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.

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

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Hey guys,

Just a quick update on where the whole scavenger hunt system stands since I know that’s a topic many of you have brought up recently. We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this is something we want to do in the future and we’re in the midst of designing how this would function, but no one is actively building this feature and you should not expect in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.
We are however working on expanding reward systems to make them more re-rewarding across all parts of the game, making the open world more rewarding, and adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.

Some of these additions will come as early as the January release, and will get covered in more detail in the next week or two as well release all the details about this release once testing has signed off it’s all ready to go in January. (we’ll also provide a high level summary of our goals with reward systems, etc. in our 2013 blog post, which should be out next week)

ArenaNet has quite a bit in store for Guild Wars 2 fans in 2013. The team has already began discussing their plans for updates we’ll be seeing early on in the year, including custom arenas, leaderboards, and 1 team vs. 1 team PvP matches for tournaments. On the PvE front, we also received an update from Colin Johanson who talked about the January and February game updates as well as some future plans to make fighting mobs out in the world a little more interesting. Here’s the first bit of news:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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There will be a blog post in around week or so that summarizes the high level plan for the first 6 months of 2013 for Gw2.

Then each of the individual releases for January, February, etc. will have their own release pages on our website, as well as blog posts describing specific important new features where appropriate.

More info coming in about a week once it’s all edited and localized!

Keep reading to see the other dev tracker announcements.

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

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Hey guys,
Just to help provide some clarity on this, we’ll be releasing within the next couple of weeks a high level summary of our big plans for the first half of 2013 to help provide more transparency into our plans with the game going forward. This will include providing more details about our goals for the game, information about the stories and features that you’ll see in the Jan/Feb/March releases.

To set expectations accordingly, the January release will be a relatively small release that sets the table for the stories and features we plan to roll out with the Feb/March releases and beyond. Also, there will be no new race, profession, or new region with these larger Feb/March releases. One of our major goals with these releases is making our existing world as strong as possible, ensuring there are reasons to go to all the locations in the world we’ve already built, and strengthening the core game we’ve provided. In saying this will be an expansions worth of stuff in these releases, we’re talking about the number of new features that will be rolled out across PvE, WvW, and PvP in early 2013, which usually you’d only find in an expansion for a traditional MMORPG.

More details and specifics to come in the next couple of weeks, but I hope that helps provide some more insight into what to expect at a very high level.

Ever since the first few days after Guild Wars 2′s launch, botting has been a problem in the game. Bots are randomly common in most MMORPGs, of course, but due to GW2′s automatic level adjustment system, simplified combat entry, the repetition of some dynamic events, and the game’s single-purchase requirement and its economy as a whole, botting is quite rampant and extremely obvious– and has been for a while. It’s hard to miss a flood of identical “Jfjfkajkjkj”-named Rangers and herd of bear pets while out exploring and gathering crafting mats.

GameSpy recently published a rather honest editorial about the botting and customer service issues one journalist sees in Guild Wars 2. It’s a solid read, and definitely got some attention on ArenaNet’s forums. Among that attention, Colin Johanson, Game Director of Guild Wars 2, took some time to issue an update on the company’s stance and plan of action regarding the botting issues. Keep reading to see that update.

We received an interesting dev tracker post by Colin Johanson on the official forums Sunday. It seems that as part of our exciting Shadow of the Mad King Halloween event that’s starting today, we’ll be getting to see an extra special one-day event occurring on October 28th. A fairly specific time of day was even given as to when players should be around for it. Here’s the post, which begins with an answer regarding whether or not normal Black Lion keys open the special event chests:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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You use normal keys to open the chests yes, there won’t be an additional chest type for Halloween, it’ll simply be that the existing black lion chests have new items that can be found in them during the 10 day Halloween festivities.

And also since I’m sure someone will ask this, yes there are loads of other Halloween rewards you can earn over the course of the festival that don’t come out of these chests!

And finally, make sure to be around on Sunday October 28th mid-day pacific time, you’re NOT going to want to miss it!

Sounds fun! Most GW1 veterans are speculating that the mini-event will most likely run throughout the day on a looped schedule of sorts as to allow players from all time zones to take part. Let’s hope this is the case.

Colin Johanson went on a frenzy over the weekend with a half dozen posts on the forums telling the community that they are focusing on changes to not only sPVP and new content, but class balance as well. Here are a few quotes to read, unfortunately there is no detail to the changes in the pipeline, but confirmation that they are there.

WvW Updates and Free Transfers:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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Just wanted to quickly add we’ve got people working on fixing issues with free server transfers as well, its proven far more complicated than we originally intended/expected to get done but is absolutely being built and is coming as soon as we can possibly get it in and bug-free.

We’ll also be working on a number of other WvW features we’ll talk more about in the coming months once they’re closer to being implemented!

FOV Fixes and Updates:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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We’re in the middle of working on additional fixes for the FOV, we’ll have an update on this very shortly. We’ve been doing some very promising tests internally, will role out more info soon once we’re sure everything is working!

Future Content:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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A number of the activities/mini-games are things we decided to table for a while in favor of focusing on features and areas we felt were more important for the game. That being said, if you like activities, make sure to stop in and visit during the big Halloween festivities running from Oct 22nd-Nov1st!

In the short-term we’re currently focused on adding a massive wealth of additional content and features for players to do in the game using the players core skill-bar, which you’ll start seeing in the Shadow of the Mad King update in October as well as our massive November release.

Long term we’ll absolutely be adding more activities as well, but we want to make sure we’ve got loads of stuff to do at level 80 in PvP, WvW, and PvE using your characters core skill-bar first and foremost, and we’re dedicating our focus in that area. Down the road, we’ll continue to expand on the scope of activities available in the game as well.

Class Balance:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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Yeah just to clarify, the update before Shadow of the Mad King will be a written blog post update summarizing a bunch of information about upcoming features and pvp additions.

We realize there are a number of key features required to both grow and expand the pvp community, and we’re both actively developing all of those, and ready to talk about some of them in more detail next week.

As for class balance and skills, other teams not directly working on the pvp features are working on that stuff and will give updates once they have a clear plan in place. What we don’t want to do is post and say, “We’re doing x and this is how it’s going to work!” and then come back say, “no we lied we are actually doing Y”. We have a strict policy of talking about features and changes once they are far enough along we feel comfortable they are going to work, so we’re actually always delivering on our promises.

Over this past weekend, Colin Johanson, Guild Wars 2′s Game Director had a few words to share on the philosophy behind PvP ranks and ArenaNet’s stance on the addition of competitive, instanced PvP such as the new paid tournaments coming to the game in Shadow of the Mad King, Guild Wars 2′s first major content update. He also hints on more PvP content in the future:

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

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Rank is intended to be a metric to show much how you’ve played of PvP, and how experienced you are over-all as a result. The various banners that come with rank is a bit of a prestige thing that says “I’ve played me a ton of PvP!”

The addition of our new paid tournaments, and the features that will follow after it will be how we answer that clear question of: “who is the best”. We think it’s important to have both. As we begin our new live releases, starting with Shadow of the Mad King (and the new pvp hero tab and paid tournaments) you’ll see pvp feature additions come very regularly going forward!

All the best and happy n00b stomping,

As a random note, I kind of like any game developer who’s comfortable saying a phrase like “n00b stomping”.

Players are reporting mixed feelings about Guild Wars 2′s dungeons so far. Some think they’re too difficultly tuned and not quite worth the rewards, others think they are just fine, and merely need an organized group and a bit of smart tactics to successfully clear. Yesterday, Colin Johanson, GW2′s Game Director, had a few things to say about the inherent difficulty of many of GW2′s dungeons and how dungeon difficulty in general was approached during the game’s alpha stages as well as in comparison to Guild Wars 1. It’s an interesting read!

Here’s a snippet:

I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.

We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

Keep reading for the rest of the quote!

Over the last two days, Guild Wars 2 Hub published a great two-part interview they had with Guild Wars 2′s Lead Content Designer, Colin Johanson. In it, he discusses some behind-the-scenes design details about the beta weekend events, renown events, the difficulty of the game, the impact of player feedback, the goals of the design team, and the atmosphere at the office. Good stuff!

Here’s one of the questions that was asked, with an answer that hits close to home for many MMO gamers:

Lewis B: Something that many people continued to say to me during the first Beta Weekend Event was that they couldn’t believe how polished the game was, that it could undoubtedly be launched tomorrow. Do you think this is a fair assertion? Where are you in terms of your overall timeline and assessment on the products level of “finish”?

Colin: First, let me say that we’ve seen that comment a lot, too, and it makes us, in particular our QA team, extremely proud of the hard work everyone has been doing. In an age where new-game releases have been ripe with bugs and unfinished products, one of our goals is to try to buck that trend and release a truly finished game that is as bug free as possible. We’re all gamers first at ArenaNet, and honestly we’re sick of paying for released games that aren’t ready to be released—it drives us nuts and we don’t want to do that to our fans. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to play our own game if it wasn’t ready for release either.

Make sure and check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the full interview!