#gw2 dev

Guild Wars 2 offered up another surprise today for all the wrong reasons.

According to the website MassivelyOP, Mike Zadorojny is no longer the director of Guild Wars 2 and hasn’t been since around the Arenanet layoffs of last year.

Layoffs coming to Guild Wars 2 Developer ArenaNet

Feb 21, 2019 - Arenanet announced to it it’s employees that layoff are coming.

According to Kotaku, “Although ArenaNet did not give out exact numbers, and they may not yet be finalized, rumors floating around the studio signal that a significant number of people will be let go.”

Kotaku also reported:

Songyee Yoon, the CEO of Korean publisher NCSoft West, which owns ArenaNet, e-mailed employees this afternoon with the news. “Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased,” she wrote. “Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success.”

Anet themselves posted a brief statement to the forums and assured players the developer would be moving from Season 4 to Season 5 of the Living World as planned.

“We know Guild Wars 2 is important to you,” the Arenanet Team forum account posted, “and as our players, you are important to us. Rest assured that we are still working to add great new content to the game. We are deeply grateful to all of you for your support during this difficult time. “

Sources:

Guild Wars 2 Forum: Update from ArenaNet

Current mesmer to be an illusion of what’s to come

Arenanet plans major changes to Mesmer Illusions tomorrow

Feb 5, 2018 - How mesmers play will be a lot different starting tomorrow according to a post on the official forums. In short, Phantasm will become a set attack and then revert to a regular clone after 2 seconds. The idea behind this change players will be more likely to use shatters as they were intended.

Robert Gee of the Guild Wars 2 Systems Team wrote:

“In one sentence, these changes can be summed up as, ‘Phantasms become clones after their initial attack.’

Here are the specific details of how it works:

Phantasms no longer will persist indefinitely. Instead, a phantasm will attack once and then automatically be destroyed. If interrupted during its attack the phantasm also will be destroyed.

Phantasms still can be targeted by skills and take damage while alive. Phantasms can be destroyed by damaging skills before they finish their attack.

A destroyed phantasm will be replaced with a clone based on your current weapon set. This clone will spawn regardless of how the phantasm was destroyed. The clone is spawned at the location of the phantasm at the time it was destroyed.

Shatter skills no longer destroy phantasms, and phantasms no longer count towards the maximum illusion limit.”

The Devs will adjust change Mesmer traits and skills to confisate for lost of persistent phantasms.  Look for the changes in tomorrow’s patch

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ArenaNet’s Mo responds to Mount Adoption License backlash

Mount Adoption Licenses had been a polarizing element in the Guild Wars 2 community as of late and ArenaNet has noticed.

In an open later November 10th, Company President and Gamer directer Mike O’Brien posted a letter to the game’s player in which he wrote,

“You have valid concerns about random boxes. We hoped that the design of the Mount Adoption License would be reassuring. In this case, we made some missteps.”

O’Brien went on to say the studio should have know better then to go forward given the current mood of the customer base with random chance mechanics, did not explain the pool for this type of would stay at 30 skins and that having the majority of the mount skins being in a “random box” struck a nerve.

“We won’t change the existing license in a way that would invalidate the investment players have made,”  O’Brien wrote, “but I want to confirm to you that our next planned mount skin releases will focus on individual sales like the Reforged Warhound and bundles like the Spooky Mounts Pack.“

In summary, the studio has released it mistep but did not promise to necessarily no do the same practice in future.

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You can bank on it! 125 items to be added to Guild Wars 2′s material storage

Players that inventories full of odd bits of crafting kit will be getting some relief within the next four months. Game Designer Linsey Murdock has been hard at work identifying items that need a home that isn’t an inventory bag or bank tab.

Murdock did state she had to be picky about she would include due to a limited amount of resources and technical limitations.

“No ,components. has been my go to up til now but you will notice there are a bunch of things here that might be called ‘component’,” she wrote. “The ways I softened but did not eliminate this rule is two fold:

allow a second tier of refinement like dowels and patches which are used cross discipline,

allow a number of scribing and cooking components that feel very core to the disciple and are used over and over throughout but did not have OTHER components in their ingredients which are also being added to storage (eg no herbed stocks because base stocks go in). “

Murdock did not grant every popular request for varies reasons. WVW Blueprints, for example, because “I spoke with the WvW designers and they felt that this would create a bad user experience for players who legit use blueprints.”  

Other requested items that did not make the cut include:

Inscriptions and Insignias

sigils and runes

legendary gifts (”Too many. Too niche,” Murdock stated.)

Piles of Silky Sand, food, and other consumables.

SAB Baubles and Bubble Baubles (Technical issues)

Guild Hall trophy items

As for when the material storage update will be sent to player, Murdock did not have an exact timeline but did hint at a personal deadline.

“I normally say ‘no promises!’” she said, “but in this case, I promise that I refuse to let this go a whole year since my original post without shipping.”

The full list of the items headed to storage and sources can be found after the jump.

Guild Wars Patch brings love to PVP

New Heart of the Mists, Automatic PVP Tournaments and PVP Balance

Fans of Guild Wars 2′s Player verses Player game type are the main beneficiaries of the games patch yesterday. While some PvE elements are tucked in, PVP got the lion’s share of attention.

New PVP Lobby

The most accessible part of this patch for players that do not PVP often is the new version of “The Heart of the Mists”. The new version has most feature of the old but adds a skirmish courtyard, a jumping puzzle, a VIP area and a few Easter eggs.

Automated Tournaments

Also with this patch come server generated tournaments. Each one requires a a full team of players and grants decent returns for winning events. The smaller tournaments lead into qualifying to grander ones provided the participants win enough to qualify.

Hall of the Mists and other map changes

Hall of the Mists is the new PVP map added with this release. As ArenaNet stated in their press release, “Get to know your enemy personally in this new map designed for a 2 vs. 2 team death match.”

The ‘Courtyard’ PVP map was given a new mechanic where a player holds an orb and grants their team more points the closer that player is to the central alter. The catch is that a the orb slowly harms the player and any player killed in possesion of the orb does not resurrect.

Hero Balance

The changes to Hero Balance affected mostly the player vs player game type and were generally aimed at making support build more viable.

Sources:

guildwars2.com: June 2017 Competitive Feature Pack

GW2 Forums: Game Update Notes - June 20, 2017

Legendary Armor goes live May 2nd with “Flashpoint”

A long time in the making, but Guild Wars 2 has announce that Legendary Armor will enter the game May 2nd with the Living World episode “Flashpoint”.

“We’ve never produced any armor set as complicated as the legendary armor,“ Arenanet Raid Producer Paul Ella bragged on her announcement post on GuildWars2.com.

Ella stated her team got near its goals in creating the legionary armor sets and the artists and devs have done their best to limit clipping; make the armor easy for the player to use and be worth gaining though the games raids

Legendary Armor at a glance:

Legendary Armor is the is part of the raid rewards.

The armors are designed to make sense with game lore and will “transform” when the player enters combat:

Heavy Armor is meant to invoke the look of knights and iron clad soldiers

Medium armor looks as if crafted from the “bones of legionary foes.”

Light Armor uses crystals that will charge and “manifest and electric aura”

Designers looked to limit clipping as much as they could but still had to make some compromises

Each peace of Legendary Armor can have it’s stats selected separately from each other.

Legendary Armor allows the player to also swap runes. Applying a new rune to a piece of Legendary Armor will have the old one return to the player’s inventory.

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GuildWars2.com: Legendary Armor is Coming Soon!

Living World Episode Five expected to arrive in late April / early May

Guild Wars 2 Players hoping for the next episode of the Living World to be just the around the corner will have to wait a few weeks ArenaNet President Mike O’Brien announced today.

“We’re currently putting the finishing touches on episode five,” O’Brien wrote on the GW2 forums. “It’s an important episode and we’re taking the time to get it right. I wanted to let you know that this episode will release closer to the three-month side of our two-to-three-month cadence. We’ll make the formal announcement when everything’s locked down. In the meantime, just hang tight a little while longer.”

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