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Who plays Guild Wars Reforged: speed clearers, collectors, merchers, and the new arrivals

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Contents

Guild Wars Reforged is not a new game. It is the name ArenaNet gave, on 18 November 2025, to a series of free updates to the 2005 client, built with 2weeks, a studio of former ArenaNet staff, and sold from 3 December 2025 as a $19.99 bundle of the three campaigns. The servers, the accounts, and the Steam app ID are the ones the game has always had. So the community is the one the game has always had too, plus whoever the relaunch pulled in.

This is a map of that community: the sub-scenes, where they talk, what they fight about, and what changed in the ten months since launch. Everything is sourced at the end. Reddit was unreachable while I researched this, so the subreddit is quoted only through mirrors. Where a claim rests on a forum post and nothing else, I say so. And I have not named anyone as a cheat, a botter, or a market manipulator, because no public source does either.

How big it is

Steam is the only platform anyone can count, and it is a floor. Accounts on the ArenaNet launcher, where most 2005-era veterans live, and the mobile app from June 2026 share the same servers and are invisible to Steam Charts.

month avg concurrent peak
Nov 2025 ~194
Dec 2025 2,006 5,580
Jan 2026 1,095 2,967
Feb 2026 788 1,785
Mar 2026 502 1,130
Apr 2026 733 1,580
May 2026 558 1,232
Jun 2026 656 1,405
Jul 2026 608 1,211
Aug 2026 455 902
Sep 2026 390 794
last 30 days 352 646

The November figure is implied by Steam Charts’ “+933%” for December. The April bump is the 21st anniversary and the two new dungeons. The June bump is the mobile launch. The slide since July coincides with the August cash-shop update, and with the recent-review score dropping from 86% positive overall to 72% over the last thirty days, on a sample of 36.

ArenaNet’s only numbers are relative. Stephen Clarke-Willson told Forbes in January 2026 that the weeks after launch brought “an over 16000% increase in overall unit sales and a 5x increase in concurrent players” compared with the weeks before, and that the team had provisioned four times normal capacity and “blew way past that.”

Where it lives

  • Guild Wars Wiki. Still the canonical documentation, and the Feedback talk pages under each patch are where the balance fights actually happen.
  • Guild Wars Legacy. Founded May 2016 by Iaerah after Guild Wars Guru closed. Calls itself “probably the de-facto trading hub for Guild Wars 1.” Hosts the preserved Guru archive: 78,218 users, 561,723 threads, 4,911,097 posts. The forum itself has about 13,000 members and 334,000 posts, and set its concurrent-user record of 217 on 4 January 2026.
  • Discord. Guild Wars Global, spun out of the subreddit in November 2016, about 18,700 members. The Guild Wars Community and LGiT Alliance server, 2017, about 12,300. The official franchise server ArenaNet opened on 1 June 2026, about 58,300, but it covers Guild Wars 2 as well and most of that number is GW2. Pre-Searing Official, 2020, about 5,700. Plus the speed-clear servers below.
  • Kamadan, American English District 1. Trade chat, mirrored live at kamadan.gwtoolbox.com with per-item price history, and inside the game by GWToolbox++’s trade window.
  • r/GuildWars. About 67,000 subscribers according to a third-party tracker whose methodology Legacy moderators have called “absolute garbage.” I could not read it directly.
  • Steam forums. The one genuinely new venue. This is where newcomers ask which campaign to start.
  • Twitch. A dedicated Guild Wars: Reforged category. All-time peak of about 2,500 viewers on 28 June 2026. The top channels average under 100.

Speed clearers

The speed-clear scene is the most closed of the sub-communities and also the best documented, because it keeps its own wiki.

The infrastructure

  • wiki.gwscr.com, hosted by the guild FBGM since 2018, started as a Domain of Anguish resource and now indexes every active tactic. Its rules bar theorycrafting from main space and tell editors to “avoid topics they lack direct experience with.”
  • A phpBB forum at gwscr.fbgmguild.com holds the record verification threads. It is not indexable from outside.
  • Four public Discords, member counts read from Discord’s invite API on 14 October 2026:
server members role
Speedruns ~1,750 “The speedclear forming discord,” verification gate
Guild Wars Speed Clear Community ~943 older general hub
Fow Teach Discord ~897 onboarding, verification gate
DoA Teaching ~759 onboarding
  • Alliances. NNG, Aria, db, and ARMS, with about 39 guild pages on the wiki. The guild tags holding records and the alliances organising runs are the same small set.

What is run

The roster is the classic roster. Underworld (Terraway, Hombreway, ARMSway, low-man), Fissure of Woe (T2way through T4way, SenTway, rollway, and a “2026 Tactics” page), Domain of Anguish (IT Tactics, RoJway, 3-3, low-man), Deep and Urgoz skipways, a vanquish speed clear, and sixteen of the eighteen Eye of the North dungeons. The only Reforged-era addition is Tunnels of the Forsaken, the April 2026 post-Searing dungeon, and its only published speed clear is LaiN’s solo-with-heroes route at about fifteen minutes. Nobody has made it an 8-man format.

The only public record tables are classic-era, compiled by PyroLobster on Legacy in 2023 from the GWSCR forum. They split TAS (consumables allowed) from PURE.

area best 8-man or full holder
Underworld 11:54.3 mixed guilds
Fissure of Woe 05:56.6, 7-man SenT
Domain of Anguish 13:47.7 IT
The Deep 04:54.3, 12-man Fett
Urgoz’s Warren 04:54.0, 11-man 亡囗囗大

Several entries are flagged as impossible since later nerfs: the pre-2009 Underworld records from before Dhuum, and the Deep low-man records since Necrotic Traversal was changed. The 2026 nerfs below almost certainly added to that list. No 2026 record table exists in public.

How you get in

Not through PUGs. The model is apprenticeship.

  • The two Teach Discords are the funnel. The DoA one links a “Preparing for 3-3 DoA teach runs” guide.
  • Illumination Theory [IT], the DoA guild founded in 2018, lists its recruitment as “Be a solid player,” “Play with us so we know you’re a good fit,” and “Provide gameplay for review.” Its Discord gives guest access only to people “known in game.”
  • Never Not Grinding [NNG], the German dungeon guild from 2021, requires Hard Mode unlocked everywhere “since speedruns are only run in HM” and “strongly recommends” every member use Toolbox.
  • The advice in 2011 was the same: “join a guild that runs UWSC regularly,” because guilds “are more likely to put time in helping you.”

GWToolbox++ is near-mandatory kit. Its pcon automation, bonds monitor, damage monitor, and DoA duping window are purpose-built for speed-clear roles. ArenaNet permitted it in PvE on 14 May 2024 while reserving the right to change its mind. There will never be a mobile version, so phone players are locked out of the meta by tooling before anything else.

The 2026 balance war

The game had no skill balance from February 2010 to February 2026. The speed-clear meta on the wiki, Terraway, SenTway, IT’s mesmer spikes, was stable for fifteen years. Then:

  • 5 February 2026. Isaiah Cartwright, ArenaNet’s design director from 2014 to 2019, “on his own initiative, volunteered to do a balance pass.” The team data-mined the least-used skills and buffed them. Shadow Form, Spirit Bond, Obsidian Flesh, and Protective Spirit were untouched.
  • 28 April. All wells can sacrifice 66% health to activate without a corpse. Heroes use this to their detriment.
  • 24 June. The nerfs. Wastrel’s Demise recharge 3 to 5. Wastrel’s Worry recharge 1 to 4 and AoE to 75%. Energy Surge 9 to 7 per energy. Mistrust and Cry of Frustration cut. Mirage Cloak recharge 10 to 15 and block chance 40 to 80% down to 30 to 60%. Mystic Regeneration 10 to 15 energy. That hit DoA mesmer spikes, FoW low-man Vow of Strength dervishes, and Underworld farming in one patch.
  • 25 June. A Change.org petition by Dayna Nightstalker, 140 signatures of a 200 goal, asks ArenaNet to confirm “if these changes are intentional to remove sc from the game” and proposes a “Speedclear mode” with the old mechanics. It also complains that recharge rounding changed and that the Eternal Blade, the Underworld’s prestige drop, was “added to a dungeon in a tutorial area.” I could not match those two to a dated patch note.
  • The counter-voices on the wiki feedback page: “these builds were overpowered and relied on bot consumables,” and “speed records should adapt to patches.” One poster claimed the mesmer nerfs were “widely requested” via a Reddit post by Cartwright; another replied that “a Reddit post with a few upvotes” does not reflect community opinion. I could not find the Reddit post.
  • 26 August. Partial walk-back. Wastrel’s recharges restored, Mirage Cloak reworked to 40% block plus 10% per enchantment. ArenaNet’s note names the scene directly: “For PvE casual and speedclear players, our high-level goal is driving interesting varieties of viable builds.”
  • 1 September. Mirage Cloak tuned again so earth investment is required.
  • 17 to 19 September. The FoW, DoA, and Terraway wiki pages are re-edited. They still run Shadow Form tanks and Mirage Cloak dervishes. The meta absorbed the rework rather than abandoning splits.

The visible 2026 drama is speed clearers against ArenaNet. I found no documented split between speed-clear groups, and no 2026 source that uses the word “elitist” about them.

Collectors

The collector market is defined by one word, pre-nerf, and one unit, the Armbrace of Truth.

What holds value

MaxBorken’s 2016 definition on Legacy, still the one in use: a pre-nerf item is one that “cannot drop any more,” because ArenaNet removed the ability to generate those stats, “mainly 2005/2006 around the release of Factions.” Requirement 7 and 8 max staves, axes, hammers, and bows. 8/16 shields such as Magmas and Eternal Shields. Gold shields that roll -2 while hexed rather than -3. Henge of Denravi items.

Marcus Ferret’s February 2026 price-check guide adds the modifiers: 13 to 15% damage mods are most valued, a clean unconditional 15% is “very rare,” and “while hexed” and “below 50%” mods sell for less. Skins that raise value regardless of stats: the Prophecies Double Bladed Sickle, Crystalline Sword, Dwarven Axe, Storm Bow, Eternal Shield, Bone Dragon Staff.

The unit of account

Prices are quoted in Armbraces because a character can only hold 100 platinum, and the trade window maxes out at seven stacks of 250 Armbraces plus 100 platinum. The problem is that the Armbrace has moved.

date one Armbrace
Jan 2022 110 ectos
Feb 2026 20 to 25 ectos, “100K Plat”

Armbrace-denominated prices from different years are not comparable. With that caveat, the classic-era anchors from Legacy price checks: a requirement 8 old-school Crystalline reportedly sold for 5,000 Armbraces in 2022, with only two or three believed to exist on active accounts. Eternal Blades 20 to 50. Panda undedicated “3000a++.” Kuunavang undedicated 10 to 19. I found no 2025 or 2026 sold price for any named rare item or minipet. The high-end market, per the February 2026 guide, is stagnant, and the author expects Reforged to help “a little” at most.

What Reforged did to it

  • April 2025, before Reforged. The 20th anniversary added about forty pre-order promotional weapons to loot tables as random-stat rare drops, and made twelve ultra-rare minis (Panda, Island Guardian, Kanaxai, Greased Lightning, and the rest) permanently obtainable from Merrise as untradable versions. Hall of Monuments completionists no longer need to buy them. The tradable originals stay scarce.
  • 1 to 8 April 2026. The Forsaken Tunnels pre-Searing dungeon shipped dropping gold, old-school, and triple-mod items it should not have. ArenaNet disabled classic loot from the pre dungeon chests on 8 April. A Legacy thread documents the pre-Searing market crashing in the week after: near-perfect inscribables down to about ten Black Dyes, the patched-out gold items traded back and forth, the poster calling it the second “botched” release after the Lucky Weekend drops.
  • 29 July 2026. New minis and uniques in the Underworld and Fissure end chests: the Four Horsemen of Dhuum, Wailing Lord, Forest Griffon, and chaos-damage greens Padraic and Little John. The new minis do not count for the Hall of Monuments, listed as a known issue.
  • 26 August 2026. The Purveyor, a cash-shop merchant, and Reforged Coins. Its consumables are not tradeable, so it competes with consumable sellers without supplying them.

Triple mods and the Reconnect dupes

  • Triple-mod items come from a Halloween 2010 loot-table bug in the Mausoleum. Pleikki’s registry on Legacy reached 45 items in October 2025 and added nine more in July 2026 from old forum scrolling. The community record is that ArenaNet called them bugged and slated for removal; that never happened, and no primary ArenaNet statement survives. The same bug recurred for a few hours on 1 April 2026. “WTB any TRIPLE MOD SHIELD” listings still run on Legacy.
  • Duping in the classic era came from the Reconnect feature briefly allowing two sessions on one account. Minis and Armbraces were the targets. The wiki’s note is that “many high-end miniatures were permanently lost when their accounts were banned.”

Who keeps the records

The curators are a dozen Legacy handles that recur from 2016 to 2026: MaxBorken for the definition, Pleikki for triple mods and Henge sightings, Red Fireball for stat ranges and drop research, Marcus Ferret for the 2026 guide, and Emma and bsoltan moderating the Xunlai Market boards. The scene’s internal debates are sharp. A 2020 to 2024 thread on whether customising a collectible “ruins” it, and whether bought collections count as museums, ran to accusations of “criminals” and “shameless.”

Niche accounts

Perma-pre

Permanent pre-Searing characters cluster at four levels. Level 1 as storage mules, since Xunlai is inaccessible in pre. Level 9 as farming alts that stop gaining XP from mobs. Level 19 for Northlands Charr farming while keeping the Fire Imp. Level 20 for Legendary Defender of Ascalon.

Reforged changed pre more than any other part of the game. Four-player parties from 18 December 2025. A 5% XP bonus in Reforged Mode. Piken Square as an outpost with a resurrection shrine near the Oakheart death-levelling spots. A stylist from February. The Forsaken Tunnels dungeon from April, whose kills count for XP above level 16. Shifuimam’s May 2026 write-up argues nobody had re-evaluated LDoA strategy since 2011 and that the title is now “achievable for more casual players,” with levels 16 to 17 “the most tedious stage.” The same author reports sixty Lunar Tokens in the first 48 hours of Canthan New Year 2026 from a perma-pre, which is the other reason people stay.

The Pre-Searing Official Discord, created February 2020, runs a trusted-trade-moderator system for pre-to-post trades, the escrow the game does not provide. Its companion fansite presearing.com was rebuilt by Meir as a tribute to the original.

The new covenants

  • Dhuum’s Covenant, 18 December 2025. A badge for characters that have never died. Die and you lose it permanently but keep the character. The community immediately read it as the successor to Legendary Survivor and asked, on the GW2 forums, for it to be retroactive for fifteen-year-old survivors. It is not.
  • Melandru’s Accord, 28 January 2026. Ironman: no trading, no account storage, no picking up other players’ drops, no mercenary heroes. Two days later ArenaNet excluded Accord characters from account-based titles and from counting them toward God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals, and added server checks on gold movement. It is a separate title ladder in practice.
  • The badge reversal. On 25 February ArenaNet said Reforged Mode would tag any title with progress made in it. On 27 May it dropped the plan because the tagging “was discouraging veterans from playing.” Dhuum’s Covenant and Melandru’s Accord keep their marks.

Cartography

I covered the mechanism in the oddities post. The community side: the Bird’s Eye Compass arrived 21 July 2026 as a beta drop. On 29 July piers and bridges stopped counting, which numma_cway called “a bad workaround to make BEC less overpowered.” On 26 August the title’s completeness calculation was retuned. On 30 September an infinite compass went on sale for $9.99. The talk pages run mixed-to-negative through 14 October, with Ruine Eternelle, who made the 2017 Borderless texture mod, reporting “Cleaner map but more work to do.”

Hall of Monuments and GWAMM

Steam accounts can link to Guild Wars 2 for the Hall of Monuments since 3 December 2025. GuildJen’s guide reports 45 points from scratch in two and a half months and estimates all 50 at “several months if not years.” A Steam thread on going for God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals got “Reforged is THE place to get it!” and good luck. Nobody told the poster not to bother.

Veterans and icons

The people who build the tools

GWToolbox++ is one lineage. HasKha created it. KAOS (GregLando113) wrote GWCA, the reverse-engineered API underneath it, and the gwlauncher multi-instance launcher. Ziox (reduf) wrote most of the chat features. Jon (3vcloud) is the current maintainer. Marc (henderkes) contributed features and code quality. The repository sits at about 1,100 stars under the gwdevhub organisation.

The same reverse-engineering skill set, and in some cases the same API, underlies the bot frameworks. Py4GW describes itself as a Python library “for automation, scripting, and in-game interactions” and is distributed on elitepvpers alongside farm scripts. This is why “tools” are a divisive word: one branch of the tree is the tolerated quality-of-life mod, the other is the thing everyone hates in Jade Quarry.

ArenaNet’s posture is cooperation rather than enforcement. The 14 May 2024 note from Clarke-Willson permits Toolbox in PvE because its developers agreed to disable it on PvP maps, and a December 2025 reiteration via the Steam forums promised the rule would go into the Code of Conduct. I could not confirm that it did.

Other builders: Jonathan Greve’s Guild Wars Map Browser. The Kamadan trade mirror, which sits on the gwtoolbox.com domain but names no maintainer. Xunlai Exchange, a newer Discord-based listing scraper. GWTradeArb and KamaMarimo, third-party tools that consume the mirror’s feed for arbitrage spreads and economy charts.

The people who keep the archives

  • Guild Wars Legacy. Iaerah (Kevin) founded it in May 2016 with Mr Crow, Cosyfiep, Max Borken, and Richey, organised through a Facebook group called Guild Wars: A New Hope, after Curse announced Guru’s closure. Smoke Nightvogue downloaded the roughly 100 GB static copy of Guru and Iaerah scraped it into a database. The site runs no ads because its AdSense account was banned. Iaerah pays for hosting and does not moderate; Cosyfiep and Bsoltan do. Legacy’s undated open letter to ArenaNet calls PvP “PvB arenas” and names Bill Freist as having been an unofficial community liaison. No reply is recorded.
  • Guild Wars Wiki. Two bureaucrats, Poke since February 2011 and Tanetris since January 2013. Six listed administrators. Bureaucrat elections ended in 2012. The bench has been static for thirteen years.
  • PvXwiki. Still the build repository. Meta builds skip vetting.

The ArenaNet side

  • Stephen Clarke-Willson. Moved the servers to AWS after the 2017 data-centre failure, ran the 2018 subreddit AMA with Bill Freist that drew 380 questions where “five or ten” were expected, wrote a September 2023 internal position paper proposing more effort on GW1, became Game Director in April 2024 at about 80% of his time, wrote the tools policy, and directs Reforged.
  • Bill Freist. The other half of Kotaku’s 2018 “two developers keeping Guild Wars 1 alive.” Massively OP reported his departure in an undated post. No source connects him to Reforged.
  • 2weeks. Brandon Dillon and Richard Foge, ex-ArenaNet, formed 2024, joined by Matthew Moore. ArenaNet credits them with the gameplay and UI work.
  • Isaiah Cartwright. The volunteer balance designer.
  • Gaile Gray. Community Relations Manager from 2000, Support Liaison from 2008, back to the community team in 2014, gone in February 2019 after eighteen years. Owns the only Frog miniature. The Frog is marked historical on the wiki and has made no Reforged-era appearance.

The PvP canon

The Last Pride [EvIL], from Korea, won the first Guild Wars World Championship in Taipei on 17 to 19 February 2006, beating War Machine [WM] for $50,000. War Machine won the Factions Championship that August over Idiot Savants [iQ]. Ex-EvIL formed The Return in September 2008. In January 2009 Rebel Rising [rawr] and Survival Rate [zero] deliberately drew an automated tournament match to advance and both lost their cape trims. The wiki’s tournament archive ends in 2014. I found no evidence of any of these guilds in Reforged, and no source on whether monthly automated tournaments still run. Heroes’ Ascent today is mostly bot teams.

Streamers

The creator ArenaNet put in front of the reveal was Laranity, a Guild Wars 2 Twitch partner who had run a community Prophecies playthrough. The GW1-native streamers, CoopsCollection, CrasonTHC, ElChapoDan, Alacor, average between 13 and 66 viewers. I found no sourced creator drama and no evidence of the WoodenPotatoes GW1 history series I was told to look for.

The bad side

The user-facing question was about “power merch abusers with many accounts.” Here is what the public record supports, and where it stops.

Power trading

Power trading is buy low in Kamadan, sell high. A 2010 Guru guide recommends 200K starting capital and warns “you can potentially lose as much money as you gain.” There is no trade tax, so any resale above cost is profit. The 100-platinum cap is why ectos, Armbraces, and Zaishen Keys are currencies, and the trade window’s 1,750-Armbrace ceiling is why big deals go through a middleman taking up to 5%.

The multi-account angle is about per-account caps:

  • Nicholas the Traveler gives five gifts per account per week.
  • Tolkano sells 25 Zaishen Keys per account per day.
  • A May 2025 Legacy thread has a seller claiming “max 100 zkeys/day because I have 4 accounts” in one to two hours, and charging gold to reveal the method. One reply warns that running more than two clients at once “may break the terms of service.” Nobody else objects.
  • “Many people have alt account/s to get double, triple and so on Nick gifts each week.” That is said as a tip, not a complaint.

ArenaNet has never published a GW1 multi-boxing rule. The record is a 2010 remark that MultiLaunch was “OK,” the 2024 rule that no add-on may be used in PvP, and a Guild Wars 2 policy that permits multi-boxing in PvE only if each account is “actively attended” and no macro drives more than one. The GW2 rule is not stated to apply to GW1. The $19.99 bundle lowered the cost of an extra account.

So the community does not treat merching or multi-accounting as abuse. What it treats as abuse is the next thing.

Where the accusations actually land

Returning players are the easy mark. “Returning players not aware of current prices have been sadly preyed upon,” Koogler wrote in September 2025. “What used to be 1k is now like 1e,” trademeimfamous in December. Over ten years with few new players, “the market for common stuff was just dead and people merched them.”

The specific accusation that someone is gaming the market shows up in two places. In a December 2025 Legacy thread on trade-window limits, one poster warned of “some of our local botters, some of whom have been quick to introduce themselves” bidding with Armbraces; another disputed labelling bidders as botters. And in the spring 2026 ecto thread below. In neither case does anyone name a person, and no ArenaNet action, wiki record, or press report names one either. I am not going to be the first.

Bots

  • 2005. ArenaNet closes over 100 bot accounts.
  • March 2008. “Banning over 5,000 bot accounts per week.” Gold sellers were buying accounts with stolen cards, so new accounts got a 24-hour no-trade window.
  • 26 May 2010. Dhuum appears in Heroes’ Ascent to scythe botters. 3,700 accounts and over a dozen guilds. James Phinney: “cheating in PvP is especially odious.”
  • 2009 to 2012. Gaile Gray’s Botwatch page collects reports of feather-farm bots, Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood bots, and gold-seller spam. Now “no longer supported.”
  • 2019 to 2020. Bans break the bots for about a week at a time. A fix circulates for sale. By June 2020 “a large number of A/W bots in the Asian and European marketplace districts.”
  • March 2024. Leeching disabled and resign limited to once per 120 minutes “due to excessive abuse of the system by bots.”
  • November 2024. A backend update breaks every existing bot binary. Jade Quarry “seems dead nowadays since bots gone” within three weeks. Players call it the most effective anti-bot event of the decade, by accident.
  • January 2026. Clarke-Willson says pre-launch work included “improving the logging system so we could see what players were actually doing in-game, fighting bots.” A bot vendor advertises “all bots updated for Guild Wars Reforged.”
  • 2026. Steam posters report HA bot teams, Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood bots, “plenty of bots in kamadan selling consumable stacks,” and “dozens of bots, some from their own alliance.”

No Reforged-era ban wave has been announced. Every enforcement-relevant change in the 2025 and 2026 patch logs is server-side: logging, the February “60/60” PvP-item exploit cleaned up by removing upgrades, gold-movement checks for Melandru’s Accord, gates closed on Forsaken Tunnels 3 “to prevent unintended chest farming.” Reforged shipped no anti-cheat. Toolbox still injects.

The ecto trader

The one market event everyone watched in 2026:

date ecto at the rare-material trader
2025 “less than 5k ea”
early 2026 “~5 platinum”
before Canthan New Year, Feb 2026 “around 10k”
29 Mar 2026 17k to 14k “in 15 minutes,” back to 16k “in 5”
5 Apr 2026 18k in the morning, 14k by sale
24 Apr 2026 14k, “back at 18,” rising during Double Luck Boardwalk
30 May 2026 “19 platin an hour ago!”

The oscillation ran “always on the same hours.” The Legacy consensus, including a staff post, is bots programmed to convert platinum to ectos at the trader when they hit the gold cap, so there are “more bots buying than there are people selling.” No price series exists to check this and ArenaNet has said nothing. Armbraces went the other way, “largely worthless and become more worthless each day” by December 2025, with money moving into pre-nerf items.

Real-money trading

ArenaNet’s RMT policy page, last edited February 2026, still says “ArenaNet bans thousands of accounts weekly, typically more than 5,000.” The number is from 2008. Seller asking prices in 2026, from listings I could only see through search excerpts:

item asking price
ecto about €0.012
500 ectos (eBay) about €7.95
Zaishen Key, bulk about $0.035
Armbrace €0.24 to $0.42
250 Armbraces from $8.60

A Steam poster’s summary: “20 euros on a third party site” buys weeks of farming. The replies were “bans come in waves every few months” and “Bots are bad, but your solution is worse.”

Two structural changes. Steam Reforged purchases have no CD key and a refund disables the key, so Reforged key resale as a market does not exist; what remains is the EULA-forbidden sale of pre-2025 accounts, with no enforcement documented. And the free mobile tier has no chat and no player trading, which removes the delivery channel from free accounts.

Legacy’s position, stated by bsoltan in 2021: “we don’t enforce what happens in-game, that’s up to ArenaNet,” and “No one can prove items are botted.” Promoting bots is banned; selling what they farmed is not. The thread concluded the site “simply CANNOT be purged of botting influence.”

Scams

The wiki’s scam page was still being edited in July 2026 and catalogues everything: the trade-window modification, Frozen Ectoplasm for Globs, 6 gold for 6 platinum, “partner pricing” where two scammers pose as buyer and seller, account-transfer offers, people impersonating staff. The community’s answers are public price checks with screenshots, “make the other party go first,” and named middlemen passed by word of mouth. There is no scammer list and no reputation system. I found no named Reforged-era scam case with a primary source.

New players

Who came

The Steam peak of 5,580 in the first week is the only hard number. A Taiwanese player who made an account on announcement day reported the newbie area “packed” on 3 December and 120 hours by mid-month. Polish press quoted a Redditor who “logged in and immediately got a message from a friend from 20 years ago.” ArenaNet says “many new players” are on Steam Deck but does not track platform share.

What they hit

  • Campaign order. The dominant Steam-forum question, and the advice conflicts: Prophecies for story, Nightfall for heroes, Factions as “the hard mode start.” ArenaNet moved the Start Mission button on 25 February 2026 “to address a common player progression problem in Prophecies,” which is the studio confirming the problem.
  • Party expectations. “Full party required just to kill a bunny rabbit?” and “No friends? No problem. You get 8 free ones in Cantha.”
  • Empty districts. Every guide, Polish and English, says switch to America or “you won’t see anyone.”
  • Mobile. Enemy targeting “tedious,” occasional crashes, no build save or load.

What ArenaNet did about it

  • 3 December 2025. Quest tracker, six UI sizes, HD skill icons, high-DPI, tutorials aware of input mode, stream-friendly account-name hiding, one purchase for three campaigns with eight slots and M.O.X.
  • 18 December. Four-player parties in pre-Searing. Reforged Mode alpha with rebalanced henchmen.
  • 28 January 2026. Early Reforged-mode skill costs roughly halved and capped at 500 gold.
  • 25 February. Start Mission button. Stylist in pre. Shrines to switch modes after creation.
  • 1 April. One-click identification and material-to-storage transfer. Devona as a hero.
  • 22 April. Single-word character names.
  • 27 May. A “Getting Started in Guild Wars” quest. Reforged Mode on by default for new characters.
  • 1 June. The official Discord, timed for mobile, “From Prophecies vets to fresh heroes.”
  • 26 August. A $14.99 Starter Bundle of two slots and two storage panes.

How they were received

Every dated piece of newcomer or returnee testimony I found says the same thing. “Really amazing community as well.” “Helpful, funny, chaotic, depends.” “Some of the people I met as an 11-year-old kid are still in my life today.” “Real Game, Good Developers, Good Community.” I found no Reforged-era gatekeeping quote, with the caveat that top-rated Steam reviews skew positive and Reddit was unreachable.

The one place the tone turns is money. The 26 August Purveyor’s Bell, $6.99 for one Reforged Coin a day redeemable for ten bundled consumable sets, opened a Steam thread titled “a cause for concern.” “A brand new player can now have every single buff active for 2.5hrs a day, every day.” “Create problem, sell solution,” on the nerfs preceding it. Against that: “Pay 4 Convenience isn’t really that big of a deal.”

Mobile players

This segment did not exist as a category a year ago. Now it is official.

  • 28 April 2026. Announced. Prophecies free with ads on loading screens, other campaigns $6.99 each, Eye of the North $9.99. “Mobile players will share the same game servers as PC or Steam Deck players.”
  • 19 May. Soft launch in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Philippines. Korea added 21 May. Minimum devices an iPhone SE 2020 or a Galaxy A50s.
  • 24 June. Global launch. Phones and tablets default to 60 fps. Steam accounts could not log in on mobile until 21 July.
  • The free tier has no chat, no player-to-player trading, no party invites (you can be invited), and no PvP. Ads removable for a one-time $6.99.
  • Reception. The US App Store sits at 4.1 stars from 532 ratings. “It’s literally the pc game on your phone, not watered down at all.” A reviewer who called it “fully free from start to finish” with “no pay-to-win content or gacha elements” also warned that anyone expecting Wuthering Waves graphics “will be disappointed.”

The thing that sets mobile players apart is tooling. GWToolbox++ will never run on the mobile build, which is compiled separately. That means no trade-chat feed, no pcon automation, no cartography widget, and no meta speed clears. Mobile players live in the game as ArenaNet shipped it, which is a different game from the one the veterans play.

Handhelds, cloud, and Mac

  • Steam Deck. Announced as Verified. GamingOnLinux reported on 4 December that the badge had been “quickly removed” and the game showed as Playable, with Valve’s first-round notes being small text, a missing “click” label, B not cancelling cutscenes, and bad standby recovery, the last tracked as a Proton issue. Verified was confirmed by late January 2026. Touch scrolling arrived 28 January and R3 camera centring 17 June. There are two community projects for installing Toolbox and gMod into the Proton prefix on Deck.
  • GeForce NOW. The Steam version was added in January 2026. NVIDIA forum users reported it broken from 1 April to at least 11 May.
  • Mac. There was never a native client, and the “dropped Mac client” story belongs to Guild Wars 2. The wiki reports Apple Silicon under Rosetta at one to three frames per second. A Steam poster’s May 2026 claim that it is on the Mac App Store is unverified; the App Store listing I read shows iPhone and iPad only.

Foreign players

The districts

The district menu is unchanged from the classic era. America: English. Europe: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian. Asia: Korean, Traditional Chinese, Japanese. International, historically the Heroes’ Ascent hub.

The territory history explains who is missing. Taiwan opened its own territory in February 2006 and shut it on 10 April 2008 “because of legal changes,” moving accounts to North America. The9’s mainland China version, on an isolated server, closed by 31 March 2008 with no migration described. Japan opened in 2006 and had travel restrictions lifted in 2008.

Two Reforged-era changes matter more than they sound. On 21 May 2026 datacenter choice was decoupled from UI language. On 24 June the client started auto-selecting the nearest datacenter. A French or Polish player can now sit in American District 1 with a localised UI, which concentrates the population further.

Localisation

Steam lists six languages with full audio (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean) and three interface-only (Japanese, Polish, Russian). Traditional Chinese is selectable in the client, incomplete, and absent from the store listing. There is no Brazilian Portuguese. The 2026 patch notes are honest about lag: “Spanish translation is delayed,” “Not all text has been localized yet,” “Several skills received updated text after our localization deadline.” The mobile App Store listing says English only.

Korea

On 20 November 2025 an NCSoft Korea representative said “Since Guild Wars was never serviced in Korea, Reforged will also not support the Korean language.” On 21 November ArenaNet said it supports every language it previously supported, and Korean commenters pointed out that the Steam page listed Korean and that the original game did ship in Korea. The most plausible reading is NCSoft talking about service and ArenaNet about client language. Korea joined the mobile soft launch on 21 May 2026.

Taiwan and the Chinese-language players

Gene Land localised the first three campaigns into Traditional Chinese; later expansions never were. PTT’s reaction to the announcement: “This company never translates into Chinese,” and “No Chinese, so passing.” A Bahamut poster in September 2026 confirmed the interface exists but “some story text is hard to understand.” The December 2025 Bahamut write-up advises prospective players to “consider their English ability” because Chinese-language resources are scarce. Old Taiwan-territory accounts may still work if the registered email is accessible.

Europe

  • French. The GuildWars France Discord, 2018, about 2,170 members, covers the whole franchise. A Steam “Francophones” thread from 20 November 2025 shows returnees organising evening groups by friend request, one back “after 16 years.”
  • German. A Guild Wars Deutsch Discord run by Zenial.net for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and GuildWiki.de, which tracks patches through 30 September 2026. The official German forum is GW2-only and inactive since 2022.
  • Polish. A Polish guide calls Guild Wars 1 “probably the first MMORPG released in Poland in Polish,” and the Polish press covered the launch more heavily than most English outlets. The guide still tells readers to switch to the American region.
  • Russian. A Steam thread from 2024 to 2025 could not agree on whether Russian text exists at all. One poster reported a ban after registering on a mail.ru address; a single unverified anecdote.

The stereotype

Guild Wars players stereotype the bot population constantly (“30-40% of what remains is bots,” “90% bots”) and the marketplace districts by language (“A/W bots in the Asian and European marketplace districts”). I found no source, classic or Reforged, that attributes bots or gold sellers to a nationality, and I have not written one.

What I could not confirm

  • r/GuildWars directly: no dated quotes, no growth timeline.
  • Any per-district or per-platform population count, including mobile downloads.
  • Any 2026 speed-clear record table.
  • Any 2025 or 2026 sold price for a named rare item or minipet.
  • Any Reforged-era ban numbers, or the Code of Conduct update promised twice.
  • Any named mercher or botter with a primary source.
  • Whether the client is now 64-bit, Bill Freist’s current involvement, the “GW Amp” French community I was told exists, and the Reddit post the mesmer nerfs were supposedly requested in.

Sources

ArenaNet and NCSoft:

Guild Wars Wiki:

Speed-clear community:

Guild Wars Legacy:

Steam discussions:

Press:

Other:

Not directly readable while researching and cited second-hand through the sources above: r/GuildWars, SteamDB, the GWSCR phpBB forum, PvXwiki, Forbes, most Massively OP articles, G2G, elitepvpers, and the RMT storefronts.