ArenaNet Developer Reveals the 'Secret Ingredient' That…

Among the many online games that rose during the early 2000s, Guild Wars stands in a category all its own. The original MMO remains available today despite taking a backseat to Guild Wars 2 after its release in 2012. Giants like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 may have given it plenty of competition, but both Guild Wars and its successor carved out their own niches, thriving over the last two decades where many others have failed.

The Best War Games recently talked with ArenaNet veteran and Guild Wars game director Stephen Clarke-Willson about the classic game for its 20-year anniversary. Guild Wars 2 owes its continued success to the building blocks of the original, which itself is still receiving updates to this day. The developer spoke about what it was like shepherding Guild Wars over the years and revealed the secret that makes both of ArenaNet’s Tyrian MMOs timeless.

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By James Ratcliff

The Incredible Flexibility of Guild Wars and ArenaNet

Server Stability – The ‘Secret Sauce’ of Guild Wars

When Guild Wars 2 came out, the original Guild Wars had some adjustments to make. According to Clarke-Willson, the process was not nearly as hard as one would imagine: “[Guild Wars] is so well-engineered that you could literally do nothing." A team of about 10 developers stayed back on Guild Wars after Eye of the North to produce more content, but eventually, almost everyone would move over to the sequel instead. Guild Wars 1 essentially became self-running, with Clarke-Willson adding,

“We had bought really great hardware in our data center, and things tended to run. There was a certain amount of maintenance to make sure backups were done, but it eventually ran itself for a couple of years.”

A large part of this success is in the ArenaNet promise: “No monthly fee, buy once, play any time you want, play with your friends whenever you want.” Most MMORPGs have maintenance periods where the game is unavailable to play – indeed, large updates in games like Final Fantasy 14 can have downtime of up to 24 hours. On the converse, Guild Wars and its sequel both pride themselves on having zero server downtime, even for expansion launches. “That incredible flexibility,” Clarke-Willson said, “You say no downtime, but deeper than that is the fact that I can play anytime. If my friends are in a different time zone, we can make it work.” Even 20 years later, the Guild Wars servers have been online nearly 24/7.

Guild Wars Builds Success From Setbacks

Of course, even ArenaNet is not without its problems; Clarke-Willson shared a few stories about challenges that Guild Wars had to overcome. In one instance, a server hosted by NCSoft in Japan suddenly crashed – and it had been active for so long that ArenaNet did not know who to contact to resolve the issue. “We were like, 'Who do we tell? We don’t know any of those people there!' Since it was set up, no one had talked to them once,” Clarke-Willson explained.

Years later in 2018, a major data center in Frankfurt exploded and obviously caused a plethora of issues for Guild Wars. However, once the problem was ostensibly resolved, another was identified–European players were experiencing crippling latency, even though Clarke-Willson himself could not replicate the lag by playing with a VPN. “They were getting three-second pings, and I was like, how is that even physically possible?” Clarke-Willson said. “Is it because I moved the servers? I don’t know, but I have a problem to solve.”

The developer got on Reddit, began speaking to fans, and eventually was able to identify the problem: a statistical anomaly he had actually seen and resolved in Guild Wars 2. Clarke-Willson explained “that fixed the three-second issues with the giant lag spikes people were seeing, and I wouldn’t have done that unless I had gone onto Reddit and started talking to people.” What started as a catastrophe-induced bout of troubleshooting not only improved the game but kicked off chain optimizations, graphical improvements, and other tune-ups that are still going on to this day – all fueled by dedication from devs and fans alike.

“The community is just so passionate about the game that it started to wear off on me! It went from ‘we have this thing that we’re committed to keeping running’ to 'I think we should help this thing along a little more!’"

These events firmly established Clarke-Willson as the de facto caretaker of Guild Wars. Having worked on the game for most of its lifespan, his understanding of the coding went deep – though it didn’t start that way. Clarke-Willson first came to ArenaNet while helping Skyrim composer Jeremy Soule format music from the original game, but his penchant for fixing things led him to stay. As he explained, he became the guy that responded to "'We have a problem over here, and no one else is doing it. Why don’t you look?’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t know anything about it. I guess I better learn!'" There are some voices at ArenaNet with as much or even more experience as Clarke-Willson, but the senior developer has firmly established himself as the resident “problem solver” for Guild Wars.

That said, Clarke-Willson believes the secret to the success of Guild Wars goes even deeper than solid server infrastructure. “If someone asks me, 'How do you work at a company so long?’ I could say it’s a lot of variety, the size of the company, the way I interact with people. But step one is to work at a company that lasts that long!” He is no stranger to layoffs and closures in the gaming industry; indeed, Clarke-Willson admitted that all the other companies he worked for before have all since gone under. Incredible luck, good fortune, and being “founded by a bunch of smart guys who are really committed to the player experience” all combined to create Clarke-Willson's successful career with ArenaNet, and by extension, the enduring legacy of both Guild Wars and its sequel.

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