125k
62.5k
32.25k

You have to cut the population in 1/2 7 times to even get close to 10k being the majority. If things are this bad in 2 months, Your DAM right then better start making major changes.

That 10,000 only means something if you have a pretty accurate estimate of how many of those ~2 million players are active posters on this forum. 20,000? 40,000? 100,000? in other words: if you know the total number of active posters on this forum, then you can estimate if it’s 1 out of 2, 1 out of 4 or 1 out of 10 players that are unhappy with this change. Given that we don’t even know that… those figures are completely meaningless.

@Skyper:

I’ve quoted it before earlier in this thread, but I’ll repeat it especially for you. When they introduced legendary weapons, ArenaNet stated:

And Legendary Weapons ofcourse are not any more powerful than kind of the top level exotic weapons. In fact, each Legendary Weapon is based off of a very specific exotic weapon power wise, so they’re exactly the same power wise, but they look a whole lot cooler.

And up until the introduction of Ascended gear, that’s the way it has been. There never was a gap in stats. So if you want to hear suggestions on how this could work, step 1 would be to remove that stat difference again, and keep exotic, ascended and legendary gear equal in stats. The only difference should be in rarity and in looks.

Does anyone at ArenaNet even remember this statement made back in July when they first announced Legendary Weapons:

And Legendary Weapons ofcourse are not any more powerful than kind of the top level exotic weapons. In fact, each Legendary Weapon is based off of a very specific exotic weapon power wise, so they’re exactly the same power wise, but they look a whole lot cooler.

?

I was perfectly okay with Legendary items exactly because of this particular part of it. No more!

Hilko.1760:

Kelvingts.2035:

Skins alone cannot keep most of us playing the game for longer and longer.

You got the wrong game then. New skins, content, areas, dungeons, items, rares, prestige titles, competitive play, the inability to out gear content, etc, etc. Those are the things that kept the players in Guild Wars. The set of “players” your kind fall under have a billion other choices.

tbh, I more and more get the impression that we have the wrong game. Clearly, ArenaNet originally intended to make a game without gear grind, where all the content in the game remained relevant, where people would have reasons to go back to older content and replay that, and where new content was focused around adding more variety to those zones to keep people entertained. A game where max level gear would remain max level gear, and the only thing that distinguished rare legendary gear from the standard exotic gear, was the skins. But many of the people coming to this game from other MMO’s are so used to gear progression and endgame, that they just didn’t get it. As that group of people grew ever unhappier with the game, ArenaNet decided to change their direction, add gear progression and endgame… the latest step of which is a new tier of gear and the introduction of a Diablo-style endgame dungeon that people can keep on repeating. As they now have most of their resources focused on that, there isn’t a whole lot of time left to give people goals and reasons to replay older content, to revisit existing zones, to improve those zones, and to improve replayability by fixing the ‘ever branching’ personal story. Most of the people who rushed to level 80, didn’t really seem to care about all that anyway. In other words: those zones are slowly dying. This game is becoming exactly what ArenaNet told us it would never be: a dash to max level, after which you change your playstyle around and start doing endgame content with gear progression.
If that’s the direction that this game is going in, if that is really where ArenaNet believe that they can find the majority of the players, then we are clearly in the wrong game. Time to find something new…

mjharrison.3209:

No, the obvious thing to do is:

• remove any/all stat differences between exotic and ascended gear – 8% better is not acceptable
• make agony resist into a set of runes, or make any armour infusable

This! imho, Exotic, Ascenced and Legendary should all be identical in stats, and the only differences should be in the rarity of their skins (just as ArenaNet originally said it would be). They all should get the additional infusion slot for Agony or whatever… people should never be forced to upgrade from their current exotic gear to ascended/legendary just to be able to do the new content.
People who want to grind, can grind for the rarer ascended or legendary gear, and show off with those rare skins in the game.

I hope this will be allowed to stay, as I just want to make it clear to the devs why I am quitting the game. As it has become increasingly clear that I am not the only one who feels this way, I believe that it’s important that the devs know, so they can turn the tide and do something about this.

My full story can be found here:
http://www.guildwars2forum.com/threads/13980-Issues-with-GW2/

Now, mods, feel free to close this thread, as I don’t want this to turn into a big discussion thread that will result in its deletion.

I’m in the same boat. Yesterday was the first time since headstart that I had the time and opportunity to play, but just couldn’t get myself to. I logged in, stared at the screen for a moment, then logged out again. No matter how much I was originally looking forward to the Lost Shores update, today I made the decision that I will not return to this game until they come with some significant improvements… especially in the way ArenaNet just waltz over things they ‘promised’ earlieron.
Haven’t played Path of Exile at all for the past 2 months… maybe I should go back there and see how much that game has improved.

nofo.8469:

It’s not a gear treadmill!

It’s progression!

Great, a different name for the same thing. Either way, players who don’t step onto this treadmill/progression thing, will soon end up with obsolete gear with lower stats than everyone else around them. So all the gold/karma/time that you invested in getting exactly that set of exotic gear that you wanted, is just useless, as you will all have to do it again… unless ArenaNet offer you a free and easily obtainable stat upgrade from your current set of exotic gear to equivalent ascended stats.

But even then, it’s clear that ArenaNet are intending to release yet another level of gear with better stats on top of that… legendary armor.

Whatever the reasons, contrary to their promise (that other/rarer items would differ in visual appearance and rarity alone, and not in how powerful they are), they are now introducing armor that is more powerful than max level (exotic) armor.

As it is, I have lost my faith in ArenaNet and have lost my interest in playing this game. Yesterday was the first time since headstart that I had time and opportunity to play the game, but simply didn’t feel like it. Before this whole Ascended thing, I was excited about the upcoming Lost Shores update… now I simply don’t care anymore. So I will be taking a break from this game until it becomes clearer where ArenaNet are going with this. Whether or not I return, depends on the path they choose.

First, I’d like to thank Chris Whiteside for his response. But it just doesn’t make this right.

ArenaNet made the big mistake of giving legendaries a new level of stats. If legendaries had been at the same level of stats as exotics (and only differed in skin, as they were originally supposed to), there wouldn’t have been a problem, and they wouldn’t have needed to introduce ascended armor (now that they’ve discovered that people can obtain legendaries a lot easier/faster than was intended).
And imho the better solution would have been to either upgrade the stats on exotic armor, or downgrade the stats on legendaries. Both would probably have made some people (the group who farmed the legendaries for their stats) unhappy, but definitely not as much as introducing a new level of gear. And once all the ascended gear is introduced, nobody will want exotic gear anymore, as those stats will be inferior… so what’s the reason for NOT simply upgrading the exotic gear stats?
Regardless of how they introduce it, it will mean that people who spent a lot of time and money getting their current exotic gear, will be forced to go out and spend more time and more money on getting ascended gear… as their exotic gear will quickly become obsolete. In short: it IS a gear treadmill.

Earlier on, ArenaNet promised:

We don’t want the player to ever have to grind and do something they don’t want to do to progress in the game.

And Mike O’Brien said:

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games – we leave the grind to other MMOs.

So I have one very simple but important question for ArenaNet: will we all be able to obtain this new level of gear progression without any form of grinding… including grinding those dungeons?

I too feel disappointed and betrayed. Adding another level of gear just sounds way too much like the introduction of Tier1/2/3 in WoW. In Guild Wars 1, max stat gear was max stat gear, and it has always remained the same. With all their nice tales, the devs have made us believe that Guild Wars 2 would be the same. Apparently, they intend to make this game much more like WoW than like GW1. If that is the direction this game is taking, then I need to start looking for another game as well.

You can already do many of the hearts together… if you kill something together, you will get rewarded together. And it would be pretty difficult to determine who deserves a share of your reward when you feed a cow, or bring in a bag of goodies. I agree with dottek, doing a single person task within those renown hearts should still give you the full reward, and not give all 4 party members one fourth.

Besides, the hearts (which you can only do once per character) aren’t GW2’s main questing system anyway… that’s the dynamic events, and those definitely support groups (and scale to the amount of players). So I’d rather that the team didn’t spend any effort on this, and invested that time into more relevant long-term improvements (like more dynamic events to choose from, and some random factor to them)

I don’t have a problem with WvW being part of 100% map completion. There is absolutely no reason why you should be able to get 100% map completion in a week. If you absolutely can’t get the parts of the map that are in an opponent’s section of the map, then just wait a few weeks until the servers rotate and you have a chance of being on a different section of the map…

From what has been stated before, player housing is definitely planned… but probably in a future expansion:

The housing stuff in GW2 we’ve talked about, we’ve said that through expansion content we will add a very robust housing system to GW2. It’s something we want to take our time to make sure we do that right and make it a really special system in the game. So that people can feel very attached to their house and really make it something unique for them.
To do that we really need to sit down for a while trying to design that system and, as I said earlier, now we are focused on getting GW2, the core game, as great as it can be for the release. We’re not looking that much into the details of what we are going to do with the expansions yet. Housing is something we will talk about more down the road when we figure out exactly how we want to do that. Whether it will be within your Home Instance or something separate we haven’t decided at this point.

I think the use of “kitten” for every swear word is actually very good. “Kitten” is quite the opposite of the swear words, and usually not the kind of emotion that people using swear words want to convey. So once someone gets familiarized with the idea that all his swear words are replaced with “kitten” every single time, I think this will actually make people more aware of their swear words, and will push them to pick alternative formulations instead.

Prophet’s suggestion could have quite the opposite effect… some people might actually start experimenting with the use of as much swear words as possible, out of curiosity of what the forum would come up with.

In my case, that “someone else” is my wife, and she has no intention of buying GW2 herself. However, as these names have a special meaning to us, I would like to be able to use 2 of the character names from her GW1 account for GW2.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way for a GW1 player to allow ArenaNet to remove their reservations and free them up for other players.

The original blog post about name reservations said:

You must create a Guild Wars 2 character with the same name as your Guild Wars character during the Headstart Access period or on launch day. Shortly after launch, we’ll free up all the unclaimed names for new Guild Wars 2 players to use.

That launch date is now almost 1 month ago… even players who had problems claiming their name on launch date due to hacked or suspended accounts etc should all be back in the game by now and have had plenty of time to claim their reserved names, right?

So I’m sort of not seeing why you would want to postpone freeing up these names any longer?

There actually has been an official response from ArenaNet.

See this thread on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/103n56/update_guild_wars_2_combat_mode/

In short:

Basically, anything that touches the game client in any fashion, including but not limited to visuals, overlays, controls, inputs, outputs, automation, sounds, or play experience is going to be referred to as a mod. The Guild Wars 2 software package is meant to be delivered and used AS-IS, with zero flexibility for the end user. If your script changes anything about the game itself, how it’s displayed, or how it’s played, then it’s forbidden 3rd-party software.

Yeah, I too would love to get some kind of response from ArenaNet on how much longer we will have to wait.

And if this goes on for much longer, then I would also like to see a way to free up the reservations from individual accounts. I’m still waiting for 2 names from my wife’s GW1 account to become available. She even created a support ticket to ask ArenaNet to delete all the name reservations associated with her account from their database, but apparently, their database doesn’t have that kind of ‘delete’ functionality (frown).

Sorry to hear you don’t enjoy the game, but I have to agree with the other posters… just because you discovered, after playing through the game, that you don’t like it all that much, doesn’t entitle you for a refund. After all, you already HAVE used the access code, and you’ve obviously been able to play through the entire game.
What would happen if game stores allowed everyone to return all games: “I finished it, but I didn’t like it all that much”

point for point:

1. The bugs will definitely get fixed in time. Hardly any game is released completely without bugs. But incomplete? Exactly what content was promised by ArenaNet to be included at launch and isn’t in the game?

2. They never said that there is no grind… they said that you never HAVE to grind in order to remain competitive. And you can complete the game without grinding… you don’t ever have to repeat the same content twice if you don’t want to. In other words… there is still grinding, but it’s a choice, not a necessity.
As for innovative… personally I think it is quite innovative in many ways. Exactly what kind of innovation were you expecting that you were disappointed in?

3. Everything that was promised to be accessible at launch, is. More will surely be added in future expansions. As for “only 2 level 80 areas”… you DO realize that as a level 80 player you can play in every single zone in the game and do everything you want… you will automatically be scaled down to the level of the zone. Meaning you have 25+ zones to choose from at level 80!

4. See (3). There is plenty to do all throughout the game. Are you sure that you’ve discovered every single dynamic event that is in the game? (many of them are player triggered!)

5. Did ArenaNet ever claim anything else?

6. Try creating a new character now that the starter zones are less full. DE’s definitely aren’t zerg fests (you may even be doing some solo) and do require skill to get through!

7. That’s your personal opinion, I can’t do anything about that.

Now, how about some constructive criticism in which you explain what ArenaNet could do (small steps) to improve the current gaming experience in order for you to enjoy it?

Evildogg.4098:

I got over 100 of these emails and then finally today they succeeded..

If you get even one single of these emails, change your password immediately, to something that is very hard to guess and crack (the longer the better), and something that you have never, ever used before. Because that email means that hackers know your password!

The fact that hackers were able to log in to your account (ie. the fact that they knew your email address and password) and make this change, is probably your own fault… I suspect that you have already used the same email address and password for another game, another website or another forum in the past.
The fact that this account name change was possible without any additional verification, was ArenaNet’s fault. But they have already taken action there:

From the Game Status updates:

We’re temporarily disabling account name changes for accounts with validated email addresses. Thus, users with validated email addresses whose accounts are hacked will in most cases be able to recover their own accounts using the reset password functionality linked above.

Strange, is it possible that, maybe because of your IP range, the website believes that you are not actually in Norway? Because if I go to the website, I have absolutely no problem selecting any other western European country (including Norway) from the list.

No updates here? I can’t be the only one who noticed this, as I have it regardless of the browser I use, and regardless of what PC I am on (even from work).

Ticket #120907-005479 (from one of our forum members who doesn’t have access here atm) just passed the 5-day line.
He initially created multiple tickets, at one time even closing the original one. But then he re-opened the original ticket and added all info to that one. I hope that didn’t cause any additional delays in processing.

Please let me know what I can tell him.

Although I realize that the lack of an answer to your question is extremely frustrating, you may want to have a look at this post, explaining that support currently needs 5 days (~120 hours, not 72 hours) to process a prioritized ticket:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Account-Issue-Updates-Posted-Daily/first#post59547

So you’re not setting any records, they are just that busy processing thousands of similar requests…

A member of our guildwars2forum who had his account hacked a week ago, and hasn’t heard anything yet:

Ticker #120904-004723

Please let me know what I can tell him.

Veeber.3192:

He didn’t mean the actual account, just the game Login email and password.

Correct. They don’t have to be able to log in to your email to log in to your game. All it requires is either the owner not paying attention and authenticating the login attempt (once), or them being able to trick the authenticator into believing that the attempt came from a previously authenticated ip address.

Pictish.3410:

3/There are reports of that all over every gamesite read the comments, there is also reports on the forums of people doing that and still getting hacked, just because you password is unique or you only use your email for this game does not mean you are immune from other methods. A unique email and password is a good idea, it is not a cure all.

So far, the only case I have read where someone specifically confirmed that they used a unique email address for GW2 that they had never used anywhere else and not shared with anyone, is this thread... but that person also admits that it could be any of a number of reasons. I will definitely be watching that case closely, as I am curious about the reason there.
Usually the statements are along the lines of “I have not used this email address/password combination for any other online game”, which says next to nothing, as it excludes all other websites and forums.

So you actually used this page and entered your full serial number there?

https://account.guildwars2.com/recovery

If so, then exactly what did you mean by “it refused to let me do so”… what did you see when you tried it that way? Did you get some error message? Were you unable to do certain steps? Did it appear to do everything but it didn’t actually change your password?

Actually, we know that ArenaNet have set up software to test for bots and eliminate (perma-ban) those accounts. It’s entirely possible that that software isn’t entirely foolproof yet, and that it will make a few mistakes. But you can be assured that ArenaNet will fix those mistakes when they are discovered, and that they will admit those mistakes and give back access to anyone who accidentally got banned in that process. So if that was indeed the reason for your ban, then I’m sure this will get resolved within the next couple of days.

I also don’t believe ArenaNet has been hacked. Why? Three reasons:

1. They are honest enough about such critical issues, that they would have informed us/warned us if that were the case.

2. See the game updates: if ArenaNet’s database had been hacked, why would hackers still bother testing logins for thousands of email addresses that do not have a GW2 account? That’d make absolutely no sense at all.

3. Amongst all the thousands of users that have been hacked, I have not heard of a single case where someone had a unique email address that they only used for Guild Wars 2, and still got hacked. If ArenaNet’s database had been hacked, then many of those users would have gotten hacked as well.

Did you try this:

http://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9222