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.

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.

Arenanet has published another dev blog, but this time in the form of Video! Keep reading to watch the videos, or you can find them on Anet’s dev blog page.

Earlier in the development of Guild Wars 2 we released our MMO Manifesto video, a high-level look at the philosophy behind the design of the game. As we approach the launch date, now is the perfect time to talk about the outcome of that design philosophy with a look at the core ideas that the game is built on: personal story, dynamic events, combat, and PvP.

The only video missing is for WvW! But Anet is promising that is coming soon.

In the wake of BWE3 we get a new Dev Blog telling us all about how Arenanet tells stories in their world.

The biggest story is the “Story of the World,” which is portrayed on the largest canvas. This is the tale of awakening of the Elder Dragons, and the threat that they pose to Tyria.

At low levels, near the starting areas, this is distant thunder; each race is absorbed within their own problems and threats. Some of these threats are related to the Elder Dragons, but you’re not fighting dragon minions every time you set out from Divinity’s Reach or Rata Sum. Challenges in these areas are more local. As you move into higher levels, the threat of the dragons becomes greater and greater, “…the central theme of the game: pulling people together to face more difficult challenges.”until at last, at the highest level, you reach Orr and the lair of Zhaitan, the Elder Undead Dragon.

Read more over at Arenanet’s blog page.

One more Dev Blog has been released, ramping up our excitement for this week’s BWE. This blog talks about the opening sequences and tells you a little bit about them.

Regarding Humnas:

We wanted to establish several key points in this cinematic: humans were once the predominant race, a people with many kingdoms spread all across Tyria, but now they are in decline; and despite these dark times, they still have faith, even if it feels more distant. Visually, we wanted to show the amazing vistas of Divinity’s Reach and the last great human nation of Kryta.

The second half of the cinematic is set by a player’s choice of social class—is your character a member of the gentry, a hardworking commoner, or do they hail from the streets? The moving imagery in each option is very different, and the writing is designed to convey the mood and give you a distinct feel for each background and setting.

Find out about the Norn and the Charr over at Arenanet.

We get some pretty good information with the latest dev blog for this weekend’s BWE. Here are a few tidbits that should help out your guild’s strategy launch.

To help account for the rapidly fluctuating populations at launch, we’ll initially use the 24-hour match format until world populations settle down a bit and we are able to get some data that will help avoid having two-week-long extreme mismatches. Once most worlds are reliably matching up against worlds of similar strength, we will switch over to playing the two-week-duration match cycles.

What this change does it hyper-inflate the initial competitiveness of launch. Established guilds were most likely aiming to control maps from day 1 and over the course of the first two weeks, stake a claim for world dominance. Initially this gave them some breathing room. Now with this change, it appears worlds will be reset and you will have to repeatedly claim W3 territory every day.

This should provide for some amazingly competitive battles and PVP rushes as guilds attempt to claim influence every day until things settle down.

The second piece of news is:

As you’ll see, there will be fewer worlds available initially than we had during BWE2. Why do we have fewer worlds for a much larger beta event? There are a few different reasons for this, ranging from being able to have a larger player limit on all worlds, to a shift in focus for how we utilize our server power.

Larger server populations! This should definitely help head start angst about getting locked out of the server of your choice. We found that many guilds were focused on a few different servers. Hopefully now players won’t be stuck on another server not being able to play with friends and waiting on server transfers to open up.

You can read the rest of the dev blog on Arenanet’s official website.

If you’re getting ready for this weekend’s BWE then you’ll want to read this latest dev blog and find out what is new.

Introducing the first minigame activity playable in a beta weekend—the wildly popular, incredibly macho norn pastime known as Keg Brawl!

Activities like Keg Brawl are fun minigames that are available in many Tyrian cities. In the great norn settlement of Hoelbrak, players can speak to the Brewer NPC in the northwest corner to begin the game.

In Keg Brawl, two teams attempt to score points by toting a full keg of ale across an icy lake and turning it in to the Ale Collector that belongs to their team. Participants are free to tackle, pummel, kick, and otherwise rough up competing players in order to seize control of the keg.
Keg Brawl—you’ll never look at a keg of ale the same way again!

There is much more, including Vistas! Make sure you read the whole blog.

Today brings another Dev Blog from Ben Miller, a Game Designer for Arenanet. In this blog Ben goes over almost every aspect of designing a game. He talks about MMO combat, UIs a sense of character development and much much more and provides a really great insight in the mind of a game designer.

Some developers might wish there was a secret recipe book for designing an online world—some big ol’ Betty Crocker-style book with chapters like “Combat System” and “Interactive Story Telling,” containing recipes for “Melee Weapons” and “Compelling Main Characters.” And they’d wish all you had to do was add in the particulars specified and work on each bit for the required amount of time.

The truth is that designing an online world is a lot like the real world. It’s messy business. It’s organic. It’s chaotic. The mental space in which you are creating is different from moment to moment with assumptions and extrapolations piling into a confusing tangle that only your gut has time to sort out. It’s like a turbulent ocean storm of ideas, processes, people, and collaboration.

Source: The Golden Rules of Guild Wars 2

A new developer’s blog was published today that talked about how ArenaNet measures success. In a game that will have no subscription numbers to go by, how will Anet measure their success?

When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc.

But what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?

How do you measure fun? Well, get the answer from Colin Johanson and read the full dev blog over on the official website.

A new developer blog has been posted detailing some of the changes to WvW by Mike Ferguson. Along with some updates to squads and seige work, there is a WvW scoreboard from last BWE1. How did your server fare?

On Squads:

The commander system is another area where we’ve spent some significant time. We’ve made it easier to join squads, as you can now right-click on someone’s name in chat and choose to join their squad. And squad chat now works both ways, allowing members to talk to their commander. In another improvement, commanders can now check the followers tab in their contacts panel to see a list of people who are in their squad.

Check out the rest over at Arenanet’s website.

This weekend is fast approaching and Arenanet is now allowing people to do some free World (server) transfers so you can get and play with friends that might be joining the BWEs for the first time.

If you played in our first Beta Weekend Event, you will already have an existing home world. We’ll have a lot more players participating in this second beta, so you may want to change your home world so you can play together with your friends. Good news, everyone! World transfers will be free of charge on June 8 from Noon PDT (GMT -7) until 6PM PDT (GMT -7) on June 9. After this point, a world transfer will cost 1800 gems with a limit of one transfer every 7 days.

What if you need a server transfer after the free grace period expires?
Every beta player will get 500 free gems automatically, and you can get 2000 free gems by entering a valid credit card in the Gem Store. You will not be charged, but your credit card company might place a $1 hold charge on your account. Don’t worry; it’s not an actual charge!

Not only will you be able to transfer, but you get to help Arenanet test out their RMT/Cashshop system. If you wish to read the full blog and get a list of all available servers, follow this link to Arenanet’s homepage.

This weekend is the first time we get to see the iteration process of Arenanet and their patching methods. Now we get to see if they took our feedback or not. Today, in a new developer blog going over some of the bigger changes GW2 has gone through since we last got to see the game:

>
• Keep Your Characters!
• Enter the Catacombs (Explorable Mode)
• Visit Lovely Gendarran Fields
• Unlock the Mysteries of the Mystic Forge
• Expanded World vs. World
• New Automated Player vs. Player Tournaments and More
• Combat— “A Sense of Hitting”
• Improved Overflow Servers
• Improved Chat
• New Key-Binding Feature
• UI Improvements
• Tiers for Skills
• The Gem Store is under New Management

We’ll see you in-game from Friday, June 8th, at noon PDT (GMT-7) until Sunday, June 10th, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).

If you love information, and speak German or French, today is your lucky day. Anet has announced that they are official launching their German and French wikis today.

Hello, everyone, my name is Stéphane Lo Presti. As a community manager for ArenaNet, one of my roles is to act as a liaison between our studio and the wiki community. And today, I’d like to share some exciting news for French and German gamers: we’re launching official French and German Guild Wars 2 wikis! But before we get into details, I’d like to say a few words about wikis in general.

In case you didn’t know, GW2 already has an official English Wiki, which you can find right here. Make sure you read the full dev blog for all the info you could possibly want on the whats, whys and whos of the Guild Wars 2 wikis.

Source: Official German and French Guild Wars 2 Wikis Launch Today

This morning we get an announcement of the date of the next BWE:

Heroes of Tyria!
My name is Chris Whiteside, and I’m the lead producer of Guild Wars 2. Normally, I’m head-down in the trenches, making sure we’re producing the best MMO possible, but I wanted to come up for air and share some exciting news with you:

Beta Weekend Event 2 will begin on Friday, June 8th, at noon PDT (GMT-7) and will run until Sunday, June 10th, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (GMT-7).

If that isn’t enough to get you all bursting with excitement, here is some more news:

Your existing beta characters have not been deleted, and you will be able to continue right where you left off! This means that enterprising players with characters level 35 or higher will be able to test their mettle against the explorable version of the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon!

In addition to sharing this news with you, I want to convey a massive “thank you” to all of you for playing in our beta events so far. The participation and enthusiasm we’ve seen has exceeded our expectations, and we’re all very grateful and appreciative here at the studio. Your support during our first Beta Weekend Event and throughout development has been instrumental in getting us prepared for launch and helping us take massive steps in the evolution of Guild Wars 2 as a whole. You, our community, are an integral part of the development process, and Guild Wars 2 simply would not be what it is today without you.

To read the full dev blog, please visit this link.

We’ve got another dev blog published by Arenanet on the process of naming things in Tyria! Find out more how the development team goes through the process of creating names for people and places in Guild Wars 2, it’s pretty fascinating.

Keep reading to find out more.