Let me just start, by saying how awesome it was for a games company to hold an event like this. So many companies nowadays only pay lip service to how they listen to their fans, it’s a true testament to how much the guys and girls at ArenaNet listen to their fans, and how much they care about what they produce. With a special thanks going out to Colin Johanson (Game Director for GW2), Aiden Taylor (European Community manager) and Craig Stephens (European PR Manager for NCsoft) for arranging the day, these guys are the best, and you should all shower them in shinies. But I’m not done there with the thank you comments!

One last big shout-out to the guys from DragonSeason.com who sent me in their place to mine for all the juicy info below, and for transcribing all of this information from the audio clips (2 Hours long people! Do you know how much work that is?!)

Now all that’s out of the way, let’s get on with the show. That’s right, it’s time for an information download. Prepare yourselves!

Guild Missions – We all know guild missions are coming on Tuesday 26^TH, and one of the features that’s been announced is the ability to participate in guild missions, events that span across an entire map zone that require you to work as a large group to accomplish specific tasks. When asked about this new feature, Colin mentioned a few details we haven’t heard yet, here’s the list:

• • • Guild missions will take place across various zones in the world, Southsun Cove confirmed as one of them.

    • Players in a guild can start off the missions if they are given the permissions for their guild rank

    • There will be 5 guild missions released this month. Only bounty hunt is available from the start, with the others unlocked via guild influence.

    • There will be ‘tiers’ of difficulty when choosing a guild mission, so smaller groups can still create missions without fear of lacking enough players

Awesome, right? It seems that the Guild Wars 2 crew are really putting an emphasis on allowing players to play in bigger groups and more importantly, to play as a guild. This also gives rise to content that is created by the user, with guilds being the factor that kick off these events, there is likely to be more focus on getting to know the guilds on your server who are making life more fun for everyone.

To everyone’s surprise (Literally when he said this, everyone stopped eating and started writing feverously) Colin revealed one of the new mission types that will hit this Tuesday, which was named ‘Bounty Hunt’. In this mode, we can expect to see several targets scattered within the chosen map that the guild has to take down within a certain time frame in order to complete the event. He mentioned that this would hopefully see guilds working together, and promote a cooperative team effort that the entire guild can rally behind. You can hope to see varying tiers of difficulty for this mission, which will allow smaller guilds to play out the mission without fears of not having enough participants.

WvW changes – Another hot topic of the day (especially with some big time WvW fans at the table) was what changes and concepts we are going to be seeing in the coming weeks for World Vs World. Here’s what Colin had to say, on your favourite player killing past-time:

• • • Orange ‘Fight’ markers designated by crossed swords on the map will trigger only when a higher number of people join the fight (Approx 25)

    • Commander book is scheduled for some changes to help support better communication and add ‘community support tools’

    • Adding ways to gain Ascended gear via laurels without leaving the WvW environment

    • Adding features relevant to the monthly holidays (Halloween/wintersday etc...)

    • WvW specific abilities to add a level of progression to the mode.

There’s a fairly big portion of content here, so let’s break it down. First of all, it’s obvious that the team wants to answer concerns about excluding WvW’ers from obtaining the new ascended tier gear, however it was not mentioned how they are going to combat this, and it’s comforting to know it’s on their list at least. Something else that’s been excluded from WvW is the ever changing world events like Lions arch getting decorations for themed holidays. When we spoke to Colin about this, he responded by telling us how he would hope they could include various elements of the months active holiday into the WvW maps, for example, having cannons that shoot toilet paper during Halloween or NPC’s that appear inside forts for the duration of the event.

Moving on, we probed Colin for some information on the commander book, and specifically if there were any plans to add to it in the future, or if there was any reason why the books were character bound instead of account bound, to which he had a rather interesting response.

“I asked the WvW team about that and they had some good reasons for why it’s [like that], for people getting to know who the commander is and they don’t want that concept if you’ve got 20 characters on your account and you log in with each one and there’s a different commander they really want people to get to know and recognize this specific commander. “

 

I think that’s a fair enough answer. It’s clear the team wants to promote the idea that if you buy a commander book, its more than just a floating star, it’s a symbol of you as a player that others will come to recognise as a pillar of the community, and someone who will become known for leading the charge. That’s not to say it isn’t disheartening to spend all that money on one character, but at least they had an answer that I think is reasonable.

Onto a big change now, and that is altering what triggers the ‘Orange Swords’ alert, revealing enemy attackers on the map. When asked about how Colin felt about the current state of play, we were told that the idea of using much more strategy and teamwork is something the team wants to promote, and to that end he suggested they raise the trigger for the alarm to a player count of 25 (Approx) attackers, which creates the need for scouts to relay important information about guerrilla forces moving around the map. Personally, this sounds awesome to me. The idea that they are going to promote such a deep playing experience that rewards teamwork on such a scale is one that peaks my interest, and one I hope will be embraced with open arms by all you WvW players out there.

The final tick on the WvW front comes from our discussion on the abilities previously mentioned a little while ago, and Colin had this to say:

“For example, if you are standing out in a field and you are fighting 1 on 1 against a player the abilities do not make you more powerful than anyone else in WvW. They just expand your ability to operate in WvW. We don’t want to create a system where like five years from now someone who has leveled way down the tree is able to just kill everybody else. Instead it just makes you more functional. It gives you additional abilities that help your capacity in WvW, but doesn’t make you more powerful. An example could be “potential carrying of more supply”. 

 

Colin also confirms that the abilities are all passive features:

I take it this is a passive thing, it’s not slotted in your bar? 

“Colin: Correct.”

 

What does this tell us then? Well, we now know these abilities are unlocked as you progress through playing WvW, allowing you to assist your allies with various player specific bonuses like being able to carry more supply. They aren’t going to be direct skills used against enemies, so no need to fear the high level WvW reaper! I expect much more info to come out about these features coming closer to the time of next month’s patch release, but only time will tell.

This is only part one of the summary of what turned out to be a 2 hour session with Colin. (The poor guy didn’t even get to eat all of his sandwich :( ) So keep your eyes peeled for more content, as and when we finish transcribing the audio, but there’s definitely more juicy info to come. You can see the full transcription so far on DragonSeason's website.

What do you guys think of the released info so far? Are the WvW changes in the right direction? What do you think of the new Guild missions? Tell us in the comment box below!