Hi all,
This week we’re completing dev work and starting integration for the upcoming Spring Quarterly Update, which we’re preparing to launch in mid- to late April. It’s a busy week making sure everything comes together right and hits our quality bar.
I know that the discussion around legendary weapons is still fresh on everyone’s mind. But as we’re locking in the contents of the quarterly update, there are some specific things I should tell you about today.
The quarterly update will include changes to Fractals, and among those will be changes to the tiering structure. We’ll have to retire two of the current achievements, Casual Fractal Hero and Core Fractal Hero. While we’ll introduce new achievements to replace the ones we’re retiring, any progress made toward the old achievements will not count toward the new ones. If you’ve been working toward the old achievements, you have a few weeks or so left to wrap them up.
With the quarterly update we’ll also reduce scribing costs across-the-board. Here are some of the ways that will happen. We’ll reduce material costs on recipes: for example the Basic Ink Set will no longer require a Simple Ink Set, and each Sandpaper recipe will now require less Sand. Reducing the demand for basic materials will reduce their prices. We’ll add significant new supplies of Resonating Slivers, so that they no longer serve as a barrier to scribes who don’t have a guild supporting them. And we’ll increase drop rates of certain other components. These are going to be impactful changes, so we want to give you this advance notice, and encourage you to consider pausing here and waiting for the quarterly update before doing a lot of new scribing.
Two weeks ago we polled the WvW community about Desert versus Alpine borderlands. The majority of players asked us to bring Alpine back. We’ll do that. It actually takes quite a bit of time to dust off old content and bring it up to the current game state, so it won’t happen in time for the quarterly release. Instead we’ll launch the quarterly update with improvements to Desert, use that as an opportunity to get the community’s feedback on those changes, then we’ll swap to Alpine when it’s ready. Changing borderlands maps like this will disrupt matches in progress, but we think that making changes on live servers, where everyone can test, is worth the cost.
I wanted to give this early heads-up about these areas. You already know quite a bit more about the things we’re working on for the April Quarterly Update, but I’ll stop here for now. I think our jobs are to delight you with what we ship, not with big talk or big promises. So hang tight. Release day will be here soon enough.
Mo
