[2022] Oct 14 - 21 World Restructuring Beta Recap

Hello everyone, I have a message from Senior Game Designer Floyd Grubb: Greetings from the Mists! Now that the dust has settled on our most recent WvW Restructuring beta, we wanted to take a few moments to give a quick recap and talk a bit about some improvements you'll be seeing over the next few months. Phase 1 of the World Restructuring rollout is focused on getting the backend systems to a stable and automated state. Two of the biggest issues we've been tackling over the past year that have prevented us from achieving that stable state include players being placed on the incorrect team and the queue issue that causes players to lose their spot in line when trying to join a queued WvW map. We made some significant strides forward with the last beta. We saw the fewest number of players placed on the incorrect team thanks to some recent code fixes and the in-game mail that reminded players to choose their WvW guild. While incorrect team placement was rampant in our first few betas, we've managed to narrow it down to just a few edge cases and we were able to identify the root cause of one such edge case during the last beta. Now that the underlying tech for guild selection and team placement is nearly hammered into shape, we'll be integrating the guild selection functionality that currently resides in the World Restructuring - BETA panel into the guild panel, its new permanent home. This follows the Beta Development approach we laid out late last year. In the November 8 update, players will be able to choose their WvW guild for matchmaking purposes from either the WvW panel or the guild panel. Eventually, the World Restructuring - BETA panel will be deprecated, and the guild panel will become the only way to manage your WvW guild selection. These panels will remain accessible outside of World Restructuring Beta events, allowing players to update their WvW guild selection at any time prior to a matchmaking event. The guild panel has also been updated with new WvW guild selection functionality and iconography: If you are currently on the same team with your WvW guild, it will show an "active" icon. A "pending" icon will display next to your WvW guild if you are not currently on the same team as your WvW guild. You will be placed on the same team as your WvW guild in the next matchmaking event. On the queue-issue side of things, we have a handful of improvements in the pipeline, tentatively scheduled for mid-November. Note, these changes do not require a full game build—they're server updates. If a player is map traveling when a WvW queue pops, the queue-ready panel will now reopen once they've finished loading without requiring any workarounds on the player's part. We added an Enter WvW button to the WvW map selection screen, similar to the one seen on the queue-ready panel. Essentially, this is an additional way to enter WvW when your queue is ready. We fixed several instances where the WvW queue-ready panel wasn't properly reflecting the server state. We fixed instances where ready players would keep using up their reserved slots a little longer than necessary, which should essentially make the queueing faster for players. We're looking at hosting at least one more Phase 1 beta before the end of the year to test out the changes above. Phase 2 (alliances) is slated to follow early next year, barring any unforeseen complications. Finally, we want to apologize for the issues surrounding the WvW World Restructuring Beta Veteran achievement and the War Machine weapon skin rewards. It was exciting for us to be able to provide some new rewards to WvW, but their release suffered due to some missteps in our team's release process, which we've since rectified. Game development in a live environment is a complex endeavor, and if proper procedure is not followed, even for mundane tasks, it is easy for mistakes to be made. That's all for now. Thanks for reading. See you in the Mists! Floyd Grubb, Senior Game Designer, WvW