Guild Wars 2

[Nadia]

Summary of Beta Changes and Developer Q & A
http://guildwars2ranger.com/news/summar ... loper-q-a/

[Nadia]

for what its worth,
you can preorder GW2 from Amazon (and not get charged) and receive the prepurchase perks
http://www.amazon.com/Guild-Wars-2-Pc/d ... B001TOQ8X4

Betaweekend 2 is this weekend

[Nadia]

stress test, Wed 06.27
http://www.arena.net/blog/help-us-stres ... on-june-27

[Nadia]

release date announced of 8/28
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/28 ... unch-date/

http://www.arena.net/blog/announcing-th ... aunch-date

Now that we’re just two months away from launch, we’ll spend our remaining time optimizing, polishing, and balancing the game, to ensure that we provide you with the best launch-day experience we possibly can.

To this end, I’m excited to announce that our next and final Beta Weekend Event is planned for July 20-22.

[Nadia]

Curse giving away 20,000 beta keys on July 10th --- for the final beta weekend on July 20th
http://www.curse.com/betas/guild-wars-2

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/633- ... -giveaway/

[Nadia]

all races playable for final beta weekend
http://www.arena.net/blog/play-asura-an ... kend-event

[Nadia]

Crafting
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/10/guild ... -detailed/

PVE end game discussion
http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/endgame ... -johanson/

Eric Flannum and Colin Johanson of ArenaNet graced our Twitch TV screens today for about half an hour to discuss Guild Wars 2′s end game. There were a couple reveals including Legendary Weapons and they took a few questions. Some major points that were brought up:

The whole game is the end game. Whatever activities you choose to level with are still the focus when you hit the level cap.

Questing zones don’t end at 80; there’s still a lot of PvE content in high level zones after most players will max out their level.

The 8 dungeons split apart into over 25 explorable dungeon paths, effectively creating 25 dungeons.

You never stop gaining experience. Once you’ve hit 80, you’ll be able to keep farming experience and “level up” to gain another skill point. These skill points are the same ones that can be used to purchase skills, but also are used to buy items from a vendor for use in the Mystic Forge.

With the side-kicking system in place, ANet plans to update the whole world with new content all the time, not just the high level zones. This includes the addition of new Dynamic Events, dungeons, and more.

There will be Holiday Events; two examples given were Wintersday and the Mad King (a Halloween event).

Legendary weapons are an endgame goal for players.
They’ll take a long time and a lot of effort to make, but have some of the coolest skins in the game.
One example of a legendary weapon is a hammer called the Juggernaut that covers your character in liquid metal. Each step your character takes leaves a small liquid metal imprint on the ground.
These weapons aren’t going to be just bought; you’ll have to earn certain components of their creation through actually playing the game.

[Nadia]

the final beta weekend details
http://www.arena.net/blog/whats-new-in- ... kend-event

The final Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event is nearly here. From Friday, July 20 to Sunday, July 22, hundreds of thousands of players from Europe and North America will experience the beta version of Guild Wars 2 one last time before the game launches on August 28.

[Nadia]

post BWE3, Difficulty being tuned to be more like BWE2
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comm ... ifficulty/

[Nadia]

PVP interview
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/691- ... s-growing/

Tournaments will obviously be a big part of the structured PvP scene in Guild Wars 2. Will tournaments, such as those made by users, be restricted by region, or will users be able to create worldwide tournaments?

Tournaments will be restricted by region. This is for technical reasons. We will deal with worldwide tournaments in a manner outside of the online tournament system.

Can you tell us a little about what players will be able to determine before a tournament begins? Will they have information, such as which map(s) will be available or enemy team composition, beforehand?

For automated tournaments, we will be showing you the maps for each round in the tournament. Automated tournaments will be three rounds and will be played on a different map each round. Our current plan is to have fixed maps for each round; however, we may change the maps from time to time. You will not have access to enemy composition before you are in the map.

Will players be able to swap weapons, skills, and armor, or even profession composition, mid-tournament? Last we heard from your team was that locking “builds” was being discussed internally. Has this changed? Could you give some insight to your decision either way?

This is still being discussed. Although, we can say that between rounds players will be allowed to change their builds. Any locking down of builds will be for a single tournament match. We want to find the perfect balance between “build wars” and people swapping out their skills between each fight in a PvP match. This is one of those areas where we’ll need to listen to our PvP community. We feel we’ll have a better answer to this after our entire system goes live and our player community can give us feedback on what they feel is best for the life of Guild Wars 2 PvP.

There is a large player base that wonders why you think 5v5 Conquest format is better than a 3v3 Death Match, or traditional Guild Wars GvG format. Could you discuss your position on these issues? Is there a possibility we might see them at a later point?

We tried a number of formats for GW2 and decided to go with one that scaled well for different numbers of players and was familiar to a wide audience. We want to build an open and inclusive PvP community, and finding a game format that fostered both friendly play as well as highly competitive play was a challenge.

We have seen the Conquest format work well on our open play servers with 10v10 as well as competitive 5v5 tournaments. It is important to us that people have an avenue to move from less competitive to more competitive play. Our hope is to see a player new to the game start off by hitting “Play Now” on the server browser, getting to know the game, making some friends, and building some confidence. Once they have a firm grounding in how the game works, how the maps work, and how their builds work, we hope to see them move into tournament play with our automated tournament system and eventually to our scheduled tournaments where they can contend for a spot in our yearly tournament. Our dream is to see someone go from newb to world champion. We just want to provide a path for them to follow to get there.

Having said that, we may try new formats in the future, but we want to be sure that we don’t split up our competitive player base and that any new additions are good for the game overall.

If Guild Wars 2 really wants to make an appearance in the e-sport scene, there will have to be a spectator mode. You have already confirmed you are working on it. Is there any news on this, such as a rough estimate on when we’ll see it implemented after the game launches? How about adding some sort of replay possibility?

We fully believe this, and it is high on our list of things to add to Guild Wars 2. It will be ready—wait for it—when it’s ready.

How much do you take the whole e-sport aspect into consideration when developing the game? For instance, do you take into consideration how easy/convenient the game is to spectate?

This has been a concern the entire time PvP has been in development—as far back as day one, meeting one. We’ve learned a lot from watching other e-sports (walk through the design room on any given day and you will see e-sport streams running), and having combined that with the lessons we learned from the original Guild Wars, we tried to balance spectator, announcer, and player needs. We wanted it to be easy to get into, but we also wanted a skill gap that would allow pro players to show their mastery. In addition to this, we wanted to make sure the game was exciting from a spectator’s standpoint, while ensuring that announcers easily understand the action well enough to communicate to the spectators.

With the focus on e-sports: Do you think that Guild Wars 2 will have professional players, earning their money with tournaments and streaming?

That’s the hope. The global PC-gaming community decides which games are played at the highest levels, be it FPS, RTS, fighter, or MOBA. Guild Wars 2 combines aspects of those games, so we hope that players enjoy it, both as players and as spectators.

Do you have any plans in terms of PvP publicity? Will tournaments be advertised on the main webpage, or perhaps on the log-in screen? What about giving us tournaments in the next BWE to get people excited?

We can’t talk too much about this yet, but there are plans for things of this nature. I can say that we want to support the e-sport community, and we follow contemporary e-sports to learn from the example set by great companies supporting their communities.

If there will be a ranking system, what will it be based on: Individual player ranking or team ranking—perhaps both? Will it be based on total glory or some other means, e.g., PvP emotes, skins, etc.?

We have plans for stuff like this, but we can’t talk about it yet. Sorry… Again, “when it’s ready!”

Many players have asked about the endgame in Guild Wars 2. You answered us with “the endgame starts at level 1” and have shown us that we have standardized gear and the ability to roll a new class within minutes—a dream for PvP players. Your announcement to balance PvP accordingly sounds really great. Can you tell us if you are going to stay with this philosophy in the future, where new players are not limited by being behind in farming?

Yes, we are staying with this philosophy. We feel it’s crucial to the success of Guild Wars 2’s PvP. We want new players to come into the community and be able to focus on learning the game, not grinding in an effort to “prepare to have fun.” We want you having fun as soon as possible in PvP! We offer aesthetic rewards, but never power rewards. You will never be at a statistical disadvantage when playing PvP—if anything, being a new player will get even easier down the road as we add more features.

[Nadia]

Arena Junkies features GW2 section
http://www.arenajunkies.com/news/509-gu ... a-junkies/

AJ has AMA on 08/11 about pvp
http://www.arenajunkies.com/news/510-as ... /#comments

[Nadia]

https://www.facebook.com/GuildWars2

We will be conducting a stress test tomorrow Wednesday, August 15 from 12:00 Noon PACIFIC Time to 4:00 PM PACIFIC Time.

We will be actively working on the game during the event, so you might experience connectivity problems or discover features that are not working as designed.

Any issues you experience are a result of the rigorous conditions of the stress test, and are in no way representative of the state of the game at launch.

[Nadia]

Server list for launch announced
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/intr ... ld-wars-2/

[Nadia]

ill be playing on Sorrows Furnace

my guild
http://www.gw2guilds.org/view-guild/123

my real name is Karl but I'm Ninna on the GW2 guild forums

[Nadia]

Guild Wars 2 PvP designer talks e-sports, spectator mode and streaming
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/21/guild ... streaming/

There’ll be daily pickup tournaments as well as monthly and year-long contests. Players will also be able to customize tournaments to run among their friends and rivals. Tournaments are hot-joinable through a shooter-style server browser. “If there’s two of us we can be matched with three other people and then fight somebody else in a five on five. That’s really cool, and we’re trying to grow the community there.”

A spectator mode is on its way, Sharp says, although ArenaNet aren’t willing to show it off yet. The game has been built with spectators in mind, however. “We looked at sports when we were designing Guild Wars 2 from day one” Sharp says. “Usually there’s only one focus point – usually the ball. Guild Wars 1 never really had that. You were just kind of hovering around a flag point where people were interrupting each other and if you didn’t know the game you didn’t know what was going on. We looked at the League of Legends, The StarCraft 2s, the TF2s, the Counter-Strikes. We looked at those and we said, ‘what makes these so good?’. A lot of times, there’s only one focus point.”

Guild Wars 2′s three launch PvP maps are all based around capturing and holding control points as a team. Build up a high enough score and your team wins. On the surface, it’s not that far from the first game’s Alliance Battles, or World of Warcraft’s Arathi Highlands and Eye of the Storm battlegrounds. Each map has its own unique features, however, from Dota-style creeps to massive siege weapons. These are intended to add an additional dimension to the competitive game.

“We’re trying to make things really easy to understand for new players” Sharp explains. “With the spectator mode, what we’re trying to do is have these three capture points that they have to focus on, and then the secondary objectives. Because that’s consistent across everything you don’t have to relearn the rules all the time. You don’t have to relearn basketball if you’re playing pick-up ball, college ball, high school ball or professional: they use the same rules throughout, which is what we’re trying to do with conquest. We’re trying to model it after a sport so we can say that once you learn the base rules, there you go, you can just spectate and understand.”

[Nadia]

TIME: first impressions
http://techland.time.com/2012/08/28/gui ... e-of-mmos/

you wander into your first dynamic world event, and it’s like what they say about cans of Pringles. Mine was something to do with the Norn’s preliminary bad guys, the swarthy, beard-braided Sons of Svanir. I was exploring a bit, minding my own business, then wham, a quest message pops into my screen queue and dozens of howling guys in headbands and dresses start charging the local Bear Shrine (the Norns wear animal skins and bellow stuff like “Halt traveler!” or “Hail, slayer of such-and-such”).

It was just me and a few others in the vicinity, so we started pummeling wave after wave. Then a few more players joined and the attacks grew more intense. Before you knew it: dozens of players, battling dozens of bad guys, in a melee scrum of arrows, lightning, arms, blades, flames, axes and bodies.

Now multiply that by “anywhere you go” times “pretty much all the time,” and you’ve got a sense for the manic compulsiveness of Guild Wars 2, which plays like the pinball machine of MMOs. There’s just never a dull moment. I’ve been in snowball fights with kids, timed hunts for worm eggs in icy caverns, barrel-gathering (and later catching) events, timed runs to gather scraps to help someone build a silly snowman and staggered events that built to epic boss smackdowns.

That’s my experience of Guild Wars 2 17 levels in: unpredictable, relentless, exhilarating, unexpectedly stable and — except for a few head-scratchers like the still-nonexistent trading post, some reports of server unavailability (hasn’t happened to me) and guild tab malfunctioning (also hasn’t happened to me) — essentially bug-free.

[Kulaf]

I hadn't read anything about GW2 before it was released and didn't play at all in the beta, but I decided to pick it up mainly because it was free to play and it was going to be my game to play when I had nothing better to do. And I must say that I am very happy with the game so far. I am feeling no pressure to level and not really even focusing on leveling much at all. I am an explorer by nature so finding all of the POI's and other things has really been fun. The ability to help others while helping yourself is great.

I would encourage everyone to give it a look.

[Minute]

I thought about trying it out. I haven't done any MMORPG in a long as time, but I loved GW1 & have heard a lot of good shit about this. Might give it a go.

[Nadia]

ive been playing GW2 for the last 5 days (since headstart) and have been enjoying it

ive only been doing PVE w the game -- have not tried any pvp

[Minute]

I hate PvP. Is it a huge loss not to do it in the game? Also, I just noticed you can't get this on steam. BOOOO! We've become so spoiled.