Guild Wars 2 digital sales on-hold

Digital sales of Guild Wars 2, which recently released (28 August 2012), have been halted to improve the server response for current players.

The long-awaited MMORPG (previously operating in beta and early-access modes) saw an expected boom in player numbers shortly after its release. ArenaNet decided to suspend all first-party digital purchases to slow things down a little.

ArenaNet explained on its Facebook page that the game’s rising popularity is about to affect player experience with overloaded servers:

Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority. We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.

Effective immediately we have disabled sales via buy.guildwars2.com. To be clear, box and digital sales are still available via our retail partners. We are tracking our concurrency closely while expanding our infrastructure. We’ll re-enable first-party digital sales as soon as we feel that we can do so safely.