Yesterday, ArenaNet released a cool video for Shadow of the Mad King, the Halloween event heading our way on October 22nd. It’s worth watching for the baby costumed quaggans alone.

We also found out a little more about the event. Shadow of the Mad King will be a four-act event, with the first act starting on October 22nd, the second on October 26th, the third on October 28th and the final act on October 31st. We don’t know the details of what will change between each of the acts, but it’s safe to say it’s probably worth checking out each of them.

More information on the new event items being added to the Black Lion Trading Company was also revealed:

All kinds of tricks and treats are coming to the Gem Store this Halloween. Costumes that grant spooky skills, tonics that transform you into ghouls and ghosts, creepy crawly minis to follow you around. And don’t forget to pick up your free devil horns before they disappear!

The Black Lion Chest is getting a spooky upgrade for Halloween. Between October 23 and November 5 each Black Lion Chest you open has a chance to give you one of six exclusive Halloween-themed weapon skins!

Free devil horns? Those will look rather silly on my charr main– in other words, a must have!

ArenaNet also released a wallpaper of one of the awesome artwork designs for Shadow of the Mad King. To check out the wallpaper, video, and all the details, head on over to the event’s official page.

ArenaNet announced yesterday that select retail stores will now be selling Gem Cards for Guild Wars 2. Players can purchase Gem Cards and use them in-game to receive Gems without having to utilize a credit card. Here’s the official announcement:

“You can purchase gems in-game from the Black Lion Trading Company, but starting this week you can also purchase Guild Wars 2 gems in real life at select retailers. These cards, which make a great gift, contain a serial code that can be redeemed in Guild Wars 2 for gems.

If gem cards aren’t in stock at your favorite retailer yet, be sure to ask if and when they’ll be arriving.

For redemption instructions and additional information about gems, visit the Guild Wars 2 Support page.”

Update 10/17: ArenaNet has released a list of retailers where Gem Cards can be purchased.

That’s right– Guild Wars 2 players will be getting a Halloween event! Not only that, but our first major content update as well:

Halloween has a long history in Tyria, and in times past was always marked by the spirit of Mad King Thorn cavorting among the people unleashing his own brand of insanity. However, it’s been over 250 years since he was last seen, and for most people he is merely a figure of folklore. Despite this, rumors persist among the populace that something wicked this way comes.

Shadow of the Mad King is the first major game release for Guild Wars 2 and will go live on October 22. This new game update will include a number of new features for all of our players to enjoy, new content to explore and see, and a week-long Halloween event.

The Halloween event will begin October 22nd and end October 31st, bringing with it festive decorations, mini-games, dynamic events, and new goodies available at the Black Lion Trading Company.

The content update will also be bringing paid PvP tournaments to the game, which are a more competitive option for PvP teams. Paid tournaments offer players better prizes and cost a ticket to enter, which are available at the Gem Store and through winning regular tournaments. Tyria will also be seeing a bit of an upgrade, and new jumping puzzles, events, bosses, achievements, and mini-dungeons will spring up on multiple maps.

Check out all the details for Shadow of the Mad King, including some very cool artwork images, on ArenaNet’s official announcement page.

New WvW server rankingss as of Oct 5th. For North America, the top 3 servers do not surprise anyone, though they may change as HoD seems to be losing for the first time since the game’s launch.

Ever since the latest patch, there have been massive culling issues inside World vs. World. If you don’t know what that means, the picture should tell you. The engine has trouble rendering characters as they come within your viewable range. Props to Nija from FOHGuild.org for giving us this brilliant solution of how to fix your problems.

Jonathan Sharp, Content Designer at ArenaNet, shared some interesting PvP news in a developer blog published yesterday. Guild Wars 2 is going to have a much larger structured PvP scene, and in the near future players will not only be able to take part in normal (free) PvP tournaments as they can now, but also more competitive, paid tournaments that will offer a different set of rewards:

As the name implies, paid automated tournaments have an entry fee. You’ll need tickets to enter a paid tournament, which you can purchase in the gem store, find in reward chests from free tournaments, and receive when you rank up!

These tournaments reward ALL teams that play in them, and offer better rewards on average than free tournaments. Successful teams can earn excellent rewards from paid tournaments, but you’ve got to be good to finish in the top prize slots. We expect that more experienced PvP players will start to migrate to paid tournaments because the risk/reward is much higher than in the free automated tournaments.

There is also no matchmaking in the paid tournaments. You have to come in with a premade team, which means the teams will ALL be organized teams – you won’t have premade groups fighting pick-up groups as you would in free paid tournaments.

Players will most likely need Tournament Tickets to take part in these tournaments, which are already available in the Black Lion Trading Company for gems.

ArenaNet is also working on a custom arena system, where players can set up a private, password-protected area for friends and guildmates, and use it to arrange custom challenges. The team also has additional PvP features in store for Guild Wars 2 players, but some of those plans are tight under wraps for the moment. Read the full developer blog for all the details.

Jonathon Sharp brings us news about Structured PVP (sPVP) and what to expect. Here teams will come together and be able to set up tournaments and private custom arenas.

Structured Player vs. Player (sPvP) is a core feature in Guild Wars 2, and it’s quite massive. The features we want to add to sPvP, to use an analogy, are like an iceberg…It’s more than we’ve been able to say so far. And like all our other game types, we talk about sPvP features when they’re ready. We shipped the game with some key features, but a lot of features we wanted to show at release simply weren’t ready. So now we’d like to start talking about some coming features that, until now, have been beneath the surface of the ocean on our metaphorical iceberg.

First, let’s talk about free automated tournaments, the new paid automated tournaments, and the differences between them. After that we’ll talk about another new feature – custom arenas.

You can read the rest of the post over on the official website.

Arenanet has released a new post regarding Legendary Weapons. There are no new tips or hints on how to build your weapon, but it gives you a general idea of how they are hinted at in game. More importantly we get a short video showing off a few Legendaries in action.

How do you get started? Legendary Weapons are created in the Mystic Forge. We’ve kept the recipe a mystery so the community has a puzzle to figure out, but if you want some hints, many players have been posting their progress on forums. You’ll begin to see some ambitious players wielding Legendary Weapons in game very soon. If you’re more the figure-it-out-yourself type, you can finds hints as to how to craft your weapon in almost every area of Guild Wars 2—WvW, dungeons, dynamic events, crafting, and more—so keep your eyes peeled.

Keep reading to see the video.

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.

1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.

2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.

3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.

First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.

I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise.
We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.

• Players need more rewards for WvW.
• Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
• Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
• Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
• And so and and so forth.

We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…

TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.

OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!

Jon

In response to using portals to stack players and pop them into the middle of an army causing increased server load where models don’t load fast enough:

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Hey all we have some plans to fix some of this. It is currently being looked at so expect a fix in the next few weeks. Basically we like that Portal has this power, but it shouldn’t be able to bypass walls, etc.

As for the problems with players not appearing this is a more difficult engine problem to solve. While we would like to solve it there are definitely counters to this strategy, because anyone doing it has just clumped up their entire team for AoE nuking. Ultimately if they outnumber you by a lot there are much more effective ways for them to kill you.

Jon

More interesting, does this mean we’ll see a nerf to the Portal skill where Mesmers won’t be able to hide out in keeps and open portals to allow people to sneak in?