Potential player has a few questions

Hi,

I'm a new-to online player having just switch to Broadband. I'm looking for games to play with my friends. At the mo' we play (or rather try to) NWN, but that game's bugged to betsy and we spend more time trying to connect than playing, only to have my computer crash out.

Guildwars looks ideal, but there's no plans for a demo so I'd like some user insight before I part with my cash.

1) How reliable is the game? Do you ever have connection troubles? Random drop-outs? Problems running the game from time to time for no apparent reason? These are common faults with NWN and the frustration is too much!

2) What's the technical support solutions like? Do people get their problems fixed? In NWN you post on a forum, get no answer (other than update drivers and set Firewall settings) and your problems never go away. Utterly useless. Have people here had problems actually get fixed? Has anyone got problems that haven't been fixed and it looks like they never will?

3) What's the bandwidth requirements like? On a capped service I have to know how much data I'll be guzzling. Is it a case of a few megs when you start a mission as maps etc. are downloaded, or tens of megs an hour?

With any luck this game will provide that gaming fun me and my friends want in an evening.

Thanks,
Shifty Geezer
...

1) There are occasional disconnects etc. in every online game, mostly it's a ISP's fault / some local error.
The game servers are stable and lag free, no need to worry about that (there was a downtime for about two hours a few day ago, but it was a big network error in the city where the servers are, there was nothing wrong with the servers).

2) There is a whole team of people who squash the bugs and fix problems, and with GW's streaming tech you don't need to wait for patches - as soon as the bug is fixed, your game automatically updates.

3) All of the game content is on the CDs, the only thing that you'll have to download after installing is the small patches. As for how much bandwidth it takes...can't give you exact numbers, but you can play it smoothly on dial-up, so not much

I've played 7 hours (i think) and didn't had many problems, i used to play NWN too, but it was extremely unstable on persistent servers (+30 people online)

updates aren't big and you don't have to worry about your download limit for this game

but it's live for not even a week, it only can become more stable and reliable

not much lag either

Thanks for the feedback. Will probably get it. Sold out when I went looking though.

Anther thought though - how firewall friendly is this game? NWN has beena pain in the butt, with talk of port forwarding that's not even listed on my router. Is connection straightforward when it comes to firewalls, or at least decent instructions on how to connect?

The game is firewall friendly. I did not have to open any ports on my hardware firewall and the software one asks for you to permit the connection or not. With Symantec it will ask you everytime the game is updated since it changes the .exe file timestamp and such. But overall it is firewall friendly.