Guild Wars 2

cesmode.4257:

And Colin, you didn’t smile as much! What gives?!

It’s a very serious subject!

TriggerSad.2597:

@AndrewSX

You make it sound as though the whole company is working on the Living World content. Though from what Colin said in the video, only a portion of the team has been chosen to make this content, and even then, they’ve been split into smaller groups to work on each individual month separately. Meaning that the people that are handling the Bazaar this July will be different than the team handling the update in August which will be different from the team handling the update in September.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they’re handling other aspects of the game similarly.

Also true! And as noted, the four living world teams going forward will be working on a much wider array of content and more permanent, recurring, and world changing content with the additional time they’ll have now with four total teams to rotate. Chris and MikeZ talked to the press last week about all the details, make sure to check out the interviews that go up today to find out more!

GoldenTruth.2853:

This wasn’t the Late July video/post (though you may already know that).

Indeed, the Gw2 in the second half of 2013 blog post is coming later this month, we’re focusing specifically today on summarizing what living world teams will be building in the future based on the feedback we’ve received so far, as well as announcing releases every 2 weeks going forward.

(And to the person who asked, fear not! The next blog post talks about rewards like crazy.)

We’ll be continuing to permanently update our dungeons and rewards for dungeons this year and beyond, these updates will be part of living world releases in the future as well as we expand the scope of living world releases to include more permanent updates to the game.

Yeah for clarity, we’ll also be working on dungeons outside of the fractals. Sometimes content that makes sense will end up there as a way for us to update our fractals permanently, sometimes we’ll be working on other dungeon content permanently.

Healix.5819:

There are/were plans (announced back in January) to add additional rewards to achievements and rewards based on total points. Since recent achievements rewards items, maybe that’s as far as they’re going to take it now.

We’re still working on a system that rewards bonuses and rewards for achieving various thresholds of achievement points on your account. More news on this soon!

You’ll see holiday festivals return, but with updates each year to continue to expand the festival experience, provide new rewards, etc. You’ll also see some types of living world content, such as Super Adventure Box, some mini-games, and other types of content that make sense return at various points through-out the year as they are updated as well. And as mentioned earlier, the dungeons people enjoy from our living world release will be researched by the keepers of the Fractals of the Mist and used as way to continue to expand and build on our fractals permanently going forward.

We’ve built out a portfolio of content and experiences we can use and more easily expand on for years to come with our holidays and recurring content, leaving us a larger opportunity in the future to focus time on other projects around those events since we’re not building the festival from scratch. This means as holidays we’ve run in the past approach, you’re more likely to see larger living world projects like permanent updates to existing dungeons, world areas, etc.

We’ll go into more specifics about what we’ve learned from living world releases so far, and where we’re taking them in the future with a blog/video and press tour at the start of July. This should help answer any of the more specific questions about what to expect in the future in regards to the living world in Gw2.

Very high level, you can find our over-all plans for 2013 here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

We’ll put out an updated Gw2 in 2013 blog post in mid/late July that summarizes where we’re going in the second half of the year, and goes into greater details and specifics on systems we’ve talked high level about so far.

Any updates to the fractals will need to include additional update to the reward systems as well, agreed.

As for the jet pack, those specific rewards are intended as limited rewards you can only earn during that time, thus making them valuable. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who did earn jet packs for us to bring them back, and suddenly undercut their value entirely.

And yeah that F&F dungeon updated for size would make a good fractal wouldn’t it? =)

aspirine.6852:

But one solution would be to revert the changes that made orr so empty. And from there you can do the more exciting and rewarding stuff

It’s certainly one of the options we discussed, however it brings us right back to the initial problem we set out to solve, a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas. The original version of Orr events were painfully easy, they didn’t scale well, mobs evaporated into thin-air and you had to race to even get a hit in before they died to get credit for kills.

The ideal balance point we’d like to have is with the scaling and more exciting encounters we have now, so it’s actually fun and at least remotely challenging to play there, but also rewarding as well. The reward systems we want to roll out to support those areas are part of a larger reward revamp and aren’t done yet, but are on their way and tie more strongly into the comprehensive system we’re trying to develop, thus the swap.

In regards to regular mobs hitting for insane damage, we did find a bug about a month ago causing many of them to scale way out of proportion, it has since been fixed and normal bosses in Orr should be doing damage on par with other bosses in the game. If you find any that are still nutso, please give us a shout, the intent is they should be fun/challenging, not one-hit-wonders.

Hope that helps give more insight into what we’re trying to do here, these changes are directly tied to feedback we’ve received. You don’t have to agree with them, but it’s important we explain why we’re doing them so folks understand the end goal, which I don’t believe we’ve reached yet until the rewards are there as well.

And now off to do that work thing, thanks for the feedback folks, as always keep it coming we really appreciate it!

Based on responses I’m not sure some of you read my post past the first paragraph….I’m agreeing with you, thus the:

“The one thing that’s really missing is the rewards to help make playing in these locations more even exciting and rewarding than they are now.”

And no, we’re not putting in a new currency, we have plenty of those

We feel like our fractals dungeon is the perfect fit for this kind of “historical” experience, similar to the way the BMP worked in Gw1. Even better, it already exists and has explanations behind why these slices of time are available to discover and experience within.

In the future, you’ll see certain types of content that was part of larger story experiences be updated to work within the fractals dungeon and return there where it makes sense to do so. Of course, the specific rewards and achievements will not return since those are intended to be completed as the story unfolds, but the content itself will be used to expand out our fractals experience and serve as a place to continue to experience great (and strange) moments in history.

There are indeed!

We’ve had a lot of feedback from folks asking for more difficult places in the game that can be more rewarding to play in. Our intent with Orr (and Southsun) is to create areas that are more fun/difficult for groups to play through event chains, with events that scale better when larger groups of players show up than the rest of the game, rather than the old versions that fell apart when more than a group or so of players showed up.

Thus the continual updates this year to make the creatures in Orr have more varied skills, the swap over to the new event scaling system that creates veterans/champions as content scales up, and the updates to Southsun to have more playable content. The one thing that’s really missing is the rewards to help make playing in these locations more even exciting and rewarding than they are now.

We want champions to be more rewarding, so places like Orr/Southsun where events can scale up to create champions become one of the more fun and rewarding places in the game to play, since events there can be champion on demand generators to an extent. We’d also like to tie in additional unique rewards to the temple chains, to make those more worthwhile and differentiate them from the giant boss encounters (which we’ll also be upgrading to be more exciting) to give a reason to do each in a day. We’d also like to add more value and use to blue/green items, so things like killing vets feels more rewarding when those type of items drop when doing those events in Orr as well.

And of course, we’d like to remove culling from PvE as well so you can experience these events in all their glory when they do scale up.

We’ll go into specifics on all of this in an updated version of the Gw2 in 2013 blog post sometime in July focusing on our plan for the 2nd half of the year and how we plan to improve the core game experience. As a reminder, you can find the original detailing our high level plan here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

Vahkris.6847:

maddoctor.2738:

Could it be that this is the Scavenger hunt for the Precursor? Looking for all those caches around the game to forge your own precursor?

Yeah, if this is the scavenger hunt for the precursors…precursors are going to tank once it’s released. Unless there’s something extremely big missing, you can do those within a few hours or less (with mesmers it’d be incredibly fast). I’m going with future Living Story content instead.

It has nothing to do with precursors, sorry!

The reset didn’t take for some reason, we’re investigating and will push a reset fix ASAP.

Thanks very much for your patience!

I’m told in Spanish, the doll has been re-named to Polly, our LOC team as usual was one step ahead. Me encanta localization!

tigirius.9014:

“Globs of Ectoplasm can now be salvaged into Piles of Crystalline Dust. This change should help Globs of Ectoplasm maintain a strong value in the economy and lower the cost of Crystalline Dust.”

Thank you. Now if we could have a solution for lodestones that would be awesome!

Additional ways for other items like lodestones will arrive later this summer, there part of a much larger reward overhaul (outlined in very high level detail here) we’ll go into more low level detail when we update the status of this blog: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

The dust solution was a quicker low hanging fruit change outside of the larger reward system overhauls, so we figured we’d get it out quickly based on all of your feedback.

As always, thanks again for feedback folks!

JustTrogdor.7892:

72 hour suspension @Devs for inappropriate name. I wonder if they will post here or the account forum to say they were suspended unfairly?

Punishment is they have to eat at “Old Country Buffet” or “THE OCB” as it’s known here at Anet for an entire week.

We’ve passed this along to our LOC team just in case, thanks folks.

Tower Guard.5263:

Moa horse race lol. Do I get to be one?

Anyway… mini dragon pet?

The Moa race is a betting game taking inspiration from the 9-rings style betting mini-games from the original festivals in Gw1, but with a little more action involved for each round of bets. The bonus: this activity will remain in the game permanently in Lion’s Arch after the Dragon Bash festival ends.

You don’t get to be a Moa for this specific activity, though you never know what might pop up in future festivals! As one of the people who built roller beetle racing I’d love to see its spiritual successor in Gw2 someday, we might need to wait for beetles to pop up in game though

rootnode.9546:

And as for the dev code vs live code: they should test both. It’s of no use now if they test againkittenture code and not the current live code. It shouldn’t be that hard to boot a server with the currently running live code as a snapshot and then run test by test.

Sorry if it wasn’t clear, we do test both, which is part of what takes a while for stuff to get live. =)

But yeah, we do miss stuff sometimes, and we’re constantly working to update that pipeline to make it better, automation is certainly one part of that.

Behellagh.1468:

It’s just players have a different definition for “down the road” and “in the future”, just like “rare chance”. Causes a lot of misunderstandings. Also most players aren’t software developers, it can take months from idea to implementation that doesn’t break something like the economy, profession balance, etc.

True enough, we also try to avoid putting timelines on anything due to the volatility that comes with live development, and if we’re ever wrong folks tend to not respond terribly well to it.

One of the fun things about live MMO development: all the steps that things have to go through to make it live. Generally a feature needs to be done 2+ weeks before it can go live, so it can get locked down and separated from everything else in development to be tested in isolation with the live game to verify it doesn’t function different in a server filled with development code vs. what’s going to go live. Before this lock down, the feature needs to be done with core development about 1-2 weeks earlier to allow downstream teams like localization, editing, and audio to have time to complete their work after the content teams are complete so content isn’t changing out from under them. And if any VO is used in the feature, all the recorded text needs to be completed 4+ weeks earlier than that to allow all of our localization VO partners to get all the correct staff in studio to record all the VO to match the english recording after the first batch of VO is recorded.

Most of this year we’ve been having a release once every month, which means if a feature has a lot of issues during testing and we need to make a lot of updates and pukitten back, it could be multiple months until it gets into the next one due to all the lead time required before something ships in game. The amount of steps required to get something live is pretty staggering, I just covered some of the high level steps above but there are a lot more than this.

We’ve actually been re-working this pipeline a bit lately in the background to try and speed it up (thus 2 releases in a row with 2 weeks separating instead of 4) but it still makes it really hard for us to give exact dates. A little peak behind the curtain how development works, there are around 300 folks working at ArenaNet, but a lot of them have nothing to do with building the feature, and instead provide all the support required to get that feature live. It’s why very few live games do frequent updates to their products, but we’re trying to find innovative ways to buck that trend and update more frequently.

Thorquist.8126:

Down the road, we’ll also be adding a reward structure to total achievement points, and we’ll be looking at revamping portions of existing UI to help players understand all the different kinds of content they can play and the types of rewards available. Once we have that framework in place, we’ll be able to really expand on the content accessible through the achievements system and provide you with even more new and exciting ways to play the game.

This feature is still in development and will be added to the game, yes. No ETA since it hasn’t been signed off testing wise yet, but it’s absolutely still something you’ll be seeing this year. This is part of an over-all project to update reward systems across the game, you’ve seen some of the stuff already (daily/monthly overhaul), rewards for giant boss chests in the open world, etc. Some arrives next week release (rewards for WvW ranks) and the rest will arrive over the course of 2013.

As a reminder, what we’re working on high level strategy wise can be found here:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

We’ll update this blog post in a few months with our status so far and the plans for later in 2013. (edited to clarify we’ll update the blog)

To all the Karka in the place with style and grace.

Great question. I have no idea who Bastion is, but I’ll look into it, thanks for the heads up Maz!

Just for clarity, this quote isn’t from NCSoft PR, marketing, or ArenaNet.

It was written by the person who wrote the article, who was expressing their own opinion about the state of the game. We’re excited and humbled they feel that way, but that’s up for each of you (and the press) to decide on your own.

We’ve only once as a company made any reference to a statement about “expansions worth of content”, December of last year, in one interview and we both very quickly clarified what we meant by such, and also asked our marketing team to remove this from our future messaging since it means wildly different things to different people making it impossible to be true for everyone. (For example I expected the sandwichmancer profession in an expansion and didn’t get one in jan/feb/march, that’s BS ArenaNet!)

As a reminder, the stuff we are trying to work on can be summarized high-level here, and we’ll update this again later this year with our progress:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is there any sort of timeline on this? It was first stated over 6 months ago I believe. Is this something that is going to happen in the next few months? 6 more months? A year? 10 years? Obviously you can’t give us an exact date, but some sort of rough timeline would be nice.

We’ve learned we really can’t give timelines, since if we’re ever wrong a mob comes after us with torches and pitchforks I can say we started designing this, and realized the proper (not hacked in quick) solution needs to be a part of bigger systems that more clearly directs players as well as ties in comprehensive rewards for playing across our game world, which we’re currently working on right now.

Some small parts of that comprehensive plan for game reward systems are already rolling out this month with the updates to WvW rank rewards.

For more details of our high-level strategy, feel free to check out:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

kissofthehell.3720:

Is there time when the event will start or its going to repeat for the whole day of 28th?

There is no one time only content in the May releases, it’s all available for week(s) or in some cases, will be available permanently.

Einlanzer.1627:

Hi Colin,

As long as there’s a mixture, I think that’s the important thing. One of the potential issues with doing too much temporary content relative to permanent content is that over time players who quit will return and see that the game hasn’t changed that much, which will dissuade them from continuing to play.

I think it’s important for the longevity of the game that there’s a steady growth of permanent, fixed content to go along with ‘living world’ content.

We agree, a proper mix of everything is what we’d like to be doing as well. =)

sonicwhip.9052:

Just thought I’d ask.

#15chars.

As we’ve said before, the releases this month include content that will remain permanently in the game (not all will, but some), as will other Living World releases in the future. Some events and content from the past will also re-appear in the future, some will return for relevant holidays/festivities, and other for special events or even permanently added to new locations.

(Edited to add more details) #More than 15 characters.

Daecollo.9578:

This makes Roleplaying/Open World PvE Horrible, When will it be fixed?

We’re working on getting over-all game performance with large #‘s of players/mobs on screen running better first. Some improvements were included in the last release, a number of additional performance improvements will be included in the release next week. Once we’re up to performance that can handle the transition to include mobs in the more advanced culling system, we’ll pull the switch, hopefully not that far off but I can’t give an ETA since we’re still doing extensive testing on performance.

As a bonus, the perf fixes next week should also help any location with lots of players and very few mobs, hello WvW.

lordkrall.7241:

Is the combination cost for both items and infusions or just infusions?

Ascended items and infusions both will cost a less than normal amount of laurels, and a badge cost as well. (Ascended accessories will remain laurels + ecto, but with new WvW rank reward chests you’re going to be getting a lot more Ecto!)

Ascii.9726:

Millenium Old School have just had a major update to there score reporting site that now automatically tracks all scores across all threads live and also has an interactive map that updates every 15 seconds showing who owns what.

http://mos.millenium.org/na
http://mos.millenium.org/na/matchups/map/694

The site offers live score tracking, in-game wvw mapping, score breakdowns and analysis and history match-ups.

Why cant this be done on an official scale? Put an advert or two on the page and it would be a brilliant revenue source as it would get thousands of hits.

It’s funny you should ask this today….With our new API development soft launching today (see the new forum topic at the bottom of the forums) you’ll be able to do just that! Keep your eye out, I imagine a website that works this way will be popping up in the very near future =)

Judge.1923:

I just hope the wvw infusions work on the other ascended items we already farmed for

They use infusion slots from normal ascended gear, you’re good!

Also they will cost a combination of both laurels and badges (at a discounted laurel cost) but we’re also adding more WvW achievements to the achievement categories to make it easier for WvW players to earn their laurels doing nothing but WvW.

We’ll have a blog post going out before the release that walks you through every detail of how it works with examples. The goal is to get you more variety in match ups, while avoiding match ups against worlds way outside of your current tier so it’s not too crazy.

I posted this in another thread, but I’ll copy and paste here. Content like recurring holiday festivals are absolutely part of the long term living world strategy, though the story and some of the content may change each year a bit to provide variety. So the answer is really yes to both, it is living world content, and it could come back again in the future with new rewards.

What is the upcoming celebration and how does it play into everything? You’ll just have to wait and see, we have more Southsun coming first!

Can find the more detailed post on page 1 here →

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Official-explanation-for-temporary-content/first

We’ll look into it, minis should always be able to go into your collectibles storage.

Thanks for the heads up!

I think it didn’t make it into today’s release notes since the fix got in so last minute, but a bug causing some of the newer bosses to scale their damage out of reasonable bounds has been fixed and will be included in today’s patch.

These bosses will now use the same damage scaling system consistent with champions in the game that scale normally.

Southsun cove will feature a mixture of both temporary story lines and content, as well as permanent additions of playable content as a result of what happens there.

Edited to add: Some temporary content may also appear again in the future in other story lines, events, or even find permanent homes as the world continues to change.

We’re aware of this, and plan to address it absolutely.

Rerroll.9083:

Is the game out in korea?

It hasn’t released in Korea yet no. The only major territories we’ve released in so far are US and Europe. We do have a few folks in Korea playing, but they’re getting US/Euro versions of the game from vendors outside of Korea to play early.

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.