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)

---

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.

I know, I know. Wintersday is over. But that doesn’t mean the music stops! I think it’s safe to say that music will be a major appeal to many Guild Wars 2 fans from now on, thanks to the lovely Unbreakable Bell item. Speaking of which, we’ve got a treat today for Guild Wars 2 fans who happen to also be Portal fans. One talented fan took Portal’s “Still Alive” end title track and performed it using nothing but the Unbreakable Bell, GW2′s in-game organ, and a bit of editing (okay, more than a bit). It’s nothing short of impressive!

Keep reading to see the video.

Colin took to the forums today to respond to a few questions. Here’s one:

I’m kinda diggin’ the announcement that achievements will have value, even if it ultimately ends up being nothing but cosmetic stuff. However, I’m a bit concerned that my 4200+ points will go -poof-.

So, do we get tokens for our existing points? Is the exchange going to be 1 to 1?

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

---

The initial version will only be for daily/monthly achievements (this will not be retroactively rewarded.) Later you’ll see a system in place that rewards more expanded achievements points which will retroactively reward all achievements already earned, yes.

However, there are some achievements which are infinitely repeatable currently. It is highly likely so this new system isn’t broken we’ll need to cap those and people who have made insane progress down one of those lines will lose some of their progress to get back to the cap. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go bonkers trying to progress an infinitely repeatable achievement category in anticipation of the release of this system, as you will likely lose some points/progress if you take it to an extreme number.

We’re still working out the details on the system, so that’s about as far into detail as I can go currently.

…

Re Examples of rewards

---

In going back to that whole “let people play the way they want to play” concept:

We’re going to hold off on adding most of the daily achievements that send you to specific parts of the game until we’ve added the ability to select from a list (like 4/6.) The initial version you’ll see with rotating daily achievements won’t feature too many new achievement options, since we don’t want to do more specific type achievements without giving you the choice to pick from a list of stuff you’re more excited about.

Today, Colin Johanson posted a long awaited developer blog that gives us insight into the next six months of development for Guild Wars 2. The main focus of the changes come in the forms of rewards and incentives for players to be playing different parts of the game. Colin breaks down the game into three spheres: sPVP, PVE and WvW. Each portion of the game should see some upgrades to the way players earn rewards. Whether it’s achievements that reward tokens to buy gear or WvW prestige ranks that award new skills and abilities, big things are coming for Guild Wars 2.

Keep reading to find out more.

This week on guildcenter we have two guests from Blackgate: Evo X and Sanjo of Lords of the Dead. We discuss the news of the week including some new exploits and responses from Mike Furgeson. We also talk about what we’d like to see in the upcoming updates as well as some hints about in game strategy.

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

---

Hey guys,

Just a quick update on where the whole scavenger hunt system stands since I know that’s a topic many of you have brought up recently. We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this is something we want to do in the future and we’re in the midst of designing how this would function, but no one is actively building this feature and you should not expect in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.
We are however working on expanding reward systems to make them more re-rewarding across all parts of the game, making the open world more rewarding, and adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.

Some of these additions will come as early as the January release, and will get covered in more detail in the next week or two as well release all the details about this release once testing has signed off it’s all ready to go in January. (we’ll also provide a high level summary of our goals with reward systems, etc. in our 2013 blog post, which should be out next week)

Ever wanted to hop on, quickly take care of your daily achievement, and move on to something more fun? Matt Visual over on YouTube shows Guild Wars 2 players an extremely fast way of farming the needed amount of kills and events needed to nab the bit of extra karma and cash obtained from doing the achievement every day. His favorite farming location happens to be Queensdale, and he directs players on which mobs to kill and provides a sample route. As a bonus, he’s a pretty entertaining guy.

Keep reading to check it out.