Remember that one thread that me and Al3xand3r were arguing on, well it seems he and I were right and wrong about certain apsects of Guild Wars. This was taken from the Guild Wars website.
[quote]Is Guild Wars an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)?
Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.
Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.
Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one’s guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player’s choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.
Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world – they are not divided onto different servers or shards – so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.[/quote]
So, I guess they’re creating a genre? Both Al3x and I thought there was more than one server 
. How wrong we were.
They certainly have to have more than one physical server, this thing propably just clarifies that anyone can talk to/team up with anyone else unlike MMOs that restrict your access to a single server/shard depending on your location and some preferences (PK or no PK etc).
Shards for MMOs simply exist to
a) give better ping to people since there’s usually a shard for Asia, USA, Europe
b) alllow people to chose a preference (player killling or not for example) since it can change the gameplay of a mmo radically.
The gameplay of Guild Wars makes you able to not have to separate the thing in shards like full MMO games often have to because everything is optional on first place.
Still, as it is from the game’s website it obviously only shows these things in a positive light.
Nothing it says makes any difference to the points I had made about its gameplay which is what matters anyway…
Well, it specifically says that there won’t be any different servers or shards so I’m going to go with that because they said it flat out. I’ll let you know if they’re lying or not in 10 days. I don’t know how they would do it but like you said before, they’re the people who made battlenet and they’re good at this type of thing.
I also know that our comments about the gameplay weren’t wrong, I wasn’t meaning anything about that. That is why I said certain aspects instead of several aspects.
I think what they mean, is that the players aren’t divided onto servers for the rest of the game - they can change servers at any time, unlike (some?) other MMORPGs where you create a character and that character is bound to that one server for the rest of its existence.
If that is the case, it would work a lot like Phantasy Star Online, but with the characters stored server side somewhere, or on multiple game servers. In that game you created a character, but it was stored on your VMU. This was a major issue because it meant that people could clone characters, etc… although you couldn’t simply copy your character from one VMU to another, there was a way that you could copy a character by emailing the save file.
In Guild Wars’ case, it’s possible what they mean is that there is one central place that all the characters start out in, and then you get transferred to different servers when you create a party… But even something like that would have to have limits to the amount of characters that can support. The words are quite unclear IMO.
Well I’m confident all they wanted to clarify with saying that was that everyone has the potential to team up with anyone if they meet whereas in a MMORPG you are restricted to the single shard that you chose when you started the game.
(Which isn’t really a bad thing for MMOs since it would kinda suck to only have a single shard, raising your latency, making the world of the MMO crowded, and having you in desperate search of an english speaking player while you dodge all the Korean - or whatever - item beggars.)
Nice Itam Plz ^____^)
Regardless, the way the game is set up, even if it was run by a single massive server (not likely but just saying…if…) the gameplay as shown in the betas is still separated in ‘quest’ areas and the different ‘districts’ of each ‘town’ area rather than have a massive world to explore like most MMORPGs.
So I don’t see how you will be able to tell in 10 days if they are truthful or if I’m right since you still won’t be seeing their physical set up but only the game itself and its interface… Which will remain as it was in the betas…
Unless you are hoping that the finished game will have a massive continuous world instead of the way it is set up in the betas. That’s not going to happen I’m afraid.
As far as I’m concerned a comment like that is simply made to wrongly provoke yet more comparisons with MMORPGs when, in fact, for the type of game Guild Wars is, the matter of ‘shards’ would have never ever been an issue unless they had a totaly fucked up game design for some reason…
I wrote the above reply before reading yours Solo. Go to the thread linked below for more details on how Guild Wars works. You are quite right in that it’s got a player limit since, again, it’s not a MMOGame.
panzerdragoon.net/forums/vie … php?t=1515
All this should have maybe been replies to that thread anyway…
Yeah, I read through that topic a few days ago. What I thought they might have meant by a single server, is that the 3D “chat room” that you start out in could be a single world that everyone started out in, rather than the individual lobbies in PSO. I think that there would still need to be a limit on the number of people supported though, so I’m not sure how they could pull something off like that.
Well I think it will have multiple lobbies like that (diffeent areas’ cities). The beta I played only had one city but it was also separated in different “districts” which was propably just a different name for serves since they all looked indentical and you used a menu to chose to which to go to… But you could at any time switch to another district if you thought one of your friends was on another and not yours for example. Very similar to a 3D chat imo except you can also trade on top of chatting/walking around.
You said you played it at E3 right? That was a demo instead of a beta test, just to tell you. But I’m not sure what to think, you’re probably right that it’s just so you can party with anyone at anytime instead of hoping your friend has the same shard or server as you. But then again, they said thousands of players in the same virtual world and those outposts and towns would be a little crowded if that was the only time that it was true.
I’m not hoping for a continuous world because I know that won’t happen… Which is a little sad really. 
And there there were a few cities that I got to go to in my little time in the beta tests (damn E.B.) and you could switch districts but I’m not sure if that is even going to be in the full version.
You can also accept quests in towns too(which can also be done outside of them) and…get this…DANCE! lol, who doesn’t want to watch thier character dance badly?
About the shards and servers thing, I think I remember seeing something about them stating that you could play with anyone around the world and blah blah blah, world wide release. But I’m not sure. If they don’t have any shards, I hope that it has the quick translated sentences stored like FFXI had, cause I don’t want to learn Korean or use my poor Spanish skills lol.
. How wrong we were.