Massively has an interesting interview with Regina Buenaobra, Guild Wars 2′s North American Community Team Lead. This is one article that is full of hard hitting questions that have been posed on forums and fan sites across the internet. For example, for those of you wondering why Reddit was a place where you could find official solutions to in-game bugs, hardware issues, and any general support questions…this interview has the answer and then some. Curious about the current offline status of the official Guild Wars 2 forums? Massively asked that as well. As a matter of fact, here is the reasoning straight from the team in charge of them:

Massively: ArenaNet has been using Reddit to communicate important information to the community and create a dialogue between players while the official forums are offline, but more than one of our commenters and writers have expressed distaste for the medium, and the Reddit crowd is particularly friendly to GW2. The truth is, the vast majority of players would never think to visit Reddit for an explanation on why they were banned from GW2 or what the ETA for the trading post is. So why does ArenaNet continue to disseminate information over Reddit instead of its own website or a long-established fan gathering spot like Guild Wars Guru?

Regina Buenaobra: Like all of our services, we want to make sure that our forums function up to the high standards we expect. Our highest priority right now is to ensure the game runs stably. We made the decision not to open forums for the time being so as not to create additional demand on our infrastructure and our programming team. In the interim, we’ve been using a combination of channels including Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and the game launcher itself to communicate with our fans as regularly as possible. We’ve also been mirroring these communications on our game status wiki page and directing people there for updates. What’s important is that we want to choose mediums that allow us to communicate back and forth with our fans, in places where we can reach a lot of people, hence the focus on channels that allow us to do that. Publishing updates on social networks reaches hundreds of thousands more people than third-party forums.

Wanting to know where to find support or information for your issues with Guild Wars 2 especially if you don’t use Twitter or Facebook? Here you go…

Does ArenaNet find the focus on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook an effective use of staff time as well as an effective way to convey information and support to players? What about people who eschew social media? Wouldn’t support tickets be a better way to help lost players?

It’s important to note that the use of Twitter, Reddit and Facebook are all in addition to the normal activities we do to engage with our fans and address concerns, including customer support tickets, the wiki, the website and the game launcher. People will take their concerns to social media no matter what the situation. Today’s consumer expects to be able to engage with companies on social networks, and our experience, notably during the beta weekend events, bears out that fact. Our customer support department continues to be the main method by which players can get individual account support. The community team uses social media to direct customers to get that individualized help. Our community and support teams have been working around the clock to stay in touch with our fans, and we will soon be able to add the forums to our list of ways to communicate with players.

For the rest of the article, you can read it at Massively.