Guild Wars 2: open beta announced!

 Today is the 24th of January 2012, the first day of  year of the Dragon according to Chinese calendar which coincidentally is the mascot of Guild Wars 2, because of this Areanet founder Mike O'Brien took the opportunity to reveal their until now "secret beta plan".

 According to O'Brien they plan to begin spreading beta invitation exclusively to the members of the press starting sometime next month. The invitation will be severely expanded over the course of the next couple of months(March and April) allowing players to finally have a taste of their favorite game.

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

 The launch day is still classified as "TBA"(To be Announced), but with this information some companies such as GameSpy think its is possible to speculate that Guild Wars 2 release date will happen somewhere around June.