Guild Wars 2

Is the Wintersday patch coming mid-December (aka 10 days before Christmas)? In the past, have we not had the content for closer to a month? Since lots of people are busy around the holidays, it would be nice having this kind of content available for longer than just two weeks.

Anyone else?

They axed the length of time Hallow’s End was available this year, too, so I see nothing to suggest they’ll extend the length of the Wintersday patch.

I would suspect it will be released on the 16th of December, two weeks after the next scheduled release on Dec. 2nd.

Wintersday usually lasts beyond (or well beyond) New Year’s Day, so I’m guessing it will again.

2012 Wintersday Dec. 14 – Jan. 3

2013 Wintersday Dec. 10 – Jan. 21

Wintersday can’t come soon enough. <3

Last year all the staff were on holiday over Christmas and New Year and as a result they ‘skipped’ one of the bi-weekly updates (what would have been the first one in January) and Wintersday kept running for most of January.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same again this year. It seemed to work well for players too since a lot of people have less time to play over the actual holiday period due to all the other things going on.

The sPvP test season runs from Dec 16th until Jan 13th. I assume that is the time for Wintersday too.

Guhracie.3419:

They axed the length of time Hallow’s End was available this year, too, so I see nothing to suggest they’ll extend the length of the Wintersday patch.

They axed the length of Halloween because it was followed by a LS chapter and they didnt want to stretch the players between those 2 events.

MY guess will be that the next chapter of LS will be the last one for this year with WIntersday following at the 16th. That will run at least 4 weeks until the LS resumes because most Anet employees will be on holidays as well during that time.

I hope Wintersday runs as long as it did last year, I had real fun with it It can start any time now as far as I’m concerned, my shopping is done and my lights are ready to go, I’m all ready to start christmassin’ lol

I could swear I read somewhere that Wintersday would be mixed with the last ep of the season and that it would be the same as last year. I suspect it will be at least 4 weeks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted until the end of January.

Alright you all have allayed (sp?) my fears. <3

There’s really no reason that Episode 8 and Wintersday cannot reside in the same release. Wintersday is just a regurgitation of previous content while Episode 8 is permanent content that is more or less independent from the open world. They don’t interfere with each other and would likely make a certain percentage of the player base happier as they’re always complaining about the lack of content within each release.

Let’s hope they don’t release the two at the same time, as that would kick off a certain kind of -storm, like these forums seldom see.

Remember SAB?..and the lack thereof?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Let’s hope they don’t release the two at the same time, as that would kick off a certain kind of -storm, like these forums seldom see.

Remember SAB?..and the lack thereof?

During Season 1 they often did festival and living story releases together. Or at least had them overlap, since updates were released every 2 weeks but each one ran for 4 weeks, meaning 2 were active at any given time. Last year for example Fractured was still running when Wintersday Started and The Nightmare is Over (the final part of the Tower of Nightmares story) was released at the same time.

As for SAB the explanation I heard is that it hasn’t come back because Anet felt that the theme didn’t fit with the rest of the Living World and it was taking developer resources away from content they wanted to focus on, not because players complained about having 2 kinds of content running at once.

If anything that’s even better for something like SAB which some people had no interest in (or even hated) because it means they have an alternative.

I think you misunderstood. It’s not that the forums would erupt because SAB was introduced during a LS episode, it would be that something not part of a LS episode was after saying SAB could not be.

I can just see that being used as another reason for bashing ArenaNet. But, whichever…maybe they will stagger them, or, at least, let us know in the next few weeks. Maybe a short-term roadmap will be our Wintersday present. Would be nice.