Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

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.

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

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.

Expansion

Chauncey agrees with you.

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.

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 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 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 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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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