omg my disk drive broke my GW cd

i went to go eject my guild wars cd from my disc drive and it broke,i was freaking out till a friend told me not to worry and just download the game from the GW website but i dont know if that will do me any good cause i had the trilogy cd with all 3 campaigns,i had always thought the download from the GW website only let you play the prophecies campaign.do i have to buy the game again and if not will the download work for EOTN too?if so im going to throw the cd's away...thnx

Download it, then let it update. Your campaigns are saved on your account, which is saved server side.

Research Command Lines. And then use the "-image" command on your fresh install.

Sorry to hear about your disk.

Just to make it perfectly clear:

The disc(s) that come when you buy a retail copy of Guild Wars are not necesssary to play the game. Once you've registered an account and entered all the relevant product keys, you need never use the disc(s) again. All your account details are stored on ArenaNet's servers - all you need to connect is your account name and password.

Go to http://www.guildwars.com/support/dow...nt/default.php to download the client then, to make this easier, install it to this exact location:

C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\

In order to download everything possible and minimise loading times when entering new towns and explorables, you will nedd to run the program with what is known as the image switch. Here's how to do it:

If you're using Windows XP, go to Start, select Run..., then enter the code in the box below and press Enter.
If you're using Windows Vista, do the same but from the Search bar.

To make life easier, copy the above text and paste it into the run box/search box.

Once you have done this, Guild Wars will download an awful lot of files - somewhere around 3 Gigabytes worth. As you can imagine, this is a task best left to run overnight - but you won't regret doing it.

Good luck!

One more thing - after you have let it run overnight (about 6 hours on DSL actually) - be sure to switch that command line back to what it was originally.. otherwise you won't be able to play GW.

Psst - I used the command line method, rather than the shortcut alteration, Elder

thanks for all the replies,i feel much better knowing i dont have to repurchase the game again...

Another helpfull tip would be to make a copy of the GW startup icon and change the command line on the copy (just rename the copy icon to GW image or something so you wont get confused about why your GW wont start up).

Its usefull to use the image function every now and then anyways for larger updates and such. Once everything is downloaded (the big 6 hour one) subequent updates usually only take a few seconds, but you will have 0 wait time ingame because of that.

Another tip if you can after you downloaded everything from following the above posts
is Copy an Burn the whole GW folder to a DVD or external backup system
Will save a lot of download time next time you need to reinstall GW
for whatever reason hd crash etc.
Just copy the folder from the DVD and add a shortcut as needed and run -image to
install any updates since you did the burn to update your dat file.
Saves lots of time and your up and running faster.