GS: And how did the play test work out technically? What lessons did the team take from the test in terms of stability, server load balancing, and lag to make sure that the game runs smoothly at launch?

JS: The event worked out very well technically. Guild Wars is still at an alpha stage of development, but our programming team has a tremendous amount of experience building global game networks, so server load balancing and stability issues were minimal. Many of the unique technologies we created to minimize instability and server downtime were put to good use. For example, if an instance of a mission crashes, the ArenaNet server manager will terminate only that game, but players in other missions on that server will not be affected. Our servers are also capable of running multiple versions of the game simultaneously, so we can quickly fix a bug or exploit and patch the server without rebooting or even terminating games that are currently in progress. We did have a database server hardware failure one evening, but otherwise the hiccups were minor and affected very few players.