Rankings provided by Habib Loew.
Source: GW2 Official Forums

We all have things we love about Guild Wars 2, places that make us cheer out and say “yes, this is my ultra-mega place!” We all have classes, abilities, and features we’re passionate about, either negatively or positively. This is a place to share all that. Once a week I’ll be raising a Guild Wars 2 question to the community– hopefully an interesting one– and we’ll share our opinions. I’ll start off with my opinion just to get the ball rolling, but these questions will not have any right or wrong answers, so feel free to argue with me to your heart’s content!

One of the recent hot topics on the official GW2 forums has been the subject of grind in Guild Wars 2. What is grind, exactly? The easiest way to define grind in an MMO is to compare it with how we normally think about the saying “back to the ol’ grind.” It refers to work, right? Going to a boring 9 to 5 job day after day, repeating the same, uninspiring tasks. That’s a grind.

Now, in an MMORPG grind can refer to a few things. Usually weeks worth of daily quests are the perfect example. Want something cool? Better prepare to do something boring for a while to get it. Farming over and over for certain materials or extra cash also fits. Running dungeon run after dungeon run to the point where you’re kind of sick of the place is another good example.

Origionally posted by Habib Loew (Source)

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In the January update we’ll be making a couple of preliminary changes to WvW.

1. The first of our engine changes will be coming on line to help improve character load times by using fallback models.

2. We’ll be switching over to the culling methodology that we trialed in December.

The engine change we’re making uses fallback models to represent characters until their detailed models are fully loaded. The fallback models are cached so that they can display without any asset load delay and there is a distinct fallback model for each race/gender/armor-class combination. As a result of this change players will be able to see characters represented as fallback models as soon as those characters are reported to the client. Once the specific, detailed model for a given character is completely loaded from disk the fallback model will be replaced with the detailed model. This visual compromise will help to ensure that players see other characters as quickly as possible in WvW. Please note that this change does not eliminate delays due to culling, it only addresses delays due to asset load times. Players on higher spec machines would therefore expect to see fallback models less often than players on lower spec machines. This change also lays the groundwork for more extensive uses of fallback models in future updates.

In December we ran a one matchup trial of an updated culling system. Based on all the feedback we received, both during and after the trial, we will be transitioning to the updated culling system that we used in the trial. This update allows the culling system to handle allies and enemies separately so that being surrounded by a group of allies will not impact the culling of enemies (and vice-versa). The general consensus after the trial is that this system lead to a better player experience in WvW. We further saw that some of the issues people had with the new system were related to asset load times rather than culling issues so making this change in combination with our character loading improvements should lead to an improved overall experience. It is important to note, however, that while we believe this change is an improvement to the WvW experience it does not fully address the issues with culling and we are still working towards our goal of removing culling from WvW completely. This change is intended to give players an improved WvW experience while we continue work on our more comprehensive solution.

While this update only contains a couple of visible changes to WvW it lays a lot of important groundwork for future updates. We have some exciting changes coming and this update is just the beginning!

Habib Loew also posted a second time for clarification, please continue to read to see his response.

Recently while leveling up a new character, I was looking for a way to get the job done faster. Sure the game is fast enough, but if you’ve seen the content you want to hit max level as fast as possible. There are many methods to speed leveling, from running the Centaur Loop in western Kessex Hills at lower levels, to grinding NPCs in the WvW Borderlands. But nothing is as fast as crafting your way to success.

Leveling up a craft from 0 to 400 nets you 10 easy levels and we’ve found some guides by Qorthos that give you a shopping list of goods and instructions on how to level these the most efficient way.

The earth and sky will both erupt on Tyria beginning January 28th, when a new, multi-stage narrative event will begin to unfold in Guild Wars 2. This event will be a prelude to the next couple of months and major updates headed our way. In Flame and Frost: Prelude, we’ll see the long-awaited guesting feature as well as an improved achievement system with laurels that can be used to purchase special rewards, ascended amulets, new items in the gem store, improvements to WvW as well as the in-game UI, and a special Temple of the Silent Storm paid tournament week. Here’s a teaser on the tournament week:

“From January 28—February 4 the regular eight-team/three-round paid tournaments will be replaced by two-team/single-round paid tournaments in the Temple of the Silent Storm map. After the week is over, we’ll add Temple of the Silent Storm to the regular rotation of both free and paid tournaments.”

For all of the details and a cool wallpaper, check out ArenaNet’s Flame and Frost: Prelude information page.

If you’ve ever played any of the melee professions and/or weapon styles and perform a lot of dodge rolls while fighting, there’s a good chance that you’ve experienced a bug that’s been in Guild Wars 2 for a quite a while now. The bug happens during certain chain auto-attacks of melee weapons and will sometimes cause a dodge to fail. It seems to be most easily reproduced using slower weapons such as the Guardian and Warrior Hammer and Greatsword, although Thieves, Rangers, and even Mesmers can also be affected by the bug.

So, what happens? If you hit dodge at the precise moment when the cast bar for a chain attack is firing off, you may find that the dodge animation and movement displacement doesn’t happen, but you still lose Endurance. For a good write-up of what weapons cause the bug, check out this thread on the official forums. And for those who have experienced the bug, ArenaNet has some good news! The team has finally found a potential fix for the issue and plans on implementing it during the next full game update. Here’s the dev quote:

Originally posted by Jason King (Source)

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Good news: we have a potential fix for this issue in the next full update! Thank you for your patience, everyone!

Colin Johanson sat down with ZAM recently and answered more questions from the community about the upcoming changes to GW2 over the next few months. Here’s one of the questions he answered regarding rewards:

Along with a need for increasing the fun of fighting non-standard mobs, Johanson was also clear that more incentive is needed to get players leaping on creatures, such as veterans or champions, rather than sneaking around them to hit nodes. This is good news for those who have repeatedly slammed against high HP mobs, only to get a Dark Stained Claw.

“A lot of what we’re looking at this year is how do we ensure that our reward systems are strong enough across all of these creatures in the game and all the things you do to make it worthwhile. One of the things we want to do is to make sure we’re not forcing you to go play one specific part of the game as the best way to be rewarded. We want you to pick the parts of the game that you’re excited about and you want to play and ensure that you’re being rewarded for doing that. Making these creatures more exciting is one thing but we have to make sure you’re rewarded for the time you put into them as well.”

To read the rest of the interview head over to ZAM today.

In case you didn’t know, ArenaNet has a SoundCloud page set up for Guild Wars 2, which is a community created for sharing music and other audio tidbits. They’ve recently made some fun additions to the page, and on top of the original audio files for many of the Wintersday music clips, fans can enjoy audio and music segments from the The Lost Shores event, Shadow of the Mad King, and the newest addition– voiceover outtakes!

Outtakes are always a blast, and these Guild Wars 2 outtakes aim to please. They can be found along with the other Guild Wars 2 music and audio goodies right here. Simply hit the orange “Play” buttons to take a listen. Definitely a good page to bookmark. Oh, and before you ask– yep, it’s all free. Enjoy!

During this live stream, a lot of questions were answered in regards to the 2013 update blog that Colin Johanson wrote this week. We got confirmation on a few things and there are a few others items that we learned.

The highlights concern a nerf to AOE damage across the board. Arenanet will attempt to rebalance the usage of AOE attacks. The example they gave was that if your single target attack did 10 damage, and your AOE did 8 damage to 5 targets; a player would most likely use the AOE all the time. They do not want this to be the case, so expect some major nerfs to this in the future.

Yesterday we received some big news– Guild Wars 2 will finally have the long-awaited guesting feature beginning on January 28th. ArenaNet posted a developer blog detailing how the feature will work and what restrictions will come with it. Guesting will work for all types of gameplay except World vs. World. Since players will be able to guest on different worlds within their region, players won’t be able to transfer between worlds for free after this date. After January 28th, full world transfers will remain on a 7-day timer, but will cost Gems. Population restrictions may also apply.

Later in the day, we also saw a detailed explanation on why guesting will only work between worlds in the same region (North American and European count as separate regions). Here is what ArenaNet had to say:

Originally posted by Martin Kerstein (Source)

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Let me explain to you why you cannot guest on worlds in another region.

There are two databases: European player data is stored in our European datacenter, American player data is stored in our American datacenter. This is to ensure that people in these regions can still properly play in case there is an issue with the connection between the datacenters.

When you do a world transfer from the US to the EU (and vice versa) your player data is transferred from one datacenter to the other. This is not the case with guesting, as you are still “registered” on your home world.

I understand that some of you are disappointed that you cannot guest on worlds in another region, but considering the complexity of internet routing, our main priority is to ensure that players have as much of an uninterrupted game experience as possible, which is the reason why we have two datacenters.