Guild Wars 2

Sorry, typos. Hordes* of monsters, not horses.

The Sovereign skins are very cool, some of my favorites so far. I’d describe them but I don’t think I would be able to do them justice. You’ll just have to log in and see.

It’s not allowed in WvW or sPvP.

Also to be clear, the recipe is exotic and tradeable, but the output of said recipe is not.

To clarify we had both QA and our internal core tests go through the content a whole bunch. The QA team focused on making sure that every profession could complete every boss (there are 12) with a reasonable level of skill and gear. The core testers mostly did what they do best and beat the pants off of the stuff we throw at them and tell us whether or not it was hard enough. I feel its worth mentioning that we would schedule tests for an hour or so and some of them would stay all day trying to beat it. But they were having fun, and that’s whats most important to me.

Queen’s Gauntlet is definitely the more challenging side of the Jubilee. That’s why it has its own achievement category and rewards. There’s even a gambit system wherein you can increase the difficulty for a better reward.

It’s not quite like anything we’ve ever done before. I think some of you are really going to have fun with it.

Before you assume that you won’t be fighting horses of monsters or face difficult challenges, I urge you to try the content when it releases. Just because its a festival doesn’t mean we’re telling the same story or using the same type of content.

In testing we ensured that every profession can complete the gauntlet.

Queen’s Guantlet is 1v1 challenge against new bosses, not other players.

Solo queue is for 5v5 competitive PVP.

The portal is a one-time use consumable that effectively allows you to use a skill that is similar to the mesmer’s portal. We recognize that it’s a very powerful item, so the recipe is quite rare and takes considerable resources to manufacture.

Initially I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of another festival, but our team took that as a challenge to implement a festival that plays much differently than the others. I think we accomplished that.

There is a new trophy called the Watchwork Sprocket and yes it is permanent.

The Crown Pavilion makes up the bulk of the content and it’s not a mini-game. It’s a public map roughly the size of Mad King Labyrinth.

You’re all correct, Mai isn’t dead. She might as well be though, after she answers to you-know-who.

Variety is good for the game, especially a balanced variety. If we make too much of any one type of content, eventually that type of content will become tiresome. The purpose of my reply wasn’t to naysay jumping puzzles or activities, but just to let you know that something different is coming. Personally, I’m a huge fan of epic open-world dynamic events and since I’ve had a hand or two in the upcoming releases, you should get ready.

As the late Captain Mai once said, watch the skies.

Can’t really spoil anything but August has no jumping puzzle and we definitely wanted to steer away from instanced mini-games.

The Royal Terrace will be a thing, but it’s not the thing you think it is.

Just a final quick note, I’m certainly not denying that at one point a Canthan district was planned and partially implemented. But the actual lore of the district that the game shipped doesn’t support it very well right now.

I think it’s great that you guys are fans of Cantha and I would personally like to see it in the game as well. But what you’ll be finding under that tent (very soon) is not Canthan. I’m just making assumptions here, but if we did return to Cantha I suspect it would be a really big deal, way too big to fit under the even largest of tents, or even in an existing city at all.

We will not make both fractals.

Nick, that picture was a screenshot taken prior to the release of the game.

To shed some light on my bias, our team brainstormed up a bunch of fractals for you guys to pick from and then we settled on the best two. I got pretty excited about Thaumanova, given what we intend for it to entail so I’m Kiel supporter all the way.

Abbadon will also be great if Evon wins though.

Your tin foil hats need tuning because I’m hoping for Kiel. But I have a vested interest because my team will probably be working on the fractals. I had nothing to do with this content though.

The Cutthroat Politics team tried to make it as even as possible.

I’m not saying that we can’t make improvements to the living world story telling. I’m saying that we should get as much storytelling into the game as possible, but I see no need to dismiss the lore blog posts just because they’re not in the game.

We have more than one type of employee at the company. No matter how much the content designers can add to the world, there’s always going to be resources dedicated to building supplemental content for the web site. It’s not a matter of preference; the people who write those lore pieces are taking the time to contribute extra material to the release. I think the only other option would be for them to not do at all.

If you look in your collection tab at the bank, you’ll notice that there’s a standard set of miniatures. The achievement is for collection those miniatures specifically. If we ever released an additional set of miniatures, we would probably have a different collection tab with it’s own achievement.

Although we could add an achievement for collecting special miniautures, some of them would be extremely difficult or impossible to come by.

Kryta will get their day.

That is all.

I doubt Evon’s interest in the past isn’t entirely…religious.

We have not started building either Fractal yet. We’ll be starting pretty much as soon as the vote is decided, with all three fractals (Aetherblade, Molten, and Reactor/Abbadon) releasing later this year.

I wonder what kinds of things would happen if you mixed the Mists with chaos energy…

pessimist.7294:

I think Divinity Reach defenses got a little problem: Do you remember the vista at the giant hole in one of the districts? At this part the wall got a huge gap there.

Yeah, someone should fix that someday.

Just to clarify, everyone is really glad that we could get it improved. It’s hard to say exactly how long something like this takes. The changes were brought on by what was pretty much universal recognition that item just wasn’t as appealing as it could be. From there I mocked up an improvement and then had a lot of feedback and support from our amazing artists to get it just right. Then it went through QA and I made a sacrifice to the noble and wise gods of live production to make sure we could get it into this build today (that was already planned to fix some other issues).

The change has been made. Now with 100% more smoothness.

We’ve got a solution for this coming that’s the best of both worlds. Stay tuned for details…

With a new build on June 11th. Many of the changes to Southsun Cove, including the upcoming meta event, will remain indefinitely.

Originally I was calling it the Karka Bowl, because I first conceived the game’s core concept to be about dodging rolling karka. In fact, I further thought that points would only be awarded by causing other players to meet their untimely demise by tossing the crab to them at the just right (wrong) moment. In that regard Crab Toss makes a lot of sense. But a few experiments and iterations later, it evolved into the keep-away type game it is today with a few core elements. But Crab Toss is still very appropriate, considering the game begins with the referee tossing the crab into the arena.

Major thanks goes out to Peter Fries and Scott McGough for coming up with the term Crab Toss as well the most excellent title in game: Crabgrabber, which I will wear forever.

You’re right, luck is a big part of this. It’s just meant to be a fun achievement though, in a game that’s only been around for a few hours.

Perhaps if it’s truly an issue we’ll change it to something else.

The big ones only target crab carriers as well. Here’s how to get Crabtacular:

1. Grab crab.
2. Run from other players.
3. Run towards big karka.
4. Dodge big karka roll.
5. Watch karka roll over everyone who was chasing you.
6. Laugh.

Once you’re downed you can’t be hit anything until a few seconds after you get back up or until you take an action (use a skill, pick up an item, etc).

Also, there’s currently a bug where the karka are targeting players who do not have the crab. This will be fixed very soon.

Only the person carrying the crab should be targeted. There’s currently an issue where if you ever held the crab you will forever be a target. This should be fixed soon and it will make the game a lot easier to play.

There will indeed be a new asura gate linking Lion’s Arch to the new resort on Southsun Cove.

I agree that it seems possible to travel to Southsun from other areas when you’re looking at the map, but we’ve never had support for travel to other zones by swimming across the sea. In the context of the game world, I believe there are some pretty nasty things out in the deep water that would make it difficult to swim that far.

The game draws inspiration from the crab guild challenge but plays a bit differently. There’s achievements, titles, and prizes for participants and winners.

Crab Toss will only be around for the duration of living story events at Southsun Cove. But don’t be too sad, as far as activities go, you might have a very exciting year ahead of you.

Remember that coordination itself is the challenge. You can approach this in a few different ways. Most of the guild content can be completed by a group of fewer people who are coordinating as well as tons of people who aren’t coordinating very much. Both groups are coordinating, though. It’s micro-management versus macro-management and I’m not sure that excluding either strategy is the right answer. Variety is seems best and so most of the guild content can be completed either way.

I do agree that challenges don’t scale as well as we’d like them to and that’s something that we can hopefully get addressed and we improve our dynamic scaling technology.

Though off-topic, fixes for Sottz are coming in the next release.

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

morrolan.9608:

In a month? And why wasn’t this picked up as an issue before release anyway? It was patently obvious as soon as I saw it happening for the first time after the change that sotzz was going to be almost impossible to find unless you were incredibly lucky.

This is actually just not true. Lots of guilds have been successfully taking this one down. It’s just a tad too difficult, so I’ll be adjusting it slightly.