To anyone who’s been working on map completion in Guild Wars 2, it should come as no surprise that some areas contain their fair share of buggy dynamic events and skill point challenges. Some bugs persist until the servers are reset or go down for maintenance, which can be frustrating for players who are trying to complete every zone they level in. It’s even more frustrating when some of these bugs seem so random. One skill challenge can be bugged one week, and the next, that one’s fixed, but a different skill challenge point then becomes bugged. Why are the bugs so random?

ArenaNet had a few words to say about this exact question over the weekend. Here’s what was said by Matthew Medina, Guild Wars 2 Content Designer:

To respond to this I can say that, yes, we’re aware of the general issues that have been reported with many Dynamic Events and skill challenges. They frustrate us as much as they frustrate you – most if not all of us devs are playing the game right along with you, and these content blockers can certainly be challenging to everyone’s enjoyment of the game experience.

I would like take this opportunity to clarify one thing I’ve seen discussed here on the forums and in game chat. It’s just not true that the higher level or other content wasn’t tested. It was. Thoroughly.

But even with the Beta Weekend Events and our own internal testing, there’s really only so much that we can do to simulate the number of times that events have to run in sequence once a game like Guild Wars 2 goes live. In particular, Arenanet has made iteration one of our key development philosophies which has the benefit of promoting the publishing of better in-game content, but which has the consequence of us doing many builds a day while we’re developing. In many cases the events that are breaking are doing so because of compounding errors that are hard to catch when you’re developing in such a fluid environment. We’re seeing a number of these blocking issues in events that have undergone extensive internal testing, but which have never needed to run dozens of times in a row, because of how frequently we developers were iterating and generating new builds.

We’re working as hard as we can to find and fix the biggest blocking issues, and it’s one of our top priorities to ensure that you can complete each map and play in events without running into these kinds of issues. We sincerely appreciate your patience, and your detailed reports on anything you come across that isn’t working as it should.

There are a lot of places in the game where you can follow an event train from beginning to end for multiple rewards and it then cycles back to the beginning. The biggest one we’ve found is in Kessex Hills on the western side of the map. This is an efficient way to level (if efficient leveling is your goal) up through the 40s.

The start point is the bridge at the northwest corner of the lake. Once finished you won’t have to wait very long for the event to start over again. There are also two nearby events (marked off in purple) that might randomly show up that you can diverge and complete during your cycle.

This rotation works extremely well at all level ranges. The experience starts to lag down after level 30, but is still completely viable. It’s a very good way to earn karma and gold as well.
 
 

 
Here is what to expect at each step:
 

• Point 1: Break centaur worker morale to prevent bridge repairs. Reduce morale to 0%.
• Point 2: Dispatch the Harathi Lieutenants. Kill all three.
• Point 3: Kill the Harathi Overlord.
• Point 4: Stop the Risen Krait from building their army. Kill all four, not labeled on map.
• Point 5: The END point has it’s own rotation of events:
• END 1: Destroy the bandit cannons before the ore shipment is ready. Kill five canons.
• END 2: Stop bandits from collecting ore for a centaur supply shipment. Kill all the miners.
• END 3: Defeat the champion bandit foreman before he finishes collecting ore for centaurs. He has two forms: Mech and Human.

There are a few other places where you have a system like this after level 40. We’ll bring those to you as soon as we can.

One of the aspects of leveling in Guild Wars 2 that players are most looking forward to is the game’s dynamic event system. Let’s face it, questing in a static world gets pretty boring, and the promise of dynamic content– content that actually shifts, changes, and presents danger to us– seems like a breath of fresh air to us after years of plugging away at killing boars and wolves. A game world that actually comes to life based on the acts of players in the area? The ability to make a difference in this world? Sign me up.

The system sounds fantastic on paper, and has proven to be enjoyable in beta for most players who have taken part, but some remain skeptical. Why? Because we’ve heard the promise before. We’ve seen it in other games. Warhammer Online’s Public Quests are advertised as dynamic events, and so is a large portion of RIFT’s content. RIFT is an interesting comparison here, because RIFT’s dynamic content is one of its main focuses. RIFT is about, well, rifts. And huge, planar invasion forces. And zone events that can make an entire map gloomy until danger subsides. Despite all this, however, RIFT’s dynamic content is very different from Guild Wars 2′s. Let’s talk about how.

Many players eagerly walked into Guild Wars 2′s first beta weekend unsure of what to expect. Some of these players found themselves surprised at the game’s difficulty level. For some, this surprise quickly turned into appreciation. Others were disappointed and frustrated. Opinions are always going to be widespread and varying in a beta event for a game of GW2′s size, but with the case of the game’s difficulty, some interesting opinions, critiques, and reviews surfaced. Which held water? I’ll let you be the real judge, but for now, let’s take a look at some of the beef regarding GW’s difficulty.

Youtube user CaraEmm gives us a little taste of how Dynamic Events work in GW2. The video demonstrates what happens to some NPCs do when you’re not looking. See how certain chains start and turn into other events in the video above.

NowGamer.com takes a closer look at why Guild Wars 2 can be a perfect 10. In their review, they discuss why Guild Wars 2 is different; discussing dynamic content, skill-based positional combat, PVP, and more. Here’s is just a quick taste of what NowGamer is saying about Guild Wars 2.

The quests of MMOs have been a running joke for a long time now, resorting to typical fetch quests and ‘kill 10 boars’ style of objectives. Needless to say, that’s worn a little thin now.

So here to save the day is ArenaNet, who has decided to cut out those irritating quests for something a bit more fluid. Dynamic, you could say.

What it means is that objectives are activated by a series of unknown requirements – from speaking to a certain NPC, finding a certain item or just visiting an area at a specific time of day.

This spawns a chain of events that act as quests yet, regardless of outcome, keep offering a new objective to work for – enemy goblins may well capture a fort after ‘failing’ one event, but that just opens the new objective to free it once again. There’s a lot of longevity here, and could well be the element that gets the most praise from critics.

Read the full article over at NowGamer.com.