Guild Wars 2 servers have been offline for hours in the aftermath of what appears to be problems related to a game patch that went live earlier today.

The patch that introduced the issues was launched earlier today at around 5PM BST. It introduced several new pieces of content to the game, including the addition of a Basket Brawl minigame and the reintroduction of the World versus World Desert Borderlands map. The patch also fixes several bugs.

Shortly after the release of the patch the game's developer, Arenanet, announced that it would bring down the game's servers after it had noticed issues with soulbound items, items that can only be used by a specific character created by the player.

According to a recent statement the new patch caused soulbound items to be linked to characters incorrectly. This caused items to be soulbound to the wrong characters, rendering the items effectively useless.

"After further investigation we've determined that there is damage to almost all character records that were played this morning, not just to those who transferred soulbound items to or from a bank. To repair the damage, we will have to roll back the state of the game and characters to prior to this morning’s release." the statement reads.

It is the first time in Guild Wars 2 history that the game gets a full roll back to one of its backups. According to ArenaNet founder Mike O'Brien the process of rolling back and validating data will take hours. During this time the Guild Wars 2 servers will remain offline.

Once rolled back everything about the game state, including trading post transactions, will be restored to how it was prior to game's most recent patch. Players who have either purchased the game or have purchased gems, will still get their purchase.

Update: The Guild Wars 2 servers are back online after roughly 10 hours of downtime.