How a server explosion gave the original Guild Wars a new lease on life

Kotaku has cooked up a neat feature about the two developers responsible for keeping the original Guild Wars ticking over a decade after it launched in 2005. 

The dedicated souls in question, Stephen Clarke-Willson and Bill Freist (who both work for work for Guild Wars creator AreaNet), were forced to take action to preserve the aging MMO when the game's supposedly "uninterruptible" power supply blew up and fried some fairly important electronics during a planned server move. 

Despite being a calamity at the time, Clarke-Wilson explains it was actually happy accident that proved to be the first tumbling domino in a huge chain of events that resulted in the original title getting a new lease on life.

"I was just getting ready to dig into moving one service at a time into AWS when the data center Uninterruptible Power Supply failed to live up to its name and blew up -- and fried a lot of electronics," he explained. 

“[After digging into the code during the clean-up] I realized I needed to do more than the data center move," he continued. "I needed to do some actual code maintenance on the game. Bill and I fixed that bug recently, and the ping is solid now."

Graphical updates followed, and thanks to improved anti-aliasing, draw distances, and texture filtering, the title is looking better than ever. The fairytale doesn't end there though, and there are even more changes on the horizon. To find out about those, be sure to check out the full story over on Kotaku.