Hey folks,
I wanted to take a moment and address this, it’s a totally fair question and something as a player (removing my GD hat) I’d wonder the same thing as well. As I covered in my blog post last month, a major focus of our living world releases in the second half of the year will be on focusing our living world releases on content that has a larger sense of persistence, and more permanent effect on the world.
You’ll start seeing this strategy come into effect with the release 2 weeks from now, and grow as the year continues. The story of these living releases will occur long enough for it to play out reasonably and then update as the story moves forward, while the content and playable experiences (except specific story beats) will persist forever as a result of that story occurring.
We still want to have some content that can happen each year, our holiday festivals, Super Adventure Box, Zephyr Sanctum, and the new Queens Gauntlet are all intended to be content that will regularly return. The goal of having these in our portfolio of event content that can occur again each year is they allow us the opportunity to easily build on something we’ve already completed as themes for some of our releases for year 2.
We wanted to get to the end of the first year of Gw2 with a decent amount of these events that can happen each year in our pocket, to allow our second year a lot more opportunities to lean on these while we focus on much larger projects we’ve been working on in the background. You will not see another new recurring style event in 2014 once our core portfolio of returning events have been completed with the Queens Gauntlet. You’ll already see the benefits of this as the return of Halloween, SAB, and Wintersday has given some of our teams time to focus on other bigger projects during that time.
As to the point of this specific release, there are a ton of permanent features and content. From the update of mini-games becoming permanent on a rotation, champion loot, solo queue PvP and leaderboards, dungeon reward changes, currency wallet, PvP leaver penalties (dishonorable), the FX culling system and more! However, we do recognize one of the components is returning content rather than constant, we need one more core event in our portfolio to fill out our ability to pull off the ambitious plans we have for next year. We too want to have an even larger playable content impact as stated in our goals for the second half of 2014, you’ll be see seeing that play out shortly.
Soon, you won’t need to ask “is this permanent or temporary?”, you’ll simply be able to look at story specific parts and know the story goes away when it’s done, and the playable core content remains and changes based on the outcomes of the story. As a player, I’d rather login and experience an event knowing the outcome and the results of the story will create content I can see and experience for years, than have it all go away 2 weeks later, and have no impact.
We’re also looking into options that would allow players to experience the story sequences that will go away as the story moves forward for those who missed them, but this is still a ways off as we look at various options.
As a reminder, this is where we’re headed and the goals we’ve given to our teams to accomplish, it just takes a few months until we fully get our projects on this track: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/
