Guild Wars 2

Shiren.9532:

Most servers can’t fill four maps, why do we need a fifth?

I’m excited about new terrain and possibly new objectives or gameplay, but populations are too sparse already, this will make that problem worse.

It’s a good question, and one we talked about a lot. Above all else, our main raises behind adding another map (which can overflow and create multiple copies of itself) include:

• On many more populated servers in NA and EU, there are queues, this would allow people to play the game they want at all times.

• We want to do things in the future, this map included, that will help get more people interested in WvW. We need to make sure we’re not just making them sit in a queue when we do that.

• The game is going to be launched in other parts of the world, and on launch in NA/EU we had queues for WvW on just about every world. In some of the largest gaming parts of the world say, China for example which we’re in beta for right now, we’re seeing massive responses from guilds that make NA/EU guilds look tiny. These guilds all want to play WvW on the same world together, this map will help facilitate a better launch in new regions, as well as the much larger guild alliances you find in the east.

Hope that helps a bit! We know for much smaller worlds this may seem like it’s no big deal, since you never deal with queues anyway, but the gameplay and experience should hopefully be fun (and different) such that it may attract new players to WvW. It also opens up opportunities for us to do other types of experiences in WvW across all worlds that may help bolster smaller worlds populations as well.

Swamurabi.7890:

Hope there’s an option for non queued servers to try out the new map. I don’t think that T1 should be the only opinion heard. Would be better if you randomly got assigned a color when your guild entered the map.

There is indeed, one copy of this map will always be available during any match up.

Hmmm..suspicious…

Great stuff Leeroy, really appreciate you taking the time to both spell out your suggestions and provide strong reasoning for why we should do them =)

Keep it comin!

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

I would like to know how balancing will occur moving forward. We have had to wait 3 months for a balance patch due to esports… yet the details that have been revealed show little indication of toning down condi/cc spam or the state of some classes in general.

I hope you have a better plan than to release a balance patch every 3 months in the future… why were small changes not made every second week in line with pve balence…

We’ll absolutely still keep doing smaller balance updates and patches when we have a major bug/balance thing we want to address.

Though I think we likely would want to sit on really huge balance updates to occur between major seasons competition wise for PvP/WvW along the lines of every 3 months or so in the future. We made this mistake once in Gw1 and did a huge balance update in the middle of one of our major competitions and set the entire PvP community into an uproar, and we promised we wouldn’t do that again.

That’s our thinking currently, though as we continue to grow PvP and establish our process for Gw2, it’s open to change based on player feedback and suggestions.

savov.3712:

Sorry Colin, but at this point, no matter how hard you guys try to delude us with such “empty” news, it’s just wont work anymore.
Basically, since one of the very first State of the Game episodes a whole year ago, we have heard Every. Single. One of your “coming soon” changes.

Nothing has changed. You are yet to make PvP more rewarding and fun. You are still looking into new game types. You are yet to support the competitive scene(or whatever has left of it). Though, one thing have changed – A lot less people are listening to your communication and a lot more just quit..

If you go back and read the January state of the game, and July state of the game threads, you’ll find most of what you said above actually isn’t true. We have delivered on the things in those threads we said we would do. It’s totally reasonable to say you’d like us to do more, but I don’t think it’s fair to say we’re saying we’re going to do X and haven’t delivered on any of it. We’ve only recently made any promises about actively working on building game types, and everything we’ve said we were going to do back in January, we have already released.

I just want to say I get the frustration with wanting to see more done, we absolutely would love to see PvP get everything immediately as well. We have however very specifically listed what we’re building, and so far have delivered on all of those things in the timelines listed. It may not be everything you’d like to see, and my hope is as we continue into next year you’ll see everything on your list get checked off, but when raising concerns let’s at least be on the same page with timelines. I can be fair and say we need to do more, I’d ask you be the same with respect to what we’ve said we’re going to do.

As a reminder:

In January, we said we would be doing custom arenas, leader boards, and spectator mode. We did all of those things.

In July, we said we’re going to do a tournament at PAX, have separate solo and team queues for PvP, add ways to get you progressing towards legendaries in PvP, and updating the reward systems for PvP. We’ve accomplished half of those goals already, and hope to have made some real progress towards rewards/legendaries before the end of the year, which still has 2 months to go. In working on rewards, we decided we wanted to do something that’s very work intensive and much cooler for PvP players, so not all of it will be done this year.

Also just wanted to add, keep the suggestions coming, we’re always listening for great ideas on way to improve rewards, and we’ve read all the threads you guys have put together so far!

hooma.9642:

the Problem is it was promised january to be released start of the second part of this year. and now u talk about basics at the end of the year or next january.

I think it’s totally reasonable to say you’d like to see progress faster, and no shocker so would we! We all play PvP all the time too, and want everything done as quickly as possible, folks are working very long hours to try and accomplish just that.

However, what’s not ok is saying stuff like we “promised in jan” we would have new rewards this year. In January, we said we would be doing custom arenas, leader boards, and spectator mode. We did all of those things.

In July, we said we’re going to do a tournament at PAX, have separate solo and team queues for PvP, add ways to get you progressing towards legendaries in PvP, and updating the reward systems for PvP. We’ve accomplished half of those goals already, and hope to have made some real progress towards rewards/legendaries before the end of the year, which still has 2 months to go. In working on rewards, we decided we wanted to do something that’s very work intensive and much cooler for PvP players, so not all of it will be done this year.

Anyway I just want to call this out that having expectations, and providing critical feedback is fantastic, it’s how we all grow and make a better game together. But if we’re going to take the time to try and communicate and, it’s only fair you take the time to properly represent what we’ve said when criticizing it.

apt.9184:

How hard is it to make rewards for pvp? Just add few exclusive skins we can buy with glory since thats good for nothing right now why do we have to wait a months for rewards when pve gets it every 2 weeks…. You are not going to have any pvp players left by then. Just saying…..

We want to totally revamp the way rewards and PvP interact with the entire game, what you’re suggesting is relatively easy, but in the long run not what we think fundamentally will solve the core issue with PvP. We’re working on comprehensive fixes to help bring PvP and the sense of more reward more in with the rest of the game, rather than apply band-aids on a system we don’t really like anyway.

As for the skins, absolutely that’s one of things we’re discussing.

You’ll see changes to rewards in general come in a number of different phases/steps to the PvP system. Our goal is to get the base core reward updates out by the end of this year, but it’s going to come right down to the wire for testing, engineering and localization so we can’t promise, that’s just our target.

We’ll go into greater detail on larger systems beyond the basics in January as part of the state of the game blog so you know what we’re building towards, we’re still early into testing and development to go into too many details.

Blackwyn.8127:

Colin, feel free to take a look at my thread with several ideas on how to improve rewards and more etc.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Problems-and-Solutions-1-0

I didn’t post it here cause it’s pretty long and felt it deserved its own thread.

Already read it, and there was some great stuff in there we’ve discussed as part of our brainstorms =)

We’re just starting work on a number of bigger systems/features for PvP, and as is our policy until they are far enough along that we won’t throw them out or change them massively we won’t talk about them quite yet. We’re working down a list of big stuff though, and there are more folks working on PvP related projects right now than ever.

And as a reminder, things we’ve already said we’re working on currently that are far enough along for us to discuss are:

- Fixing rewards and progression in PvP to make the game type much more rewarding.
- Investigating new game types for PvP.
- Improving the game and experience for the core base in general to make it more fun for more casual or casual-competitive gamers to play PvP.
- Improving and continuing to support and grow the competitive scene.

In January, things should hopefully be nailed down enough we should be able to go into much greater detail on the other systems and features we’re working on right now on top of the stuff listed above.

Thanks guys and gals, some great suggestions and ideas in here, keep them coming!

Above all else, I think the most common thread we see feedback wise, and the view we share as well towards things we need to resolve for PvP is the game is so heavily separated from PvE/WvW that the core systems don’t incentive you to feel motivated to be interested in them. This goes for both MTX and rewards, and I think given how strongly gold is tied to being able to buy gems in Gw2, the two go even more hand in hand.

We really want to get to the heart of resolving the issue of making PvP feel rewarding, and tying those rewards back into the core of the game itself rather than as a totally separate game where it feels like you’re simply losing rewards/progress you could have made playing elsewhere. In doing this, a lot of the current MTX items available suddenly become more interesting and exciting as well.

We don’t want to lose the core of PvP balance wise where you can just jump in and play and be on equal footing stat/build wise, but just about every other aspect of where PvP and the rest of the game diverges are the areas we’re discussing as we look to fix reward systems, and general systems in PvP.

Feel free to continue to brainstorm and suggest in this vein as well, since this is in the long run where we are headed.

Randulf.7614:

Personally I’d prefer to see a more regular update from the director rather than just every half year/quarterly. If you look at Colin’s last update, it’s out of date mostly as you have caught up and overtaken it. If it must be that we will get 2 week updates, a “what’s ahead” every month on these forums is more appropriate to the timescale you are working towards.

Time scale wise, any project we work on at minimum takes 3-4 months from starting production to getting live (and that’s the fast stuff) to include development, testing, design, art, recording the VO, getting it localized, getting the build setup, and the build distributed. This means often times the things we’re working on aren’t constantly changing, so we don’t have huge updates to give all the time, but I do think we can more frequently update the “state of the game” over all to better reflect the minimum development time-frame and that’s totally valid feedback.

I’ll try doing the once every 6 month Gw2 status updates every 3 months starting in 2014 (the next one will be in January) and see how that works going forward. If every 3 months is still not frequent enough we can all discuss that as a community at that time, though I’m not sure a big blog post saying we’re still working on the same stuff each month would be very useful or well received

You will absolutely see a way to create a precursor available in the future. As detailed in our plans for the second half of the year here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

As mentioned at the end of the blog, as always things are subject to change as test and prepare various systems. Most of the stuff covered in the blog you’ve already seen implemented, or steps towards being implemented, however the precursor building (and corresponding additional legendary items) is the one highest at risk to not make it this year.

It is still something we absolutely plan to do!

butch.8136:

So I shouldn’t expect a replay mode nor observer mode a la gw1 anytime soon. K, is automated tournaments like gw1 hard to implement?

Just so we can get some perspective…

Yes, that’s also very hard to implement, but will be a great addition to the game down the road!

Jumper.9482:

Please don’t tell me scaling down or removing AI HP bars/names from spectator (Probably the single-most important thing for improving the game’s viewability, http://ultraimg.com/images/9KU2V.gif ) is 1 year of development time?..

That one is perfect for this kind of thread, and something I think you’ll hopefully see soon here. It’s clear when watching games there are areas that need improvement to make visibility easier to allow people to watch and understand what’s going on, that’s a big one that jumps right out at you for sure.

fugazi.5139:

may be it is GW2 PvP +WvW.
It has to be.

Extra fun fact: the population of WvW who plays any given week regularly is larger than the entire population of all of Gw1 the game any given week for a large chunk of the games lifespan. Just want to put things in perspective, Gw1 was amazing, but there is a reason we made Gw2.

BrunoBRS.5178:

is there nothing that can be done to merge the EU and NA PvP? like, if not a merge (lag issues would be intense), then maybe work on allowing PvPers to guest on EU (or NA if they’re european) on off-peak hours, kinda like GW1 districts.

My understanding is this would require a total overhaul of the way the game systems save data and player interactions across worlds, plus put really large latency and trans-cont cable down-time issues into play. All of that being said, it may not be impossible, but it’s not going to happen any time soon given other priorities. It’d be super cool though even if it was just for PvP, I always loved that aspect of Gw1 when I saw we were up against a Korean team and I knew we were probably doomed.

fugazi.5139:

I don’t know why I find this so hard to believe considering Gw1’s PvP was so much more active. So much more fun. Just so much more in general. I may have busted a vein laughing at this statement. What all in Gw2 do these numbers include? WvW,HotJoins,tPvP and sPvP. That’s just insane. If it is so active why do you face the same 5 teams in a row in tPvP? If the excuse is the match up to the ladder that is a whole other subject considering the ladder is so majorly flawed.

We Gw1 super-fans tend to remember things with rose colored glasses, I know I do at times since it’s one of my fondest life memories over those years!

People tend to play in different places in Gw2, hot join, solo and team queue and custom arenas combined account for a much larger population than GvG/Team/Random/HA arena ever had most of the time. This doesn’t include WvW, which population wise blows the roof off on top of this.

One thing I think that factors into it sometimes is region based play, Gw1 had the entire world matched up simultaneously so even during off hours, you’d catch people from other parts of the world. With region separation in Gw2, you get people in your region so it’s much harder to gauge the total population.

It’s ok if you like Gw1 better, but to dismiss Gw2 entirely for that reason would be a mistake. (not saying you are, but some folks do!)

Super Riceman.8702:

3. Add a way to spectate tournament games but make it delayed by 5 min instead of watching it live.

Since it’s late and I’m here, want to quickly debunk this one. This is like a year+ work minimum for an entire team of engineers, and may not even be feasible in our game engine.

Just to give some perspective on why stuff that often seems so easy to do, often times isn’t being done.

In general great thread though folks, keep the suggestions rolling =)

Since you called me out by name you get called back yo! Just wanted to point out that quote from PAX about PvP was not from me, though reading the article it sure sounded that way so I can see where it would be confusing

I don’t think PvP is done by any means. We’ve had some great successes this year, the total PvP population has gone up tremendously as the year has progressed and is much larger than Gw1’s PvP ever was at it’s height, which is nice to see since the game hasn’t launched in half the world yet. Spectator mode and custom arenas have opened the door for some really exciting growth and moments in 2013 in particular. We still have a long ways to go to get to where we’re going, but considering where we stood when we launched with almost no features in PvP I think we’ve come a long ways. We are of course always continuing to watch and listen to feedback, things like the addition of solo queue are direct results of that.

As a reminder, we did a blog post back in July that summarizes our major focuses for Gw2 in the 2nd half of 2013, if you scroll down to the PvP section you can find what some of our major focuses are. We told you what we’re working on priority wise already, once we have specific details we’ll share those as well : https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

From that list, we’ve already completed some of those tasks since July. As we said back at the end of July, one of our major focuses is on that sense of reward and progression for the 2nd half of 2013. And since they are game-wide and not covered in the PvP section: of course our skills and balance team will be continuing to update and balance now that the tournament final is over.

Healix.5819:

If 80 people are required, is Tequatl’s chest (not the bonus one) lootable more than once a day? If not, not enough people will show up after prime time, especially on the lower pop servers.

It is yes, Taco will have normal every time rewards (rewards for each 25% health interval you’re able to take him down) as well as a bonus daily reward roll you can also get for defeating him.

zaxziakohl.5243:

I love the idea, and the mass events is great. However, I think if you are going to do this and require such large numbers for mass stuff, that you should have a notification thing (similar to the current one for Scarlet Briar) that tells us when these epic events are happening. I think participation would be much more likely. Just make it so we can turn it off and on, for those who aren’t interested.

We’re looking into this functionality yes! If we end up messaging multiple bosses long term we’ll likely make this an option you can turn on/off in the options panel so people not interested can ignore the spamalot.

Conncept.7638:

Will the system which allows the Scarlet Invasions to ‘echo’ in to overflow servers be applied to this and other current large-scale events?

During the release Tequatl will work this way yes, all overflows created within 10 mintues or so of Tequatl arriving will also inherent the event. We’re doing this manually right now while our engineering team works on the ability to have this handled automagically by the system, once that is completed we’d roll that concept out to other major encounters as the default behavior…forever. No ETA on this, but we’re working on it right now.

I’m willing to bet someday when people get really good at him, less than 80 people will be able to pull it off, that tends to be how anything works in an MMO. It’s balanced for 80 average players though though and scales up into the hundreds because we want to make epic, large scale encounters available to players out in the open world. We’ll have a mix of a lot of different types of encounters as we continue to update our boss and world encounters, but Tequatl specifically is intended to go for the epic scale.

The idea is we’re going to make him hard, and require a lot of players, he needs to have rewards that make that time worthwhile. In the next update the same philosophy will apply to the karka queen, who will get a bump to her rewards as well given her difficulty; her base line player number is much lower than 80.

Extra bonus info: The highest chance of having a rare chance ascended weapon for you is on Tequatl’s daily bonus chest if you defeat him: game on.

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

We have folks working constantly on finding ways to improve over-all game performance, in particular when a large number of players gather together. You’ll continue to see updates and upgrades in this area as the year continues to get performance as smooth as possible.

Pacifica.9576:

Can we take this statement to mean that no “expansion” content has been worked on? Since I assume you’d have to know the method before you developed it all

We’ve said this before, so it shouldn’t be a spoiler, but it’s clear that the message hasn’t totally gotten out there yet:

For the past year, we’ve had some larger projects going on in the background we haven’t discussed yet. Our major focus however has been on making the core Gw2 live game as solid as possible, details of what’s coming still to address that core game experience can be found here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/
For the projects cooking in the background, we’ll go into more detail on those in the future.

There will indeed! Many of the details can be found high level here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

We’ll find a way to restore for folks who dumped all their karma so far today too, more info from the community team soon when we get it all ironed out. Our goal is for everyone to get what they would have karma wise, hang tight.

Ace.1726:

Ember farming is exactly what GW2 needed, it promotes getting a group together to do events. What Arenanet need to do now is tweak it so that it’s more beneficial to complete the event.

Co-ordinating an event chain is way better than waypointing from champ to champ, if you removed the incentives for doing events like ember then all you are left with are waypoint farming.

I’d much rather do event chains than farming a champ rotation.

I just want to point out, we agree. The game is more fun and exciting when defeating things and working together with other players is rewarding. Champions have always been an issue in this area, and it’s why we addressed it, we’re continuing to pursue other areas in the game in upcoming releases as well.

That being said: the behavior we want is people join up together to play events, but they want to succeed those events and win them, we never want to be in a state where intentionally failing an event is more rewarding or better for players. We’re not going to take a giant hammer to champion loot, we love it and love seeing people joining together to do events. We do want to make succeeding events what the game is about. We also do want to make some events in the future even more challenging, and in return more rewarding for succeeding.

You will see changes over time to help directly encourage players to always want to try and succeed events, we don’t ever want to create conflict between players who want to progress an event chain, and those who want to fail it. It’s bad for the game and not what Gw2 is all about.

Champion rewards will be different based on their level. However, like other loot rewards if you’re a high level player in a lower level area there is a chance you’ll receive rewards based on your actual level rather than the area you are in each time they drop.

Yes, they will also drop them in WvW.

And legendary mobs will indeed also get champion loot rewards.

The gold bonus does not apply to fractals no, we will however continue to update both content and rewards in Fractals as the year progresses. For example: champion loot bags do indeed apply to Fractals of the Mists.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

All of your tokens in your inventory and bank will be automatically added to your wallet after the update goes live

Sorry I don’t have any screenshots of the wallet, you’ll just have to wait until next Tuesday.

Just to quickly extra clarify, you will need to log in with each of your characters for their items to be deposited into the wallet. It won’t auto grab everything from all of them.

We’ve said it a few times before, but I want to just re-iterate we’ve heard folks feedback on this and will be doing a much larger mix of permanent, recurring (content that can occur again in the future), and more world impacting releases as it relates to living world in the second half of the year. There will still absolutely be some amount of temporary, in particular story-driven moments to help drive the narrative forward. You’ll also see some of the content previously noted as “temporary” return permanently to the game in the 2nd half of the year.

Three additional notes ->

• As we recently announced, we’re up to four living world teams now, which means they will have a much longer development cycle later this year to build more polished content, and content that can be more impactful.

• The Living World teams are only a small chunk of the total developers at ArenaNet, we’ll be going into details on what many of those other teams will be doing in a blog later this month.

• We also have teams working on much longer term projects, which we will discuss when they are closer to arrival.

We’ve said all of this before, but I think it’s good to just put that message out more frequently so everyone understands where we’re going. Thanks very much for all the feedback folks, as always we continue to listen to your feedback and course correct as we try new things in the live MMO space.

Best wishes Palu, thanks so much for being part of our community and sharing your situation with all of us, we’re all behind you.

Just to clarify a bit, as Mike said there are numerous teams beyond our Living World teams, and some of them are working on much longer term projects which we’ll go into details on much further down the road.

It’s entirely possible some of the types of content which you might traditionally find in expansions would be released through an expansion in the future for Gw2, and it’s possible we’d try something different when it comes to integrating those type of releases.

We have no final plans one way or another about expansions at this time, and certainly haven’t ruled them out, it’s something we’ll discuss more in the future.

Edited to add: Our primary focus right now is on making the core Gw2 experience as strong and compelling as possible, we’ll release a blog post later this month detailing more specifically our plans for Gw2 in the second half of 2013.