Cutting into their profits to make the game more stable...
Incredible.
"Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority. We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.
Effective immediately we have disabled sales via buy.guildwars2.com. To be clear, box and digital sales are still available via our retail partners. We are tracking our concurrency closely while expanding our infrastructure. We’ll re-enable first-party digital sales as soon as we feel that we can do so safely. ~RB2"
Edit: A lot of mixed opinions in this thread.
In my opinion, whatever they're doing it for, whether a stunt, or because they can't handle this many people, they are taking the option that starts to fix the problem in the best way, even though it WILL hurt their profits.
They know full well it'll make them look good (is there anything wrong with this?) and they know that they're flailing a bit (but they expected as much. New game and all.)
To you all hating/complaining:
I have no idea how a rational thinking person could not understand why them doing this would be a good thing.
Most of you have probably played WoW, raged about things, problems...
With some people, whatever a company do, they can't win.
Welcome to the internet, I guess.
If you don't play Guild Wars 2, or don't like it, don't bring your anti GW2 bias here. Simple.