Originally Posted by
Hockeyhacker
As far as which stores you will be able to pre purchase a physical copy they have not stated which stores will be set up properly. As for gamestop, its highly likely they will intentionally balls up your order and count it as a pre order rather then pre purchase to bolster their pre order numbers and end up screwing you over on the pre purchase bonus. Heck I went into one the other day for shits and giggles and asked the clerk about the pre purchase and he didn't even know there is a difference between pre purchase and pre order and then tried telling me that they had exclusive pre order bonuses for the game to try to make me pre order... So unless Anet says Gamestop is one set up for pre purchase and you make sure they do it right I would try to avoid buying from them, places like Walmart/Target/Bestbuy/etc do not try to force pre orders from their employees and so are less likely to intentionally screw up your pre purchase to being an pre order instead, so if Anet says any of them will do it I would suggest them over Gamestop just to be safe.
Nothing against Gamestop (ok many things against them but not in this point, so anything against their corporation business model aside), but getting a pre purchase from a place that doesn't keep pre order data amongst their employees is probably a safer bet then one where they may just defaultly do pre order since that is what they do all day normally and pre purchase is very rare and so higher risk of even accidentally not getting beta access and 3 day early access just because its easy to accidentally do pre order instead of pre purchase when you do pre orders all day long.
Edit:
Yes you can and that is where I will get my copy, but he specifically asked for physical copy and not digital and their site is digital copies only. My guess is he will probably want to install it on his/her desktop, his/her laptop, and his/her (girl/boy)friends or wife/husbands laptop/desktop and does not want to have to download the full game 5x over and so buying a physical copy at least helps with initial download amounts even if there are day one patches.
Odds are it will not make a difference since the beta client will probably be patchable to the full version prior to release and so if you play any of the beta events you will not have much extra to download anyways, but then again some people really like having a box for certain things. So there are two perfectly viable reasons to get a physical copy.