With a new blog entry this weekend, we find out that there will be new Guild Missions, most aimed at smaller guilds.

An important detail to note is that the Bounty Hunt training mission is automatically available to be built once the guild has researched Art of War Level 3. It costs 300 Guild Influence and 72 hours of research time. Instead of Guild Merits, 3000 Guild Influence will be rewarded. This ought to be perfect for the smaller or less active guild that can’t earn at least 1000 Influence a day.

That’s not all there will be additional content in the form of new targets and new rewards. Find out more at the developer blog entry.

Here is some clarification from the forums:

Origionally posted by AnthonyOrdon (Source)

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I have some clarifications for you guys. The intent of the training mission is to make it easier for your small or less active guild to access other guild missions (or acquire anything else you need influence for). It’s not meant to replace standard bounty hunts or augment influence gain for guilds that can already earn a ton of it. To that end:

• The commendations, rares, and silver are not awarded. That reward is specific to actual bounty missions.
• The training mission can be researched and activated as many times as you like. You can stockpile up to 10. Keep in mind that researching a training mission will tie up one of your research slots and that boosting that research with extra influence will ultimately cancel out a portion or all of your gains from the training mission.

I’m happy to answer further questions, but please remain civil in this thread. Thanks!

Regarding Weapons:

Originally posted by AnthonyOrdon (Source)

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The new weapons are exotics. They have unique skins and are only attainable through guild content.

Ascended weapons may be available from guild content at some point in the future, but that hasn’t been decided yet.

The official information page for the next major Guild Wars 2 update– Flame and Frost: The Razing– is now more than just a teaser page. ArenaNet detailed most of the major features being added in the March 26th update as well as hinted about the new advances for The Living Story that we’ll see as the multi-month storyline continues to unfold. Among the new features headed our way, we’ll be receiving a new progression system in WvW that includes new abilities, a fix to current culling issues in WvW, leaderboards, and new guild bounty hunt targets.

Speaking of features, jump past the cut to find out more info on leaderboards and the new guild bounty targets.

This week we talk with Fable from PRX on why PRX is leaving GW2. We get into the nitty gritty about what Arenanet is lacking in the WvW realm of things. We also hint a bit about Archeage and Wildstar!

In a recent interview with a Russian Guild Wars 2 site by the name of GuildWars-2.ru, Colin Johanson, Jeff Grubb, Leah Rivera, John Smith, Mike Ferguson, and Dave Beetlestone talked about a few interesting subjects. One subject that came up was the game’s economy. John Smith, GW2′s Economist, took on a question regarding price imbalances in the game’s economy. Should prices be more balanced, or does the fact that our economy is global and not world-based complicate any balance issues?

Here’s the question that was asked:

And one more for John Smith — after a decisive victory in the ongoing battle against bots, things with Guild Wars 2 economy became much better. However, it seems that there are still problems. For example – it seems like it is nearly impossible to earn money selling food. We mean that it is mostly more profitable to sell ingredients, than to craft food and sell it. Do you plan to change this? If yes, then how do you plan to change it? In general, what changes can we expect in Guild Wars 2 economy?

Keep reading to see the rather detailed answer.

Isaiah Cartwright had an announcement on the official forums yesterday regarding the loot chests that are a part of the mega boss dynamic events that happen on most maps. At the moment, the special loot chest guarantees a once-a-day rare drop for every character. This is being changed to a new system that will only allow the guaranteed rare/exotic/pre-cursor item to drop once a day per account. Here are the details:

Originally posted by Isaiah Cartwright (Source)

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In the next release we will adjust the way that world mega bosses award their loot. The current chests will stay lootable once per day per character, but each boss’s guaranteed rare item drop will be moved to a separate chest (visually similar to daily achievement reward chests) that can only be acquired once per day across an account.

Our intention with this change is to keep providing rewarding loot for world mega bosses while avoiding overwhelming participation in boss fights (and overwhelming the economy with rares) from players cycling through each character slot for each boss every day.

Martin Kerstein clarified later in the thread that players still have a chance of randomly obtaining rare/exotic/pre-cursor items from the normal loot tables of the bosses. Only the extra, guaranteed drop will be changed.

One of the many complaints across the server spectrum is that native residents are being pushing into overflows due to players guesting to servers hunting for chests. Here is a fix from Anet that is attempting to fix the issue.

Originally posted by Isaiah Cartwright (Source)

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In the next release we will adjust the way that world mega bosses award their loot. The current chests will stay lootable once per day per character, but each boss’s guaranteed rare item drop will be moved to a separate chest (visually similar to daily achievement reward chests) that can only be acquired once per day across an account.
Our intention with this change is to keep providing rewarding loot for world mega bosses while avoiding overwhelming participation in boss fights (and overwhelming the economy with rares) from players cycling through each character slot for each boss every day.

There has been an uproar on the forums, you can follow the conversation here.

Join Junkies Nation in helping our walker get ready for her walk to help Fight Breast Cancer through the Avon Foundation. Junkies Nation is proud to be part of the fight against breast cancer and we hope that you join us with a small donation.

Our walker is committed to participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. It’s a big commitment, one that will require me to spend the next several months training and fundraising. But breast cancer is a big disease, one that still affects far too many people, and she is determined to do everything she can to help put an end to it.

This walk is being dedicated to her mother, a breast cancer survivor.

The money she raises will be managed and disbursed by the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Crusade to help provide access to care for those who most need it, fund educational programs, and accelerate research into new treatments and potential cures. She’ll be just one of thousands of people who will walk up to 39.3 miles over two days, raising awareness promoting education.

She can’t do this without your help, please donate now.

Link to donation page.

In a recent interview, Forbes interviewed Isaiah Cartwright, GW2’s Lead Designer, about all of the recent additions to Guild Wars 2 and what we might see next around the bend. Cartwright talked about the addition of guild missions and said this interesting tidbit:

“We know there was an initial influence cost that was very high that a lot of smaller guilds weren’t able to get into it, so we’re looking at ways that we can improve that, make smaller guilds more able to compete on the influence gathering area.

But really, our goal for the system is so guilds don’t ever run out of accomplishments and goals they can work at together in order to overcome. So we’re going to add to the system and we’ll make sure we’ll add things for smaller guilds to really be able to compete in this space. But the goal of this system is to be rewards and goals and accomplishments for guilds of all sizes.”

This is great news for players who are part of the smaller guilds that have been struggling to meet the initial starting requirements to begin guild missions.

Cartwright also mentioned in the interview that the ArenaNet team will most likely begin to slow down on adding new features and currencies to the game as the focus shifts to improving and tightening current features and in-game systems. For more information, check out the full interview.

Habib Loew shared an informative developer blog with the Guild Wars 2 community yesterday that detailed how the WvW culling issues will be fixed during the next major update. He also detailed a couple of new display options that players will be able to use in order to ensure their computers can handle heavy character model load. Character models will have three display options: High resolution model, lower resolution fallback model, and nameplate only. Players will able to customize the amount of character models showing on-screen as well as the quality of the models using the following UI options:

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.

For more information, see the full developer blog. Keep reading to see an important forum response Colin Johanson issued regarding the culling fix.

ArenaNet is still adjusting how structured PvP tournaments work in Guild Wars 2. The latest change is a new map rotation. Instead of rotating to a new map once per week, tournament maps will now rotate to a different one twice per week– on Tuesdays and Fridays. This change first took place yesterday.

Here are the current maps for the rotation:

Originally posted by Tyler Bearce (Source)

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Starting this week, we’ll be rotating the map for 2-Team Tournaments twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Today: Forest of Niflhel
Friday: Legacy of the Foefire