Guild Wars 2: 5 things you should do BEFORE! the game releases.

Imagine this… You’re all anxious to play Guild Wars 2, you’ve pre-purchased the game and you fire-up the launcher. You’re all happy and tingly with anticipation. You can’t hardly wait. But then you discover you can’t log or your screen graphics are a mess or you’re stuck in the queue waiting to update your client with about 1 million other gamers. You can feel the nerd rage rising at the thought, can’t you?

Do yourself a favor and save your keyboard and mouse from any potential nerd-rage, directed violence. Here are five things you should be doing, now. Yes, now. Don’t put these off until five minutes before the NCSoft folks throw the login switch. If you do, make sure you have a spare keyboard and mouse, just in case.

1. Make sure you can log in.

No, of course you can’t log to the game servers, yet. But you can go to guildwars2.com and check your log in. It’s not quite the same thing as logging from the GW2 client, but you can be fairly sure if you can log to the GW2 site, your account and password will work with the client.

Problems? Can’t log in? You did set up your account, didn’t you? Good. If you still can’t log in, you can get some help here.

2. Download or update the client.

Don’t have the GW2 client, yet?! And when are you planning to download it? Now’s a good time. Log to your account at guildwars2.com, click Account and then click Download Client on the left side of the account screen.

Once you have the client, update it on Thursday, at the least. If you try to update it at midnight PDT on the 25th, you’ll probably be in a queue with about a million other procrastinators waiting for their client to update.

If you have the client, update it regularly – every day is good. At the least, update it on Thursday and some time on Friday well before the launch time. Why spend time waiting for a download when you could be playing?

3. Update your system drivers

Don’t you want to avoid as many in-game bugs and crashes as possible? Of course you do. Go update your video drivers and your chipset drivers and all the rest of those drivers. Do it now, in case anything goes wrong – as sadly sometimes happens with new drivers – and you need time to recover.

4. Change your automatic Windows updates to manual

The official start time for the  headstart is 12 midnight PDT. By default, Windows Update automatically installs updates at 3 am. Don’t even kid yourself that you won’t be up that late, you know you will be. If Microsoft decides it has an all-so-important update it just has to install, it might interrupt your gameplay with an unannounced reboot. So switch those updates to manual, at least for the next few days.

5. Tell your friends and family you’ll be gone for a while

Don’t make them worry about you when you don’t call them for a week or more. You’re just gaming and having fun.