[2020] I'm Mike O'Brien, here with GW2 dev team. AMA!

We also love telling stories in open world. We're definitely looking at all the ways we can tell our story in upcoming Living World releases.

We are definitely working on bringing these sets back into the game.

We are definitely aware that there are some frustrating match-ups being made during this Season's initial kick off period and we are actively working to improve this for Season 3.

We know that this has been successful in other games and it's something that comes up occasionally in brainstorming sessions but at the moment we don't have any plans for a system like this.

Are you sure he won't just ban Colin again? ;)

I won't give away any spoilers on future content. What I can say is that the team loves weaving long established lore into our new story, and we're excited about a lot of ways that we will be doing that in upcoming releases. And yes, magic in Tyria is broader than dragons.

Halls and Tombs were a huge part of GW1. While we loved those modes in GW1 we wanted to try something different for GW2. In GW2 we have Unranked Arenas as a fun place for all players to enjoy PvP. Ranked Arena for seasons of high competition. The Pro Leagues for the top players to compete for prizes and our in-game progression path for the Pro Leagues, the Guild Challenger League. In addition, there are Custom Arenas for scrimmages, casual play and practice. Guild Wars 2 PvP takes a new and different approach to PvP and overall is much more successful for it.

Yup, a bit after the launch of HoT I transitioned teams to be team lead on creatures, working on expansion 2. You are in good hands with /u/Anet_KarlMcLain and the rest of the skills and balance team. I'm still involved with that team though and provide lots of advice and feedback, ;)

I can answer question #2. We use MMR for minor matchmaking considerations (like finding similarly skilled teammates), but it doesn't really work as a determiner of which division you technically belong in for our specific league system. There is a lot of things involved in the League progress system, but sufficed to say, we've explored the idea of using MMR as the sole means of determining player positions and we identified enough pitfalls that we decided to opt for a different system instead.

Thanks for the nice words about the story. As we continue, we absolutely have these as some of our broad story goals: -- Bring exciting content with every release -- Integrate story with gameplay to make a great overall experience...both in instances and open world -- Tie up important story threads as we can while advancing our story

You are most welcome!

Some people just want to watch the bots burn. Mostly Chris Cleary.

I'm gonna let Maclaine answer this one.

Me too :)

WvW has been a very complicated system. We are changing some of the core architectural components. It will allow us to implement some of the changes Tyler outlined, and also provide us a foundation for more flexibility moving forward.

The way that matchmaking is set up for Ranked with PvP Leagues, you're definitely either losing or not gaining pips, but your MMR is actually not adjusting enough to bring you down to get matched with "even worse players." The matches in which you lose against opponents that are much higher rated than you do not adjust your MMR significantly. We're aware that there are frustrations with the initial starting period for Season 2 and we are currently planning to improve overall match quality for Season 3, particularly during the start of the season.

Storytelling experience in any medium is going to be useful. The fundamentals of character and world building, conflict, structure, good dialog, etc all apply. But the awesome challenge of game narrative is the way that you take into account the player role. Making choices feel meaningful is hard.

A great tool that I would recommend to build an interactive narrative protfolio is Twine. It is mostly text based, which certainly isn't the ideal way to tell story in a game. But it really helps creators think about choice and the role of the player. We have a large group ANetters, both Narrative and folks from other disciplines, who are getting together next week to do a Twine Jam.

Play aorund with it. It is free and easy to pick up. If I'm looking at candidates for a position and they don't have professional game experience, I love seeing a Twine or two among their writing samples.

And also, a team-focused attitude is critical. Everyone who works on the game helps to tell the story. People have to be able to collaborate in this industry, and great collaborators get better results.

the raids team is working on solutions for finding raid groups

Our LW season definitely picks up where HoT left off. You will certainly hear more about Rata Novus, the egg, etc. And yes, we always look for ways to put in bonus and optional story for the folks who really want it. We had a good deal of this in HoT, but it was probably in slightly different forms than we had previously. We're always trying new ways to get this info to the folks who love our story!

We do have a team that works on skills. We focus on maintenance and balance of current skills, in addition to the implementation of new player skills down the road (I.E. H.O.T. Elite specializations). Internal testing is a mix of Dev/Q.A./tester Hands-on interaction, and some automation. When discussing changes for classes, we look to a variety of areas to determine what should happen. We use metrics from many areas of the game, feedback from a plethora of sources (yourselves included), along with our own spreadsheet comparisons and experiences. In addition, we have meetings with each feature team to discuss the issues in that we then investigate and come up with solutions for. We balance from many different perspectives, top tier pvp is included as well as Raids, Fractals, WvW roaming/group play, casual open world, huge map-wide encounters and a few more that I'm not thinking of at this moment. As for skill splitting, I'd suggest checking out Isaiah's answer in this thread.

From my iPhone 4! -Karl

It is definitely our intent to build new maps for PvP for both Conquest and Stronghold. Before we dig into that, we are taking a pass on making some improvements to our existing maps. We've had some feedback from some of our top players on how some existing maps could be adjusted to be more competitive. Expect to see some adjustments along those lines first.

It's something we've discussed, but there are currently no plans for 1v1 or 2v2 PvP gamemodes at the moment.

We can benefit from quicker iterations. As I mentioned in a different post, we are investing a lot of engineering resources to make the system easier for the team to try different ideas in the future.

I also play on a regular basis. Mostly missions and WvW.

We've had many discussions here about most of your questions. The reality of making games is that we often have content that we love that doesn't make the cut because of scope concerns. We are discussing ways we might be able to delve further into some of these.

As to the Nightmare Court question, there are places in the game where we deal with the fact that, in the war against Mordremoth, we're pretty much on the same side. Nightmare Court don't want to follow anyone blindly...not the Pale Tree and not Mordremoth.

Our currently supported gamemodes are Conquest and Stronghold. Courtyard still has a place in custom arenas, but it won't be returning to Unranked or Ranked arena.

Thanks. Days like this are some of the reasons I love working here. (Well, not the Colin leaving part.) I'm proud of ANet too.

We are doing both. :) The upcoming blog posts will talk about the features Tyler listed in more details.

We currently don't have plans for match sizes larger than 5v5 in PvP. When it comes to PvP, we've seen in the past that once we get above 5v5, match quality and individual skill tends to matter less the more players we add, so we won't be going higher than 5v5 at the present.

We definitely have a long-term plan! I feel that is really important and something that will help us be sure to emphasize key beats and wrap up threads moving forward, rather than create loose ends.

That being said, there are many ways for us to get to the big milestones along the way, and with every new release/season/xpac, we always do a lot of brainstorming on the best ways to get us there.

And fun fact, we Devs have taken to calling it Steve in meetings. It isn't official, but it makes us laugh!

The story will definitely pick up in Season 3 where we left off in HoT. I totally understand your concern. As Mike mentioned in his letter, above, we had to take a lot of people off of Living World to focus on getting HoT out the door. This meant that we were left with a larger gap between that content and resuming Living World content. We had originally intended one to more quickly lead into the other. But the next chapter will be coming!

And yes, Canach does rock! He's one of my favorites.

We believe that having distinct meta periods is healthy for the state of PvP, but keeping the meta constantly in flux was frustrating for most players, because things that were effective one day were ineffective the next week.

As we have shown, we're willing to make changes to improve the health of the meta mid-season, but we also don't wish to constantly change the meta during PvP League Seasons in general.

The team has been evaluating what to do in the off season. We don't have a firm plan yet but it is something that is being discussed.

Regarding ranked play, it is our highly competitive mode. While everyone can participate in it, you do need to think of it more like a tournament. That said, we are looking at ways to get higher tier players to where they need to be faster. In S2 we added win streaks which our data has shown has helped a lot to achieve this. Again, no solid plans yet but this is something that the team is keeping a close eye on.

We're aware that there are frustrations with the initial starting period for Season 2 and we are currently planning to improve overall match quality for Season 3, particularly during the start of the season.

Chauncey agrees with you.

Expansion

We're aware that there are still existing pain points on the Battle of Champion's Dusk map and we are actively working to address them.

I'll look at setting up something with the whole Narrative team! It would be fun to chat story with folks.

From John Corpening earlier in the thread:

It is definitely our intent to build new maps for PvP for both Conquest and Stronghold. Before we dig into that, we are taking a pass on making some improvements to our existing maps. We've had some feedback from some of our top players on how some existing maps could be adjusted to be more competitive. Expect to see some adjustments along those lines first.

She is indeed!

Hank the Honey Badger of DOOM!

Or did you mean from the devs?

QA at launch was a very large group (something like 60ish people) in-house, but since then we moved to a leaner model with more testing being done as the content is developed. QAE started up after launch and we are a little more than a hand full of developers now.

Before launch we used Fogbugz, we switched to DevSuite after launch, and recently transitioned to JIRA after the HoT release.

How players move between maps in PvP is different than in the rest of the game and because of that it there are technical limitations on our ability to have players queue from outside the Mists. If we can find a solution to the technical challenges around this we would love to be able to do this but it is a very difficult problem given how the code between these systems work.

Right now, for the purposes of matchmaking, MMR is currently used when searching for players to be on your team (unless you're in a pre-made group, of course). We do not plan on making any changes to matchmaking until after Season 2 has ended.

QA Engineering (QAE) started up after launch, so our strategy was focused around covering the breadth of the game's systems. Now that we have thousands of tests, we've been focusing on automating high risk areas, keeping automation results reliable, catching up with new content changes, proactively automating new features, etc.

We use Tableau and JIRA for analytics and bug tracking. The rest of our tools (test execution, harnesses, instrumentation, reporting) were built in-house. If you're looking for more info, I gave a talk about our test automation tools at GDC last year.

QAE has been "agile" since we started. We made some early mistakes trying partial implementations of SCRUM, but we switched to Kanban a long while back and it just worked for us. I'd say we are better off for having made those mistakes, and learning from them, because the team is still invested in our process.

We have a lot of environments internally. Most dedicated content teams have their own deployment. We run automated tests on as many as we can, all the time.

I think the music team is doing a good job with what they have now:). Maclaine, Lena and Stan all work together and of course with all the live players they use are able to keep up with what we need.

For test automation, we built endpoints into the game client so we can interact with different aspects of the game. We have internal commands we can send to the game server to put ourselves in specific server states, and a verbose set of observable and control endpoints for different client states.

The back-end for the game is basically a cloud of clouds of services. The server teams write unit/component/integration tests for common regressions and high risk areas, but QAE focuses on testing the whole system rather than diving deep into component testing for individual APIs.

Yes

To build on what GM_Awesomeness said:

The biggest changes for QA have been around making sure that QA is positioned to work with customer support teams and the development teams directly, so they can identify risks, and raise those concerns earlier in the development process.

QA Engineering has also taken a step in that direction, spreading most of our team out into development teams to work more closely with designers and programmers as they're building content. We've also invested heavily in building tools (like content unit testing, bots, automation, etc) to support those teams.

T-T-T-TRIPLE KILL