[Update: See the comments. An Anonymous commentor says that in beta you could roll characters on multiple servers and that ArenaNet’s blog post is just poorly worded. If that’s the case, it invalidates this whole rant. I guess we’ll see on Friday.]

So the social networks are abuzz with the upcoming beta weekend for Guild Wars 2. I’m as excited as anyone…I’ve pre-ordered the game based on the level of excitement being projected by people who’ve had the chance to play at conventions or other non-NDA avenues. [Waves at Jazz]

But before we can have fun, we have to endure the rigors of server selection. Guild Wars 1 had no server selection and I have to confess that even though GW2 is a much different game, I was expecting it to follow the same route. I mean, if EVE, Star Trek Online and Champions Online can all run serverless, why not GW2?

Well, World vs World PVP for one reason. In order to have that, you kind of have to have worlds. So OK, at least there’s a reason for it.

BUT… Guild Wars 2 winds up being one of the worst MMOs I’ve played in terms of picking a world. Why? Because you can be on only 1 world. Once you pick a world, ALL your characters will be on that world. So if half your friends are on World A and half are on World B, it’s time to choose which of these groups are your BFFs and which are the wannabes. You’re going to have to ditch someone.

Now to be fair, you can change worlds once a week and at a cost of 1800 coins (not a clue what the real-world equivalent of that is… if it’s $1.80 then no biggie, if it’s $18.00 then we just found out where their revenue is coming from) but when you change worlds, ALL your characters move to this new world.

I’m really not a fan of this system..I have a bunch of different circles of gaming friends and most of them have little to no contact with each other. It breaks my heart that, unless I suddenly become a master diplomat and coerce them all to be on the same world, I’m going to have to pick which friends I play with, and shun the others.

[Edit: I guess I should mention the Guesting system where you can join a friend on their server as a guest. You can’t do WvW PVP that way, but at least you can play with friends. But why not just let me roll a character over there?]