Unlike other games Guild Wars has different server systems. You’re not stuck with one character on a server. Kind of explain how that works.

The traditional way that architecture is you have a server, and that server does everything. It authenticates the user, it handles all chat, it handles putting you in the missions and quests and everything. You create your character on a server and maybe 5 or 6 or 10,000 other people create their characters on that server, and that server handles everything. However, it’s completely isolated from the rest of the world. You know, not only can I not-- if somebody in Germany is also playing the game, not only can I not communicate with them or play with them-- it’s even worse because people who are in my own data center, people who live down the street, my best friend from school, if he happened to pick a different server when he created his character we are hosed. Maybe he’ll pay to have it transferred in some games, but not most games. Even then, who wants to pay the extra money to just so you can play together? It’s kind of weird.

What we wanted to do instead was rather than having you pick a server and create a character on that server—we have data centers around the world and those data centers talk to each other. You create your character and the data center controls who temporarily owns that character. Then if you want to play with someone in Germany, or say you jump into a party with players from over the world. Our server data centers actually talk to each other, figure out where the best performance will be, the best data center close to you then they migrate you character records over to the other data center and that data now temporarily owns your character records. On a regular basis it all coordinates back through the master data base that goes through several levels of cache servers in order to get there. But the point is that rather than one server that does everything and those servers don’t talk to each other, instead we have servers that do one thing, and all those servers talk to each other. And so we’re able to grow our network if we need more chat servers, we throw them in, if we need authentication servers we throw in another authentication servers, guild servers, tournament servers, fight servers, game servers. All these—probably about 12 different custom specialized servers, but the important thing is they all talk to each other, so you don’t have to make the choice about where your character record is or where you’re playing. They do it on your behalf, and so that result is that your not locked into just being in one place and then locked from the rest of the community while you play.

As a first person shooter guy I have to ask what’s up with no jumping?

(laughs) I think jumping is something in especially a corollary to that which is the ability to have a little more free form roaming and not be stymied by hills. It’s something that-- if we had to go back to do it all over again we probably would address that a little bit differently than we did because you do lose that visceral feel when interacting with your character. And I can guarantee you that that’s something we will address in the future.

You even have your own leagues and run tournaments. How does that work?

We have a different championship for every new campaign we release. So in January we have the final realm championship of the Guild Wars—the 1st annual Guild Wars championship in Taipei, Taiwan. We pick six guilds from all over the world to compete they were the one ones that were the top of the ladder in their receptive territories during the preceding 3 months from playoffs.

Right now the Guild Wars Factions tournament is under way, and each championship is divided into three seasons: the first season, the second season, and third season. We’re in the second season right now and the winner of each season—the top two winners of each season are invited to come to the global playoffs, and for Factions it is going to be in the game convention in Germany. We’ll rotate it around between Asia, the US and Europe for every championship. There’s a $100,000 total combined cash prizes. The winner of the Guild Wars Factions championship receives $50,000, and the remaining guilds split the remaining $50,000.00 in a prorated fashion. We’re big on the competitive nature of the game as well. We designed it from game one to be a truly competitive playing experience. It’s a skill based game not a time based game

That’s a key difference between Guild Wars and other on-line role playing games is that even when you’re not playing to compete even in the role playing aspect your success in fulfilling the missions is based on how well you play, how well you think strategically and tactically not well I played 50 hours so I’m level 8 versus I played 200 hours so I’m level 9 and so the PVP is very balanced and very interesting in Guild Wars. We rolled out observer mode in December so that even people who weren’t in the PVP can get a kind of feel for what the high-level tournament is like and what professional play looks like. That’s something that we’ll continue to support directly.

How do you get to the point where there’s not a dominant class?

Fortunately we have a lot of designing experience on our team with these kind of things. For example, James Phinney who was the lead designer of Star Craft and he was the one that was able to pull off the fundamental balance between three distinct races that play differently in Star Craft, so he kind of understands how to do that at the most basic structural level. On top of that we have a very talented design staff who works on it. Isaiah Cartwright whose full time job is balancing the game. That’s what he does all day every day. Not only playing it himself, but very closely monitoring player feedback, very closely monitoring the kind of statistics we generate in game, and it’s something that we constantly tweak. Another big distinction is that we don’t really view balance as something you either have or don’t have. It’s not a check mark in a box. Balance is something that changes over time, and it’s important when you’re making a competitive game to keep it fresh. So we don’t ever try to strive for a perfectly balanced game where people just walk away and say “okay we do this.” Instead you achieve balance, and you let that play for 3 months until certain strategies get stale, certain skills emerge as kind of a favorite skill, others that are very cool but not necessarily the most strategically competitive skill that you should choose kind of gets left behind. And so every 3 months or so it will just totally reinvigorate the game. In fact the reason we divided championships into 3 seasons is so we have an opportunity to make balance changes and add fresh mechanics to the game.

What is next for the Guild Wars series?

We are planning to start releasing two of these campaigns per year. They will continue to be full content stand alone games. The way we’re able to do that is that we have two fully staffed overlapping development teams so they can work on a campaign for an entire year. So for example, Factions, which is releasing in the next day or two, we began working on that last summer. The next campaign, campaign 3, that’s being kicked off production on that fall last year. Each one has a full year and we’re going to continue to do that .We have a strong and passionate player base globally, and they’re hungry for the content. As long as they’re hungry, we’ll keep it coming. So for now we are the Guild Wars company. And that’s what we’re going to continue focusing on.

Guild Wars Factions In stores now. Check out the gallery here.