Guild Wars 2 celebrates its first anniversary with graphs and charts

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A year ago this week, Guild Wars 2 launched in North America and Europe. To celebrate, ArenaNet has released a huge infographic with a ton of stats for your entertainment. Er, your infotainment, I mean.

One big highlight is that Guild Wars 2 has solidified its claim of being the fastest selling MMO in history, with 3.5 million copies sold in its first year. That rush of players caused no shortage of headaches for NCSoft, as noted by the accompanying blog post.

“Those first few months were a time we'll never forget,” ArenaNet president and Guild Wars 2 executive producer Mike Obrien writes. “The game sold so far beyond our expectations that we decided to stop selling it for a while to avoid overwhelming the servers. Even then, some aspects of the game were bursting at the seams, and we worked around the clock to address everything. Here's an example: for a while we had a regularly scheduled security meeting every night at midnight. It was all a hell of a lot of work, but it was worth it."

The graphic shows other notable numbers, like one billion trading post transactions made, 23 million caravans destroyed and 471 thousand players revived. Check out the full graphic at the Guild Wars 2 blog. Though it's a year old, our review from launch is also still worth a read.