might buy guild wars

I am thinking of buy guild wars ,but I have 2 questions first.

1. How good is character customization?

2. Is there zone loading? If so does it take long?

1. What do you mean with character customization? If you want an unique character there are different options. A few different faces and hair styles while making it. Of course after you got it started you can buy different armor and dye it a unique colour.

2. It always has to download the zone if you never entered it before. Of course it depends on what internet speed but it should never take long. Once you've entered the zone before and you reenter it, it only takes a few seconds to load.

Have fun with it

Character customization: 6 (or 8 if you buy factions) professions. Each with male/female, each with 8 or so faces, hairstyles, skin tones, and a varying height. Add in the 8 basic dye colors (which can be mixed to create all kinds of colors) and the choices for armors, you've got about a million combinations to chose from.

For Zone loading, yeah, it depends on your connection & if you've been in an area/town before. For new areas, I've never waited more than 30 seconds (with DSL) for file downloads & updates. For places I've already been, 4 - 5 seconds max.

Uh, connection and RAM. My connection kills everything, downloads music at an average speed at 700 kb/s, but until I upgraded from 256 RAM to 728, it always took me more than three minutes a load, whether I've been there or not.

1. There's a fair amount of customization, but not a lot. Depending on the profession, at character creation there are about 8 face options, 6 skin colors, 8 hair colors, and 8 hair styles to combine together. You can choose the character's height and the color of the starter armor. Once ingame, there are several armor artwork types to choose from and dyes to color them with, but no way to change hair style/color, face or skin color.

Check out this link for some pictures of different characters and armor types:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Armor_types

2. The loading times can be long if one uses the default configuration, since Guild Wars defaults to only downloading new areas upon first visit. However what I've done after installing is to create an "Update" shortcut, which is a copy of the Guild Wars desktop shortcut with the "-image" switch added to the command line. Like so...

Copy the GW shortcut.
Right-click on the copy and select Properties.
In the Target line add "-image" after the command line, without the quotes. It should look like this...

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image

Save the shortcut as "Guild Wars - Update"

What this does is opens Guild Wars and downloads ALL updates to your computer, then closes the program (can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on your connection speed). You'll still need to use the normal GW shortcut to play the game. This makes the loading time negligible, since all newly visited areas load from your hard drive rather than downloading each new area. I'll run the update shortcut about once a week.