Braham’s Story

Seven-year-old Braham stood with his back to the corner, heart hammering. Hands behind his back, he clenched them, nails digging into his palms. His eyes burned with unshed tears.

The shaman had arrived and was bending over the sickbed, preparing Borje the Sun Chaser, Braham’s father, for his final journey. The shaman’s quiet song-of-sending rose and fell in time with, then counterpoint to, the shifting firelight. He smelled of evergreen, and the bone beads in his beard clicked together as he moved his thin-lipped mouth.

“Braham,” croaked Borje from his bed, and taking his cue, the shaman receded to a far corner as smoothly as fog on a gray morning.

Braham stood taller, but hesitated. He didn’t want to go any closer, didn’t want to see his father in this state, and was afraid of what it all meant.

Borje turned his palm up and spread his thick, worn fingers. “Come here.”

Bare feet silent on the pine floor, Braham crossed the distance to stand beside the fur-covered bed. He made every effort to sound strong as he said, “I’m here.” He put his small hand on his father’s arm.

His skin stood out starkly against his father’s darker tone. He’d been told he was a mix of light and dark, his mother having had snowy skin and his father with his brown bear coloring. It had never bothered Braham, until that moment, when he wished more than anything that he could blend more smoothly with his father, be more like him, the great warrior, the legendary hero—Braham’s hero—who lay broken and failing upon his deathbed. That may have been the first time Braham ever felt anger at the stranger who was his mother, for she had made him less like his father.

“Wolf is coming for me,” said Borje. “And I must go with him to the Mists. You understand what this means?”

Braham’s throat tightened painfully, so that he could only nod.

“You…” A fit of coughing shook Borje.

Braham tightened his hold on his father’s arm as if he could share his seven-year-old strength.

“You will stay here in Cragstead,” continued Borje when his body had calmed. “You will shelter at Rugnar’s Steading with Yngvi and Brynhildr. Your strong back and sharp teeth will protect them.  They are your pack now.”

Braham’s legs grew weak, and he leaned heavily on the bed.

Borje extended an arm and coaxed Braham onto the bed beside him. Braham lay as he had when he was an infant, curled against the fiery warmth of his father’s bulk. The tears he had fought so hard, spilled into the furs where he buried his face, and Borje’s arm pulled him close.

“Your mother’s name is Eir Stegalkin. Remember that, but I will tell you what I told Yngvi and Brynhildr. No one must send word to your mother that I am gone. I forbid it. She is capable of great things, as are you. She must not be tempted to stray from her path. Wolf walks beside her. But you mustn’t worry. He walks beside you as well, my son. Never forget that.”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the crackling of the fire and the occasional rattle of the shaman’s beads. Braham fell asleep against his father and awakened when someone lifted him from the bed and carried him away.

His father had gone with Wolf.

Brand New Items in the Gem Store Now!

Stay warm on those chilly spring nights with our brand new bonfire, lend your weapons a fiery look with new Fused weapon skins, or change your character’s name!

Check out what’s new in the Gem Store today!

• Keep Warm with the New Bonfire

  Gather around the warm glow of the Communal Boost Bonfire, a new item that provides powerful buffs to players who stoke the flames.
  

• New Name Change Feature

  Tired of your handle? Rename your character with the new Name Change feature!
  

• New Fused Weapon Skins

  Give your weapons that hybrid Molten Alliance look with 16 new Fused weapon skins, which can be found in the Black Lion Chest.
  

Available Now in the Gem Store!

Log into Guild Wars 2 and press “O” to access the Black Lion Trading Company for these great offers and more!

Flame and Frost: The Razing is Now Live!

Defend the innocent from the hybrid threat of the Molten Alliance. Join the norn Braham and Rox the charr on desperate missions to defend their homelands! Earn new titles and abilities with the new World vs. World progression system, track down three new fugitives in the latest Guild Missions, and more!

Learn more!

World vs. World: The End of Culling

If you’ve ever played World vs. World in a large group, you’ve probably noticed that there were some enemy players that you couldn’t see. That was an unfortunate side effect of a process calledculling. I’m pleased to announce that in the upcoming patch on March 26, we’re going to turn culling off completely in WvW. This will make invisible enemies (except those using invisibility skills, of course) a thing of the past.

How different of an experience will that be for WvW players?  I think these before and after screenshots make it pretty clear:

Culling ON

Culling OFF

So What Is Culling, Exactly?

Normally as you move through the world, any character (either an NPC or another player) within a fairly large circle around you gets reported to your client. This lets the client draw the character, allows you to select the character as an attack target, etc.

In order to cut down on the network resources that were used by the game and to reduce the client-side system requirements, we implemented a culling system, which imposed a limit on the number of characters that could ever be reported to your client. This meant that only the characters closest to you would actually get reported.

“By removing culling, we’ve been able to [...] greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.”

While this achieved our goal of limiting bandwidth and client-side resource utilization, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing large battles in WvW to be confusing, as there were sometimes many enemy players that were completely invisible. Additionally, there were side effects of culling which could result in stealth characters getting up to two seconds of additional invisibility when coming out of stealth. By removing culling, we’ve been able to eliminate these negative side effects and greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.

For the sake of clarity, I want to make a distinction between our usage of the term “culling” in this post (meaning to limit the amount of data the server reports to the client) and other uses of the word “culling” related to graphics (discarding backward facing triangles in models, triangles or whole models that are occluded, etc.).  Our changes are to the client/server culling and have no bearing on basic graphics operations in the GW2 client.

A World vs. World without Culling

Now that every client will know about every character within range, we’ve provided a new set of WvW options to control how all those characters will be rendered. Setting these options should allow players with various hardware configurations to enjoy WvW at a reasonable frame rate.

Under the new system, characters can be rendered in three different ways:

• High resolution models - These are the high-res character models that you’re all already familiar with.
• Lower resolution fallback models - These are the models that we’ve been using as placeholders in WvW while the hi-res models load. They differ depending on race and armor class, though human, sylvari, and norn share the same model.
• Nameplates only - We don’t render the model at all and instead only show the nameplate for that character.

We’ve also added two new options to allow players to select how WvW characters are displayed:

• WvW Character Limit - This controls how many of the reported characters render with a model and how many are rendered only with nameplates.
• WvW Character Quality - This controls how many of the characters rendered with a model use the high resolution models and how many use the lower resolution fallback models.

The World vs. World team has been working on this change for quite a while now and we’re very excited to see it go live. Epic battles have always been a part of WvW and now players will get to experience them in their full glory!

We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Living Story: Evolution

It’s me again, Angel McCoy, from the Living Story team, and I’m writing this to share a bit more insight into what’s happening and what’s planned for our Living Story content. We’ve been working hard at it.

These first couple months of teaser content have allowed us to ramp up to make the long-term Living Story an even fuller and more satisfying experience for you all. As designers have come off other projects and joined us, we’ve increased the amount of content we’ll be delivering, starting at the end of March.

We’re also listening to your feedback and tweaking our content here and there in response. We’ve been reading what you’ve been saying on the Guild Wars 2 forums and across the Internet.

Storytelling in an MMO

“…we’ve increased the amount of content we’ll be delivering, starting at the end of March.”

Over the past few months of design work on the Living Story, we’ve overcome many challenges. Writing story in an MMO environment resembles building a giant puzzle. We want to avoid temporal paradoxes, for example. From a player perspective, the Personal Story is unfolding simultaneously with the Living Story, but how can characters be in both places at the same time? Furthermore, do we all presume that So-and-So is dead, because he died at level 80, or do we assume the opposite? There’s a minefield of possible paradoxes that we have to carefully move through when writing the Living Story, and we’ve had to shift our thinking a bit to accommodate that. This has taken a lot of thought and forethought.

In order to make this easier on ourselves, and on you, we’ll be introducing a set of characters specific to the Living Story, at the end of March. Hint: one’s a norn, and one’s a charr. I’m not going to tell you more than that right now, but know that you will soon be meeting the first two of these characters, and we hope you like them as much as we do.

Where to Go and What to Do

Last month, I told you about the heralds located at the exits in every city, and we’re continuing to utilize these rumor-mongers to give more general details on where to go and what’s happening. We’ve also introduced the Living Story Achievements to make the directions clearer, and we’ve identified other ways to message your mission to you.

We’ll be utilizing non-voiced conversations with options that clearly relay the next step or location on the Living Story journey. You’ll find these on characters involved directly in the arc, so take the time to talk (F) to people if you are interested in knowing what to do and where to go next. We don’t want to over-message, so some of the onus is upon you to read the conversations and look for the characters most logically in a position to guide you.

Another great resource for knowing what to do next or to find out what you might have missed is the Guild Wars 2 forums!

Pay-Off

We’ve had long meetings, with our most colorful thinking caps on, to discuss how we will pay off all your patience during these early months of teaser content, and we’ve come up with some thrilling storylines that we feel will keep you intrigued and get you even more deeply involved in the ongoing progress of the Living Story. Aside from the Living Story main characters, we’ll also be surprising you with interesting villains, one of whom will become your personal nemesis. Again, no spoilers allowed, so I can’t tell you more than that, but you’ll recognize this sassy character when you see…um, him/her/it. <grin>

With the February release, we’re further advancing the Flame and Frost storyline in fun ways, but we still consider this to be teaser content. You’ll get to experience saving homesteaders and ranchers in a more direct way, no longer just as volunteers, but becoming actual defenders of the residents of the Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau.

All our hard work is beginning to bear fruit, and we’re as excited as you are—maybe even moreso—to finally see the Flame and Frost story arc revealed in full. It’s only a matter of time, so hang in there, and stock up now on sodas and snacks.

I’ll see you in my Dream.

Robert Hrouda on Upcoming Changes to Dungeon Mechanics

Hey folks, I’m Robert Hrouda, a content designer on Guild Wars 2. In the coming months, we’ll make some changes to dungeon mechanics to make them a more fun and challenging experience. I wanted to give you a heads-up on our plans for phase 1 of our dungeons evolution—specifically, the removal of “res-rushing”—as well as a brief overview of our plans for phase 2.

“Res-rushing” is when a player uses a waypoint to resurrect immediately after being defeated in a dungeon and then runs back to the fight, instead of waiting for their party members to resurrect them.

Dungeons were designed to be highly focused on teamwork. The current res-rushing mechanic discourages the type of behavior we intended when a fellow player goes down. We hope that by eliminating res-rushing, we’ll bring dungeons more in-line with our original design goals, which are based around team play and strategy.

With this upcoming change, defeated players will be unable to use waypoints while their party is in combat. Players will only be able to use waypoints if the party wipes or withdraws from combat.

When we were making this change, we looked at the events and encounters where our data showed players being encouraged to res-rush and re-balanced them to allow for the safe removal of res-rushing. There are a few standout examples of this, and our patch notes will include a full list of changes we are making to existing dungeon content.

What’s Happening in Phase 2?

Phase 2 of our dungeons evolution will see a lot of changes to bosses and enemies. We plan on taking a good, hard look at the health values and mechanics of our elites and bosses, and in turn how we reward players for their time investment and risk. This will include looking into every boss in our dungeons and seeing what we can do to enhance the gameplay experience in order to make more memorable and strategic encounters.

Do you have any thoughts or feedback on these upcoming changes you want to share with us? Head over to the dungeon forum and join the conversation: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons. We value player input during this process and look forward to hearing from you!

New Rewards and the Achievements System

Hey, everybody! I’m Matt Wuerffel, one of the game designers on Guild Wars 2. I wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the things we’ve been working on recently: new rewards and updates to the achievements system.

New Rewards—Laurels

One of the first new reward systems we’re adding is based on a new currency: the laurel.

In addition to the normal rewards, players can earn one laurel for completing their daily achievement category and ten laurels for completing their monthly achievement category. Laurel merchants have been added to all of the major cities of Tyria, and they have a wide range of rewards to choose from. Some of the highlights:

• Utility Infusions—a new category of infusion that provides powerful boosts to noncombat statistics, like gold find and experience gain.
• Ascended Amulets—offensive, defensive, and utility variants of the next slot of ascended gear.
• Ascended Rings—non-agony versions of the ascended rings from the Fractals of the Mists.
• Crafting Starter Kits—one-time account purchases that contain everything you’ll need to get your feet wet in each of the eight crafting disciplines.
• WvW Blueprints—everything you need to rain fire on your enemies in the Mists.
• Support Items—new boosters, advanced harvesting tools, and crafting trophy bags.
• Unique Minis—Goedulf, the mythical wolf-cub spirit that protects lost norn kids, and (my personal favorite) the runner-up in the Divinity’s Reach Fanciest Cat competition: Chauncey von Snuffles III.

The list of rewards will continue to grow and expand as we add content to the game, but we’re committed to the philosophy that you should be able to get the most powerful rewards simply by playing the game the way you want.

Achievements System Updates

In addition to laurels, we’re adding a new achievement tracking UI (user interface) to provide relevant information and quick access to the achievements panel. We’re also adding new daily achievements, and we’ll rotate daily achievements each day.

These updates are just the first step. We are reexamining the way that daily and monthly achievements work and how they plug into the achievements system as a whole. In the future, we’ll be adding support to allow you to complete your dailies by finishing a subset from a larger list. We want to give you the freedom to play the content that interests you. The list will change daily to provide an array of options for earning your laurels. Pick what interests you, play, and be rewarded!

Down the road, we’ll also be adding a reward structure to total achievement points, and we’ll be looking at revamping portions of existing UI to help players understand all the different kinds of content they can play and the types of rewards available. Once we have that framework in place, we’ll be able to really expand on the content accessible through the achievements system and provide you with even more new and exciting ways to play the game.

Achievements aren’t the only thing we’re looking at. We’ll continue to implement new systems and rewards to support the living world of Guild Wars 2, and we’ll share more information as we get closer to releasing them. But for now, thanks for your time, and see you in Tyria!

New Items and an Updated Favorite in the Gem Store!

A new year means new merchandise on the shelves in the Black Lion Trading Company!

We’ve got brand new, permanent additions to the store that will keep you looking stylish whether you’re in town or in combat, plus a redesign of my favorite item of all time. The changes just keep coming, so don’t delay—visit the Gem Store today!

• Improved! Evon Gnashblade’s Box ‘o Fun

  More effects! New lower price! My favorite item in the whole store just got even better and more affordable. Now you’ll have more control over the selection in the Box, which means more fun!
  

• New Riding Broom

  The perfect mode of transport for the elegant and the footsore alike, the Riding Broom can be used in towns or the open countryside. A permanent addition to the Gem Store, this streamlined broom (which is only for riding) is now available to non-witches!
  

• New Plush Quaggan Backpack Cover

  This adorable skin will turn your backpack into a cuddly, customized accessory that will have everyone saying, “Coo!” Except for charr; we don’t say “coo.”
  

Available now in the Gem Store!

Log in to Guild Wars 2 and press “O” to access the Black Lion Trading Company for these great offers and more!

Festive Lionguard Leaving Tyria

With the holiday season at an end, the last remaining Wintersday merchant is closing shop. Make sure to finish your exchanges before January 28th PST, when the Festive Lionguard will be packing his wares and leaving Tyria.

Guesting is Coming!

CITIZENS, I have an important announcement to make.

Previously, we’ve talked about a feature called guesting, which allows you to play with your friends on other worlds. The wait is over! Guesting is coming to a world near you with our update on January 28^th!

Before I go into more detail about how it will work and what kinds of restrictions exist, I want to talk about a very important change that will come with the introduction of guesting: free world transfers will no longer be available. With the current restriction of one transfer every 7 days in place, make sure that you will be on the world you intend to play on before January 28^th, because after that date, you’ll have to pay a gem fee to transfer worlds.

With that out of the way, here is how guesting works:

Guesting allows you to play on a world other than your home world. Just follow these steps:

• On the character select screen, click the “World Selection” button.

• Choose a world you would like to guest on and select the “Guest” button.

• Select any of your characters and select “Play” to log in to the world you picked.

Guesting comes with a few restrictions:

• Because (different from a world transfer) we are not moving your character between data centers, you may only guest on worlds in the same region as your home world. Players on North American home worlds cannot guest on European worlds or vice versa.
• You may not participate in World vs. World on your guest world. If you choose to enter World vs. World on the world you are guesting on, you’ll be moved back to your home world. If you want to play World vs. World on the world you’re guesting on, you must perform a full world transfer to that world.
• You’re eligible to guest on only 2 different worlds at a time. Each time you guest on a world, that world becomes one of your eligible guest worlds for the next 24 hours. After 24 hours, you may choose to guest on a different world. You may log in to any world you are eligible to guest on as many times as you wish with no restriction.
• Guesting on worlds that are full or highly populated increases your risk of being put into an overflow map.

As I mentioned above, with the introduction of guesting there will no longer be free world transfers:

• Transferring to a new home world will now cost a gem fee.
• The gem fee for world transfers is based on the population of the world you want to transfer to. Transferring to a high population world will be more expensive.
• Each account is still limited to one world transfer every 7 days.
• Players will still not be able to transfer to worlds that are “Full.”

I am sure many of you are happy to finally being able to play on other worlds with your friends without having to leave your home world, so go forth and guest to your heart’s content (and hug the next quaggan you meet).

Colin Johanson on Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead

Happy 2013 everyone! I wanted to take the time to provide insight on some of the exciting features, events, and stories we intend to bring to Guild Wars 2 in the first half of the New Year.

It’s been a fantastic ride so far – in the few months since Guild Wars 2 launched we’ve sold more than three million games and have become the most critically acclaimed MMO of 2012. We’ve introduced the new Fractals of the Mists dungeon experience, brand-new PvE and PvP maps, events of all sizes, our Lost Shores world event, and two massive holiday events.

And this is just the beginning. Our goals for the New Year are to build on the areas of the game that were successful in 2012, to learn and apply lessons from things that didn’t work as well, and to make sure that 2013 is a year none of us will ever forget.

So what does all of that mean? Let’s dive in:

What Makes GW2 Unique and Successful?

Community and player relationships are key components to what makes Guild Wars 2 tick, and will be a massive part of the game as we evolve it further.

Allowing players to share experiences in an open world where other players are seen as helpful, rather than competition, is a huge component of what makes our game what it is. Open world online games are always strongest when players are encouraged and rewarded to interact as a community, to support other each other, and when the flow of the game ushers players to go places where they run into other players across all levels and have shared experiences. Our shared loot system, dynamic level adjustment system, shared resource nodes, multi-player skill combos, and the ability for every player to revive one another are all examples of key game features that help support this concept of a community-driven experience.

Guild Wars 2 is a game that’s about these shared experiences. Through the dynamic event system, every time you log in, you can experience and share something different in the world with other players. Maybe you’re in a map you’ve been to before and see an event for the first time, or you’re in the midst of an event and it dynamically scales with more players arriving, becoming more epic, or you’re fighting for control of Stonemist Castle in WvW, where each fight can play out differently.

Since launch, we’ve shown our capacity to really build and expand on this system of dynamic events with more unique events that are a living story. These special events and living stories like Wintersday, Halloween, and the Lost Shores invasion are all examples of this style of event we’ve run since the launch of GW2.

These key pillars — a sense of community and a dynamic, living world full of different experiences every time you log in — are what makes Guild Wars 2 what it is. But what does that mean looking forward to 2013?

GW2: The Living World Game

In order to continue to build on the pillars of Guild Wars 2, our focus for the game needs to be on these concepts of building up community and events. We’ve shown some of the promise of a truly living world, but we still have so many ideas on how to take this to the next level. Put simply, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

We will accomplish this is by building a world that has truly unique storylines and event experiences that play out over extended periods of time, that shape the future and world of Tyria, creating stories for everyone to tell about the game for years to come.

We attempted to do this with varying degrees of success with our Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday events. Thanks to each of these events and your feedback, we’ve learned an incredible amount about how to ensure big events like this are successful moving forward.

Our Wintersday event was an example of applying a lot of the lessons learned from the earlier events to ensure we create content that is inclusive, community driven, and most importantly fun. From Wintersday, we discovered still more areas we can improve for future world events to make them even more exciting.

To complement this concept of regular world events with strong stories and themes, we also need to build on and strengthen our existing open world and its persistent content. The more persistent events we can provide in a specific area, the less often each of the events in that area needs to occur, which in turn adds to the sense of an ever-evolving open world.

This means we need to give reasons for players at all levels to explore these areas, to reward them for their time, and to encourage them to play in locations where they will run into each other and experience the community-driven features that make Guild Wars 2 shine. Before we expand our world more, we need to make sure our existing world is as strong as possible, and that it gives reasons for people at all levels to go back and play and explore in the entire game.

So how are we going to do that?

Systems and Rewards Supporting the Living World

To make playing in our open world worthwhile, we’ll make it rewarding enough for players to spend their time there across all levels. It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.

One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system. The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievements that you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like Ascended gear and Infusions. We’ll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together.  Later, we’ll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you’ll only need to do 4 of the 6, so you can choose the achievements that you’re most interested in.

We’ll continue to offer cosmetic rewards such as titles, medals (such as map completion), unique skins, etc., which will remain prizes earned for completing specific parts of the game. These will show off the prestige of your character, but will not make your character more powerful than other characters.

As we look at developing new types of rewards further into 2013, we want to develop systems that are uniquely Guild Wars 2. Our reward systems need to be exciting, and include things you want to earn over time, but we don’t want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won’t see another tier between Ascended and Legendary in 2013 for example. Our goal will be to use our existing reward systems and build new ones that are fun and exciting that step away from the stale gear grind reward systems you see elsewhere. Later in 2013, we’ll begin to introduce more of these systems once we’ve finished rolling out the remaining Ascended gear and Infusions.

What About Guilds? I Want To Do Things with My Friends

Guilds are extremely important to the game. We need to ensure there is a volume of content to foster this strong community/social bond. To that end, we’re working on adding new types of content to the game in early 2013 that will allow guilds to go on missions together. Some of these missions may be content designed specifically for the guild to accomplish within certain constraints or time requirements, while others will see the creation of new content by a guild/s everyone in the world can experience. Over time we’ll continue to expand this system with new guild rewards, missions, and tools to allow guilds of all sizes to play a stronger part in solidifying the communities of the GW2 world.

OK, What About WvW (Or WuvWuh)?

Many of the features, expanded reward systems, and potentially even live event storylines described above will also play a part in World vs. World in 2013. We also have other specific features that we’re focusing on developing for our WvW community that we want to make sure you’re aware of.

Polishing the existing WvW experience to ensure it shines in every way possible is a major goal for us which requires addressing major areas we know need a lot of attention. We’ve been working on two of these projects for a while now, and both have proven far more complicated to solve than we’d hoped, but we’re getting really close and have made tremendous progress.

Firstly, we’ll be adding paid server transfers, with time limitations and WvW restrictions, and guesting ability, which allows players to visit friends on other servers in every part of the game except for WvW. To encourage players to stick with a single server for WvW and fight for the pride of that server, server changes will incur a fee and have time limitations.  Second, we’ll make improvements to culling. We recently ran small tests on Live to help us move towards eliminating as much culling from WvW as possible. The results have been promising, and we have a number of additional culling features in development. If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

We’re adding new features as well. We’ll introduce a system of prestige and advancement specifically designed for WvW. This will give players a progression path where they earn new WvW-only abilities and bonuses, and with them gain prestige and visible titles/recognition. Also, we’ll add a new motivation to the WvW domain that goes beyond the overall weekly score to give more short term reasons to be winning in WvW as well. We’ll discuss all these features in more detail as we get closer to release!

Hey, What About the PvP!?

Much like the other aspects of the game, our PvP part of the game also will be growing by leaps and bounds over the course of 2013.

For those more interested in progression in PvP, we’ll be evaluating our PvP reward systems and overhauling the way PvP operates to make it feel more rewarding and exciting and to give you reasons to log in and compete every day. We’ll be adding systems that make it easier for players who are less competitive to get matched only against people with similar skill sets, and stronger methods for players learning PvP to do so in a safe and fun environment with more information to help their skills grow.

For those more interested in competitive PvP, we’ll be adding the core features required to truly make Guild Wars 2 shine as a competitive game—things like being able to watch other competitors and see major ranked matches to learn how to play better, the ability to host your own custom arenas to set up your own rules and host your own team practices, and visible places for everyone to see rankings of the best teams/players in the world.We also want to make it easier to play games against good opponents, and give the ability to compete in games where ranking matters quickly and easily. Of course, this also means down the road we’ll have major tournaments, prizes, and more to help drive the growth of this competitive PvP community alongside our less hardcore PvP players.

Holy Moley This Got Long – Anything Else?

We’re also focusing on improving a number of other areas; far too many to cover in detail. Examples of some of the major areas we’re working on in the first half of 2013 include:

• Leaderboards on our website where you can compare your abilities with other players to find out who is the best in the world.
• Expanded and re-designed encounters for bosses in dungeons and the open world.
• New types of achievements which tie into the new systems of achievement rewards.
• Continuing to improve the security of the game fighting botters and hackers, as well as improving the games stability by addressing bugs as quickly as possible when they are reported.
• Identifying existing parts of the game that can be improved and made more fun/exciting, and investing the time to ensure everything we’ve built really shines as we move forward.
• Improving the new player experience to make it easier for new players to learn how to play GW2, enter the game world, and more quickly learn the game without being overwhelmed.
• Improving the “looking for group” tool to make it easier to find other players to play with in the game.
• The improvements and fixes to the Fractal dungeons, detailed in Isaiah Cartwright’s blog post here.

Just because it’s not listed here doesn’t mean it’s not being worked on, but hopefully this helps give some insight into where we’re headed in the first half of 2013.

In Closing…

2012 was an amazing year for Guild Wars 2, with the release of the game, the fantastic sales and log in numbers we’ve seen on a daily basis, the fun we have had both playing with and listening to our community, and all the great awards the game has received over the last few months.

But we know this game can be so much more than what we’ve shown so far. We feel like we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of where the world of Tyria can go and what you can expect from an MMORPG. 2013 will be the year we truly launch into that journey, and just as we tried to change the paradigm and expectations of an MMO when we released Guild Wars 2, we now want to raise the bar for what players expect from a live game as well.

As we push the boundaries and do new things with what an online game can be, we’ll likely hit some bumps along the road on the way. With your feedback and support, we’ll learn from those mistakes, grow from them, and be as transparent about them as possible. We’ll also have some amazing moments, and hopefully craft gaming memories you and we will never forget. And though you may not always know it, we’ll be right there in-game playing next to you as well.

In the short term, to provide a guideline on how we’re going to get where we’re going, our January release will be a relatively small one, setting the stage for the story that will play out in February and March. The January release will also provide the groundwork for the major feature additions you’ll see in the larger February and March releases.

Our promise to you in 2013 is to continue to build on the world we’ve built, to make it stronger, to refine and strengthen the game based on the core vision of Guild Wars 2, and to make GW2 an experience unlike any other online game.

Thanks again to all of our players for an amazing 2012, and here’s hoping 2013 is a year none of us forget as we all play our part in the growth and development of Guild Wars 2.

We look forward to seeing you in-game!