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)

We’re really starting to like these guys, check out Tales of Tyria’s latest vidcast (while you’re taking a break from Diablo 3) as they discuss the latest and greatest of the stress test and a few other topics including, Is the holy trinity really gone?

Episode 31:

06:34 – Feedback: WvW Keep Balance
12:14 – News: Guided Tour of Lion’s Arch, Stress Test, and Post Launch Content
29:30 – Bridger Rant: $1 = 80 gems? WTF?!?!
34:02 – Roundtable: PvE Revisited – Is the holy trinity truly gone?
Weekly Question:
Question of the Week – Having played the beta, what are your thoughts on the holy trinity?

Video after the break.

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.

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