Today, Colin Johanson posted a long awaited developer blog that gives us insight into the next six months of development for Guild Wars 2. The main focus of the changes come in the forms of rewards and incentives for players to be playing different parts of the game. Colin breaks down the game into three spheres: sPVP, PVE and WvW. Each portion of the game should see some upgrades to the way players earn rewards. Whether it’s achievements that reward tokens to buy gear or WvW prestige ranks that award new skills and abilities, big things are coming for Guild Wars 2.
Keep reading to find out more.
For PVE, Colin mentions that they will be creating a whole new system of rewards from achievements. Achievements will be awarding a new type of currency that can be used to purchase new items.
The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievement you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like ascended gear and infusions.
This will be based on more interesting or more varied Daily Quest selections. To go with these changes, Areananet has promised to improve upon their existing dynamic event system in game. Currently, in game, many of the maps remain empty where dynamic events aren’t being set off due to lower populations or players concentrating only in certain parts of the map. Colin Johanson promises that they have some changes in store that should help add variety and intensity of the open world.
In the realm of sPVP we are going to see a changes in match making for all skill ranges.
For those more interested in competitive PvP, we’ll be adding the core features required to truly make Guild Wars 2 shine as a competitive game—things like being able to watch other competitors and see major ranked matches to learn how to play better, the ability to host your own custom arenas to setup your own rules and host your own team practices, and visible places for everyone to see rankings of the best teams/players in the world.
They also promise to offer tournaments and other ways to reward the highly skilled.
As you may already know, we love to focus on World vs. World here with Guildcenter, so we’re excited to see what kind of changes we will see in WvW. Colin Johanson is promising additional performance boosts when it comes to culling as well finally putting in Paid Transfers!
we’ll be adding paid server transfers, with time limitations and WvW restrictions, and guestingability, which allows players to visit friends on other servers in every part of the game except for WvW. To encourage players to stick with a single server for WvW and fight for the pride of that server, server changes will incur a fee and have time limitations.
This is fantastic news as it will start solidifying servers as real places. Guilds are still constantly moving, looking for the latest challenge so now they will finally have to find a home. This will be a good thing for the community; we just have to hope that servers won’t have a concentration of mega-alliances again like it was at release.
With the theme of rewards, Areanent will also be introducing WvW-only skills! No other information was given but this seems like a really interesting idea. We’ll have to give Evo X some credit for mentioning the idea on our latest episode of Guildcenter. That guy’s pretty slick. Here’s what Colin mentioned in his blog:
We’ll introduce a system of prestige and advancement specifically designed for WvW. This will give players a progression path where they earn new WvW-only abilities and bonuses, and with them gain prestige and visible titles/recognition. Also, we’ll add a new motivation to the WvW domain that goes beyond the overall weekly score to give more short term reasons to be winning in WvW as well. We’ll discuss all these features in more detail as we get closer to release!
We can’t wait to see what the prestige and advancement systems will be.
There are a lot of other items mentioned that we are excited about. We’ve been talking about leaderboards for the last few weeks and Mr. Johanson mentioned that they will be coming sometime in 2013. Guild missions and rewards are coming; as well as improvements and changes to boss encounters in fractals and dungeons. There is also mention of group finding tools as well.
We can’t wait to find out more detail about these systems so stay tuned for analysis and rumors of what is coming.
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