Guild Wars 2

From the line about our beta characters lasting through bwe 1 and 2 it sounds like that’s all there will be. Was really hoping for a 3rd or even 4th before the expac launches. I can’t think of a reason to character wipe between 2 and 3 so I’m thinking that’s the case

It could be that two weekends will be enough. But there are a few ways to read it:

- They know they want two weekends. ANet being a responsively iterative developer, they can determine as of the second one whether they need more, and decide at that point whether to extend the alts yet again.

- They know there will be more than two weekends. But players being content locusts, they know some people will zip to the end of what’s available. A reset after that to get players back to testing the start of things, especially after ANet’s tweaked the start, would help the devs.

- Or, as you say, they still have a target date that is soon enough there isn’t room for more than two weekends of testing.

Anyway, I wouldn’t assume that only having two weekends mentioned means there won’t be more.

That’s the way I took it. BWE2 is just to polish the works based on BWE1. I don’t see much reason for more than that.

I figure they know they have so much stuff to look at right now that they know we need two weekends to get through it, thus why we get to keep progress for two weekends.

At the same time, after those two weekends its likely they’ll have a bunch of tweaks to make, and they’ll need to wipe those beta characters so we can start fresh again with the next iteration.

So I don’t necessarily see the mention of two consecutive BWEs to mean they’re the only two BWEs. Just that these two in particular are linked.
But that’s just me.

I took it to mean that they’ve got 2 beta weekends planned right now and they know they won’t be making major changes between the two so there’s no need for them to wipe everything and start over, but they don’t know what they’ll be doing after that. They might end up making major changes to one or more aspects which make previous progress irrelevant, like changing how masteries are trained. Or changing something like what order we unlock the abilities which means they want us to go back and try it again.

So they don’t want to ‘promise’ (read: say anything that could possibly be interpreted as) that our characters will be saved after the second beta because they simply don’t know yet.

It’s possible based on how the first 2 go we will be close enough to release to not need a third one

To BWE or not to BWE, yeah I think it’s more than enough for me I wanna start this closet size of a game already. Come on Anet get a move on and stop going to these shows. I have no interest in reading about the first anniversary of the announcement, and still BWE stuck in this temporal limbo. Stop telling us to BWE patient.

Or maybe they just want to mean that they KNOW they want your stuff to continue to BW2, but still need to get the metrics from BWE 1 and 2 to decide if they don’t want us to start from ACTUAL scratch (like making lvl 1 Revenants to see how it behaves at low lvls – i mean revenant is all fine and dandy with full skills, but how will it work when you have only your heal unlocked?), so they announced as far as they’ve planned.
Or simply we’re reading too far into something that could have been written as “Your Beta Slot progress will transition to future BWEs”, but they chose a different, more simple, wording.

there will only be 2 bwe like this but that doesnt mean other smaller scale betas will not happen.
and by small scale the ones you have to be invited to betas lol

Can’t really say that there will be only 2 BWEs. The following link shows the testing schedule leading up to the release of GW2. I participated in almost every event except for the closed betas.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Beta#Beta_weekend_events_.28BWEs.29

I doubt it will be more than 2 if the release only needed 3 then an expansion should really only need 2.

emendez.3705:

there will only be 2 bwe like this but that doesnt mean other smaller scale betas will not happen.
and by small scale the ones you have to be invited to betas lol

I doubt that they will do these kind of betas as they have said all betas from now on will need you to pre purchase HoT. Its an expansion not a whole new game like release more than 2 betas shouldn’t be needed.

Yeah it will probably just be two. Maybe some stress tests, but not many. Can’t see the need for them, the tech is proven already.

There is a problem i forsee in only having 2 BWE’s.

The 2nd BWE is to test stuff after the feedback from BWE1 but we don’t have access to other 5 elite specs until BWE2, so how do we test the feedback for those specs?

Would suck that 4 of the elite specs are nice and polished come launch time, and then the other 5 would still be a bit jumbled because they only went through 1 round of testing instead of two.

They could do a revenant style weekend test before Beta weekend 2 and we can test the remaining elite specs.

The problem I see is that if there’s only two BWE, then we’ll probably not play the remaining elite specs, like ranger, thief and revenant.

Again we can have an elite spec test weekend before the second beta depending on how much information we are getting at gamescom hopefully we will get hardcore content and then they suprise us with 3 elite spec reveals.

Wwefan.4982:

Again we can have an elite spec test weekend before the second beta depending on how much information we are getting at gamescom hopefully we will get hardcore content and then they suprise us with 3 elite spec reveals.

I wouldn’t expect THAT much from ArenaNet.