We want people who can do more than mimic the work of previous artists. A good commercial artist masters his or her art as a tool for communication to the viewer. Whether your goal is to tell a story or evoke an emotion, a talented artist can achieve that, regardless of their individual style.

Also, having a diverse team keeps things interesting and fresh for the game. Guild Wars 2 is an ever evolving world, and by hiring people from all walks for life, we’ve established one of the strongest concept art team in the industry.

Most of the security advice we’ve all seen through the years has focused on how to choose a strong password. You might therefore think that the primary way hackers break into accounts is by preying on accounts with weak passwords, perhaps scanning every word in the dictionary looking for matches. That’s rarely the case.

The basic truth is this: hackers steal game accounts because they already know the account name and password. They know them because they stole them (via security breaches or spyware) from another game or site where the person used the same account name and password.

We have some ability at ArenaNet to watch hacking attempts live, and it tells a fascinating story. We watch as hackers use tens of thousands of different IP addresses to scan through millions of attempted account names and passwords, almost all of which are for accounts that don’t even exist in our database, looking for matches. They’re not guessing or brute-forcing passwords; they’re trying a very specific account name and password for each attempt. For example, account name “joe.user@example.com”, password “alligator101″. If they don’t get a match immediately, they may try a variant like “alligator100″ or “alligator102″, then they quickly move on to the next entry on their list. And it’s interesting to see that the passwords on these lists are mostly quite good passwords. For every one account on the hackers’ lists with a password like “twilight” (real example, ಠ_ಠ), there are dozens of accounts with good strong passwords. So the world at large clearly knows how to pick good passwords; the reason people are still getting hacked is because they use the same passwords on multiple sites.

Here’s how it works. When you first login, we ask you to validate your email address. After that, whenever you attempt to login from a new location, we send email asking you to approve or deny the login attempt.

So keep in mind, if you ever see an unexpected email asking you to validate a login attempt from a location where you’re not playing from, that means a hacker already knows your account name and password! The only thing that’s keeping him from logging in as you is the email authentication system! Change your password immediately.