Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

Since the launch of the roller beetle, we’ve seen some players asking whether we’ll update previously-released mount skin packs, such as the Branded Mounts Pack or the recently released Awakened Mounts Pack, to include roller beetle skins. We will not be retroactively adding the roller beetle to previously released mount packs, but we will provide options for roller beetle skins in the Gem Store and will provide details in the future.

Regarding the wall smashing specifically, it is currently planned to add this behavior to the engage skill as well.

One of the design requirements I was given for the beetle was that it not displace other mounts for everyday short distance travel needs. Short of cutting the top speed of the beetle, which I considered a non-viable solution, starting the mount in a state where it couldn't immediately boost was the best compromise. The zero to full charge time was tuned to be about right for the delay between successive boosts, and from internal testing with stakeholders it was decided that it was also the correct delay before boosting after mounting up. Now that the mount has been live for a bit and players have had time to use it extensively, I've been comparing player experiences with our own internal notes. While I can't promise anything, it's possible there are some ways to soften the pain points of using the beetle while still keeping the other mounts desirable.

I answered a similar question at the link below, but the short version is yes, it's something that's on my mind but no solid work has happened yet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/8vm8jv/living_world_season_4_long_live_the_lich_devs/e1ohew9/

Thanks it means a lot to see the fans enjoying the cinematics so much! A lot of work was put into them!

Not immediately, though this is something I want as much as you do. I want to make sure we do it right though - I love seeing all of the player-created race courses in the meantime!

There wasn't one issue, it was many. We were still making balance changes to the mount, the cutscenes were still being polished, we had game breaking bugs in instances and in some of the events, and as a whole the team felt that the content wasn't good enough to ship.

1) A lot of what we were doing was to change how we were developing content and when we were syncing with the teams at large. The stories that we are telling are complicated enough that when you span across multiple teams that are all in flight at the same time in different parts of the production process, it meant that sometimes things were getting missed, or we had to course correct on things fairly late in development and it was painful for teams to adjust. This episode specifically lost time due to these types of corrections that forced us to look at the scope of the episode. When teams review their content with leads and directors has also changed to allow the team better visibility in to how their work is progressing and how their content lines up with the teams before and after them.

B) There are discussions happening about changes we can make, nothing that I can announce yet. Part of the reason why you can't explore the entire city was because of the time necessary ...

I can at least answer #3:

Fractal reworks are still a thing for us, absolutely. For minor tweaks, we do them as there is time, then find a suitable window to bundle them up for shipping. The larger reworks take more time and effort to design and then get through the approvals process. Ben is working on a redesign for a couple fractals that need to be brought up to current standards right now, actually.

Lost Precipice was always a guild hall. I don’t know exactly which space you are referring too, however there is definitely way more space in the original two guild halls than was strictly necessary. Part of this space was to give us room for future unknown features. Part of it was for stretch goals that we ended up not having time for. And part of it, I’m sure, was just the map designer having fun.

They were designed to be part of this map exclusively. They had a little more integration in the story early on, but some of that was lost. We had started discussing allowing them in other maps, but at the point the discussion happened it was too late to do it with the amount of testing we deemed needed for such a change. That said, we are discussing the possibility of loosening the restriction in the future.

This has unfortunately been low priority, since there are a lot of players who don't have their Luck maxed, but I agree, the system needs something to use your excess Luck for.

I’m trying really hard to find a way to answer the Marketing team question in a way that isn’t obnoxiously pedantic, but the short answer is that there were articles etc around the episode, whether or not they felt like the sort of coverage that one might find personally interesting.
That said, we’re always looking for new and different ways to promote episodes before or after they’re live and I’m all ears on suggestions for content that folks personally find appealing. Whether or not we can act on all that feedback is, of course, another matter.

The cinematics can vary greatly depending on scope, but usually they take us anywhere between 3-6 months from storyboard to finish. The Joko one in particular took us a bit to get right with newly implementing mocap and was closer to the 6 month time frame.

Having the pc in the cinematic provides an extra challenges for us, and was one of the more difficult things about that cinematic.

It is exceptionally likely that you'll see collections in the future take you back to core tyria maps. As for core-tyria-only collections, it's possible (I'd even say likely) that we would make some, but probably not as part of a Living World episode.

I don't know if there are plans, but I will take note of your request!

Due to how the wardrobe works, it's extremely unlikely that accessories will be added. In the long term, I'd like to have a solution for the legendary accessories (turning off the effects if you don't want them, and ways to acquire additional accessories for alts), but it probably won't be through the wardrobe system.

We've made a couple changes already to the Meta to better reward players for their efforts and are continuing to talk about different options regarding the map as a whole moving forward. Sadly I don't have anything concrete that I can announce at this time.

I would definitely like to add rollerbeetle-tuned races in Core Tyria. There could always be some kind of disaster stopping it, and I want to take the time to get it right, but it's very much on the table.

Absolutely. When we announced that we were initially delaying the episode, enough of the content was not stable enough or polished enough for us to feel comfortable releasing it. When we felt we were in a good enough spot, we gave marketing the thumbs up to release the trailer. Internally we were excited and we were building momentum for the release.

Fast forward to the morning of the patch, initial runs through the episode by internal QA before we distributed the build and external players looked good, but quickly started crashing in a way that we didn't see in our development or staging environments. When the map would crash it took down every instance or map running on that server. To protect the rest of the game we isolated all of the new instances to specific servers which contained the crashes, but blocked everyone from getting into the new map. The rest of the day we were investigating the crash reports which gave us completely bogus data and was a red herring to the...