Having missed last night’s brief stress test, I had to get into the 1 hour stress test announced for Thursday afternoon.

Right at 4:00pm Eastern time, I tried logging in, but there was a long wait with no problem indication other than the circular “loading” icon. No error message or anything, just… waiting. After a few minutes, it occurred to me to check the Guild Wars 2 Twitter feed: yep, they were delaying the start of the test for about 20 minutes. Well, I needed to get a drink from the kitchen anyway.

Actually, once I got into game, there wasn’t much to report: I had fun for an hour on my norn mesmer. No real customization in her character creation: just clicking right through the creation options and cinematics. I killed a trophy beast, helped kill Issormir, fought off the Sons of Svanir, put raven eggs back in nests, tangled with various other unfriendly wildlife in the area, and before I knew it time was up and I was logged out again.

I did notice one minor irritation: at first, chopping down trees or mining ore didn’t actually change the icon shown on the minimap. This meant I was sometimes going back to aspen trees or copper ore seams I’d already gathered from. Later on (maybe 20 minutes), the glitch was fixed. Score another point for ArenaNet’s diligence in addressing even minor issues.

An hour in Guild Wars 2 is like five minutes in the real world: you just barely get started and time is up. To repeat what I said in the last stress test posting… Saturday can’t come soon enough. I want more playing time!