ZAM published an interview with Jon Peters today where they discussed general game play and the eSports side of things in regards to Guild Wars 2. Here are a few snippets we found interest, but make sure you read the full interview by following this link.

ZAM: Given Guild Wars’ renown as a competitive PvP-focused game, will there be any plans to extend that competitiveness to PvE encounters? Something like leaderboards for completing elite events and dungeons the fastest?

Jon: We did do some stuff like this in Guild Wars: Factions so it is something we do enjoy. However, there are no current plans for this.

ZAM: Speaking of competitive team-based PvP, eSports has been making a big push into the public sphere, with more players turning to streams to generate consistent revenue while playing in tournaments for the prestige and bigger cash prizes. Do you have any major plans to support eSports gaming in Guild Wars 2 that you can share?

Jon: Absolutely. We consider it to be one of the primary goals of Guild Wars 2 competitive PvP to make it into an eSport. We plan to have daily tournaments, monthly tourneys and a yearly world championship. I can’t give out tons of details on these yet, but I just wanted you guys to know that we plan to have these things and support them.

Today, Jon Peters, Game Designer for Arenanet, published a new dev blog titled, “Play Your Way – Jon Peters on Traits and Attributes“. This fantastic blog details all the stats in the game and most importantly the Trait System. The trait system in Guild Wars 2 is exactly what the talent system is in WOW, Rift or TOR.

Elementalist

• Fire Magic: Power and Expertise.
• Air Magic: Precision and Prowess.
• Earth Magic: Toughness and Malice.
• Water Magic: Vitality and Compassion.
• Arcane Power: Concentration and Intelligence.

Each class gets five trait lines that augment a certain segment of a class’s abilities. For example, the elementalist is broken down into, if you can guess, Elements (as seen above). Water has healing capabilities while Fire does more damage. Each trait line has 30 points, it consists of 3 minor traits and 3 major traits. These do all sorts of different things that augment your character. If you want to dive deep into the Warrior Discipline tree, check out the dev blog.

Speccing out your character can determine your play style from offense to defense or support.

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

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Just wanted to pop in and clarify a little bit:

There are:

Renown Hearts (by Anthony Ordon on KillTenRats)

http://www.killtenrats.com/2012/01/20/gw2-just-play/

Meta-Events: (See halfway down by Devon Carver)

http://www.arena.net/blog/beta-development-update

Dynamic Events, Personal Story, Dungeons, etc.

You know that stuff!

In the beta weekend, there were generally 2 or more large meta dynamic event chains in each of the maps available. These meta event chains are made up of usually in the ballpark of 5-20+ events chaining and branching in various different directions. They stand out because even if no events are currently running, you’ll see unique UI for them that tells you the state of the world as a result of the events that occurred in the area.

Meta events generally have the largest amount of world impact of any event chains, making large sweeping changes to huge chunks of a map in the world. Dynamic events have varying impact from small (new merchant who sells stuff) to massive (explosions!!) depending on the scope and important of the event.

You’ll find the early part of the game tends to be a bit easier to help guide people into the game and not overwhelm them at first. There are optional much harder areas available in those maps for folks looking for larger challenges, and group events even in the starter maps as well designed to be a larger challenge. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter more and more meta events, group events, and the difficulty ramps up. Along the way, you’ll encounter more events that have larger branches along their failure chains as well.

Also a bonus tip, after any dynamic event (or event chain) it’s always a good idea to follow the key NPC’s or investigate the area after the event has been completed. If you don’t run off, you’ll often times find they build new buildings, setup stores, build defenses, kick off new events (after some dialogue), repair broken things, build siege weapons, change the weather, have new spawns appear/change, and more as a result of dynamic events concluding.

The range of affect on each events varies on a case by case basis, if you get the rabbits out of the melon field the farmers daughter opens a store and sells watermelon and lucky rabbits feet. If you participate in the meta event chain to drive into centaur lands near Beetletun, you open up merchants who find centaur weapons and sell them, conquer centaur lands causing centaurs to stop spawning in the area, open up safe paths for caravans to travel to Beetletun and more!

It’s always good to look around after an event and see what happened, there is often more than on first glance you’d think.

Hope that helps a bit,

Colin

In a tweet today\ from the folks at Arenanet, we get a confirmation that the next beta event will be sometime in the end of March, just a month away.

Over the course of 48 hours, Arenanet has gathered over one million beta signups. Recently posted on their Facebook page, the developers linked a live dashboard to watch the numbers tick up (the dashboard won’t load right away, give it time). Check it out and watch the numbers move.

This goes to show the massive popularity with GW2.

Today, Mike Ferguson, a Systems Designer for Arenanet, did an AMA on Reddit and we’ve brought you the transcript. For the full Reddit thread, you can find it here.

Mike Ferguson:
Hey folks, please try to keep question as short and simple as possible, I want to answer as many questions as possible and the longer the questions are, the less I can answer. I can only type so fast

Mike Ferguson, a Systems Desginer for Guild Wars 2, published a developer’s blog with many community based question regarding WvW. There were a myriad of topics he discussed including siege engines, bonuses and more. The most interesting mechanic he discussed was Server Transfers:

Server Transfers
Some of our more astute fans asked about the complications involved with switching servers and how it would interact with world bonuses. Every account has a home server where your characters are created. You can only fight for your home world in WvW. You can visit other servers, and while you are visiting, you still get the world bonus from your home world instead of the bonus for the world you are visiting. If you switch your home server, you lose the bonus from your previous home world and are not eligible for the bonus for your new server at least until the beginning of the next battle for the Mists. We may extend this disqualification into the next match or possibly even longer to discourage people from switching servers right before a battle ends in order to get an awesome bonus. You will have to pay a fee to change your home server (price undetermined), and that will also discourage people from server hopping to chase world bonuses.

Also, if you want to ask Mike Ferguson any questions, he’s hosting an AMA in several hours (9am PST) on Reddit.

IGN put out a great article detailing some of those awesome skill combos we’ve been hearing about for a while. We’ve originally heard about creating a wall of fire with an Elementalist and having a Ranger shoot through it to create Fire arrows. Now we get a few more details thanks to IGN.

Profession: Mesmer, Ranger

“When a mesmer fires off Chaos Storm it grants random boons on allies and random conditions to any enemy within the effect area. You ranger ally inside the Chaos Storm can fire through the field, applying Confusion to each enemy he hits. Chaos!

Check out the other combos over at IGN.

Ten Ton Hammer gives us their first impressions of Guild Wars 2:

Some of the challenges we completed on the first day of the event were as simple as engaging an NPC in combat, but others were placed in hard to reach locations that required a fairly coordinated group to obtain. A number of these challenges will also give you collectable books that can be placed in your bank vault, and provide some additional lore based on the particular skill challenge you completed to obtain it. There are currently a total of 45 of these that can be placed in your vault, along with numerous other collectables you’ll earn through different aspects of gameplay.

Read the rest of the article as they discuss the dye system and world events.

Guild Wars 2 is redefining what is possible in online roleplaying games. We’re casting aside worn out old MMO conventions for a new kind of gaming experience where your character’s story actually matters and your actions really have an impact on the world. Bid farewell to grind and hollow, meaningless quests and enter Tyria, a land of beauty and danger filled with dynamic events that are constantly changing and evolving. With dynamic action-oriented combat, customized personal storylines, intense competitive PvP, and world vs. world battles, Guild Wars 2 has something for every kind of gamer.

PCGamer has published an article where their writers answer questions and discuss the good and bad things about their experience with GW2′s Beta weekend.

On World Events:

Josh: I was really surprised by how few of the events had branching points or consequences in them. From the content I’ve played at earlier events and ArenaNet’s focus on their dynamic events system, I expected the vast majority of events to change the world as I completed them. That wasn’t the case in the parts of Shiverpeak Mountains that I played through on my Norn character. A lot of quests have multiple stages (i.e., steal food from nearby tribe for questgiver and then defend them when raiding party attacks), but I only found two that actually had a real effect on the world–one of them being that centaur castle siege in the human starting zone that ArenaNet’s been showing off forever.

On the Event System vs. Quest Leveling:

Gavin: Absolutely. I leveled up by trying to explore and discover new things happening around Kryta. The map system does a fantastic job of showing you hints about where you can get things done. My first fifteen levels were spent moving from point to point on the map to figure out what adventure could be found at this marker or rising up to a skill point challenge at another. I also never felt punished for showing up and helping other would-be heroes already there. If I help kill anything, I get credit. Gone are the days of kill-stealing jack holes.

Make sure you read the full article.

Guild Wars 2’s event system scales dynamically based on how many players are in the area, but regardless of group size, encounters like this are immediately challenging. Even at level one, even in the prologue area, ArenaNet isn’t afraid to throw players into a situation where they need to pay attention, learn patterns, and use skills smartly. A massive creature like this should involve more than just hacking away at its torso for a minute or two. It should be a battle of attrition, and that’s what it felt like – albeit a very fun battle of attrition.

Check out what Gameinformer’s Phil Kollar had to say about his experience in last weekend’s beta preview.

Check out more beta footage, this time from one of GW2′s dungeons.

Hey, everyone, Lead Game Designer Eric Flannum here. As most of you know by now, it’s a very exciting time for all of us here at ArenaNet. We just finished a huge beta event weekend, and we’ve got beta events just around the corner. We have a lot of work to do to get the game ready, but we’re definitely up to the challenge and eager to show off the game to a larger audience. With that in mind, we’ve been adding all sorts of new things to the game, as well as revising and improving on as many aspects of the game as we think need it.

In this blog post, we’ve got Randy Knapp explaining improvements to the compass, Devon Carver discussing some of the additions we’ve made to our open-world content, and Jon Peters talking about changes and additions to our boons and conditions. But first, I’d like to talk about some changes to being downed and defeated.

Eric Flannum, Lead Developer for Guild Wars 2, has posted a new blog post discussing last week’s beta press event. Along with a large slew of updates that have been popping up across the internet, today’s Developer Blog post gives us a ton of insight into what is going on with the game’s development. They discuss Meta Events, Boons and Conditions (buffs and debuffs), and hidden areas. Make sure you read the whole blog post here.