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In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate.

Do you have a specific achievement or goals or plans you want to accomplish, in the first few days to months after release?

Of course! In the first few days, starting with our launch party being held in Chicago, we are forming what we call the "L.A.U.N.C.H." team. Their main goal is to deliberately forego a lot of the normal instances of starting the game and heading to key areas to claim some world first youtube videos and titles. I have done this in previous guilds in Warhammer and Aion, with great success. It was a ton of fun, and I see no reason not to go forth with the concept again. We also have very intertwined and specific sets of plans to quickly and efficiently manage our time and players to control and dominate WvW for our server. Even now, every week, we train and go through extensive TeamSpeak meetings to prepare and share information for those situations.

The first thing you’ll need to know is that there are now three different types of achievements located in your achievement panel. First, there is what we refer to as just “achievements.” You’re probably familiar with these: they tend to be similar to the achievements in the original Guild Wars and many other games, which means they tend toward things that are difficult or time consuming to achieve. [...]

After months of anticipation, this week we unveiled our eighth and final (for now) Guild Wars 2 profession, the mystifying, mind-messing mesmer. In keeping with the deceptive nature of the mesmer — a profession that is all about illusion and misdirection — we briefly placed a banner for an utterly fake profession, the minstrel, on the GuildWars2.com home page. Clicking on this musically challenged minstrel revealed the mesmer, our magical duelist who uses deception as a weapon.

We will officially enter Closed Beta Testing this Friday. It will be marked with an increase in our pool of testers. To clarify, this phase of testing is still under NDA and is not open to the public.
Based on the feedback we get from our current Closed Beta Testing, we will determine the next phases of our beta program in which we will open beta access to more people.

This is a big day for Guild Wars 2 fans and for our studio. We officially revealed the eighth Guild Wars 2 profession, the mesmer, this morning and now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted, we’re ready to answer your questions today in a series of live conversations, starting at 10 AM Pacific (-8 GMT) on Reddit and continuing in a live IRC chat hosted by Curse and Guild Wars 2 Guru at 11:30 AM Pacific.