Guild Wars 2

I don’t care either way about spider mounts, but I’d like to chime in on the phobia topic and some of the outlandish claims in this thread.

We have spider enemies, tame-able spiders for Rangers as well as spider minis. You can’t avoid them, so citing arachnophobia as a point against them becoming mounts doesn’t really work.

If your phobias happen to be severe enough to carry over into virtual spaces then you may want to stay away from broader video games, because they are not designed to be a safe space for you and your particular issue(s). (Unless a product is marketed as such, of course)
But, for the sake of argument: If we start with censoring spider-themed content, where do we stop? There are phobias for EVERYTHING. Water, heights, caves, darkness, zombies, rats and the list goes on. To create a safe space for EVERYBODY you’d have to cut a massive amount of any game’s content. An option to turn creature-based sources of phobia into other creatures (like the Skyrim mod that turns spiders into bears, for example) would be a great option to have, but I don’t agree with outright censoring content for everybody because a select few cannot deal with it.

Also, the comment about arachnophobia being the reason for no spider mounts in Blizzard’s MMO is nonsense. In fact, there are multiple official posts about them wanting to put spiders up as mounts. Ion Hazzikostas (one of the game’s main directors) even went into long detail on why the mount was so expensive – and it wasn’t for fear of triggering arachnophobia if too many people had it. Around the time of the spider mount’s reveal there even was a change org petition to have it removed from the game – which Blizzard clearly didn’t pay any heed, since the mount is still here. The whole “Blizzard learned from their spider mount disaster” statement somebody put up here is nonsense.

Miles.5081:

For me was solution to do this:

1. Navigate to your Guild Wars 2 installation folder.

2. Right-click on “GW2.exe” and select “Create Shortcut.”

3. Rename this shortcut to “anything you want”.

4. Right-click on this shortcut and select “Properties”.

5. Edit the “Target” line to include /clientport 80 at the end.

Thanks a lot! This problem popped out of nowhere today, never had this before. This workaround fixed it for me!