Yesterday, ArenaNet made a new post detailing how your geographic leanings will affect your initial Guild Wars 2 set-up. Of particular note are these points:

• the three regions identified by GW2 are Europe, North America, and "Other" (a complete list of sorted nations/territories/city-states can be found here)
• if you purchase the game directly from ArenaNet, you will automatically receive the correct version of the game for your region
• if you purchase the game elsewhere, when you input your serial code it must match the region you connect from
• people not in North America or Europe may use either version to register
• region-locking is no longer implemented, so once your copy of the game is registered, you may play from anywhere
• at launch, there will be a "grace period" during which switching your home world will be free
• when world populations settle, transfers will be limited to one per week and cost a varying amount of gems based on the population of the target world
• guesting will be introduced at some point, which will allow you to freely play on any world a friend inhabits, but disabling WvW

Because server changes will be free for a period following launch, my usual plug for playing with Lincoln Force (The Giant Bomb Community's Officially Official Community Guild for Guild Wars 2) on Yak's Bend has an addendum: try it out first-thing, and if the server doesn't work out for you for whatever reason (too low pop., too high pop., excessive lag, too much laughter, etc.) just pick another home world at no cost. You'll have more fun with a bunch of friendly, helpful people than without, we promise*!

*this promise is legally non-binding

@Dark_Lord_Spam: I'm assuming they'll put in guesting as soon as they lock in servers?

@No0b0rAmA said:

@Dark_Lord_Spam: I'm assuming they'll put in guesting as soon as they lock in servers?

I would hope so. Between being able to make sure groups are on the same overflow and making sure people can PvP together, one would think that guesting would not be difficult to add and that they should be almost done with it.

So the whole region locking fiasco was just a marketing ploy to force Europeans to buy from European retailers lol.

I'm glad they didn't actually implement it.

@UssjTrunks: Well not quite, because you do still need to activate your game in the region you buy it from. So nothing's changed there, but once activated you can play it from anywhere.