In a forum post yesterday, Colin Johanson shared some thoughts on what direction ArenaNet may take Magic Find in the future. Many players, as well as the developer team for the most part, agree that Magic Find in Guild Wars 2 is kind of a poorly-implemented stat in hindsight. The team wants to change Magic Find, but from the sounds of it, they are still working on an overall plan with no ETA in clear sight. Here’s what Colin had to say in one thread where players have been responding with some great ideas for altering Magic Find for the better:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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Some fun ideas in here, we’re also actively discussing ways on how we’d best like to alleviate having to make players choose between having better stats, or using magic find. It’s not a choice that’s great for game play and there isn’t really anything that fun about it, even more so when group composition is taken into account. Ideally we’d also like to keep the ability to slowly build your magic find over time, but doing this at the cost of using better stats isn’t the right way to do that.

No ETA on any changes here, just want to point out we agree there is an issue here that goes against what we want Gw2 to be, and is something we want to address.

Colin Johanson shared some interesting information in a WvW thread yesterday evening. For the next week, due to an attempt to even out our server populations a little more equally, ArenaNet will be allowing free world transfers to servers that are currently medium population. Here is the announcement:

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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For the next week, all the medium population servers will be free to transfer to. Might be worth giving one of them a look!

Will incentives like this do more good for our WvW scores than harm? Hard to say, but it’s one option for players to consider.

In a recent interview with IGN, Game Director Colin Johanson explained that ArenaNet isn’t currently working on an expansion for Guild Wars 2, but may consider one in the future. Here is the exact quote:

“Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future,” he explained. “We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got.”

This doesn’t rule out future expansions, of course, but for the now it seems that ArenaNet is merely looking to bolster the current state of Guild Wars 2 and add to our overall experience and enjoyment of the game as it stands. Later on in the interview he also admitted that the team doesn’t ever really want to consider making another sequel. Check out the full IGN article for more information.

What do you think about this news? Does no expansion around the corner mean we’ll have to more to do in-game, or less?

In a recent interview with the folks over GW2Guru, Colin Johanson talked about some of ArenaNet’s plans for future Guild Wars 2 updates. One topic of high interest was March’s planned WvW update. What type of new WvW skills will we see? Will they be class-based, or something more passive and objective related? Here’s what Colin had to say:

Sticking on the topic of the skills, obviously there’s bits of information coming in about the March update, that there will be WvW specific skills. Maybe you can elaborate on those?

Colin: So the WvW progression system doesn’t give players skills, it just gives them new abilities that are specific to WvW and they are not intended to make it so if you’re standing out in the field and you’re fighting 1 on 1 against another player the abilities do not making you more powerful than anyone else in WvW. They just expand your ability to operate in WvW. We don’t want to create a system where like, five years from now someone who’s leveled way down the tree is able to just kill everybody else. Instead it just makes you more functional and it gives you additional abilities that helps your capacity in WvW that doesn’t make you more powerful than anyone else.

Are you able to give an example?

Colin: Like potentially carrying more supply, would be an example, things like that.

It’s like a passive thing that’s not slotted in your bar or anything, it’s just something that’s active in the back?

Colin: Correct.

And there you have it– supply capacity! This is a great tidbit of information for WvWers who were worried about potentially unbalanced combat abilities.

Check out GW2Guru’s full interview here.

Colin Johanson sat down with Dragon Season over lunch and they had quite a long conversation ranging from player created content, UI changes and more. The biggest piece of news of the interview was the discussion about Guild Missions. There is also a tidbit of an upcoming Alliance Chat? Hmm..

What can we expect from guild missions?

Colin: It’s really spread out all over the game and it depends on which type of mission you’re doing. There are actually five completely different types of missions and based on which one it is – bounty hunts, for example, is the really basic one, that’s the one that you can get right off the bat when [February's] release first goes out. You actually have to unlock all the other missions types, so it’s literally going to take months for your guild to build up enough influence to unlock all of them. It’s really a progression here, [...] it’s on the whole unlock tree just like any of the other guild abilities, so you make your way down all that stuff and you’ll use influence to kick off missions as well. So, finally, you’ll have a use for that giant pile of influence. Some guilds are probably going to tear through really quickly cause they’ve got huge piles of it but it is going to take a while. With bounty hunts, you can pick which tier of bounty hunts you go on and it randomly generates bosses in different zones that get spawned because the bounty hunt started and it spreads your guild out all over the place. If you do a really big bounty hunt it will actually spread your guild across five different zones, where there is a boss in each and you have, say, 15 minutes to kill all five of them. So, you actually have to split your guild into five different groups and send them to all the maps and find them to take them out.

Some of us have small guilds, we don’t have 500 members and some challenges could prove quite hard. Are we going to see any collaboration mechanisms set in place?

Colin: Our hope will be that [collaborations] will kinda dynamically come out of this as sort of emergent gameplay. The bounties, for example, have different tiers so there’s a small tier that you can do – even small guilds can get those – you’ve got three bosses in three zones so maybe 10-15 people can do that, a small guild, and you can pick which tier you want to kick off based on how many people you’ve got online. Maybe one of the things that will come out of that is “our guild is going to do the tier 3 bounty which takes a lot more people to do, so let’s get 3 guilds together and our guild will kick one off and you’ll help us do ours and then you’ll kick one off and we’ll help us do yours” and the 3 guilds all work together to accomplish [it]. I think that kind of emergent gameplay hopefully will come out of that for sure. We don’t really know what to expect just because it is so hard to test internally to see what guilds are going to do [when all this goes] live. So, some of this is going to [emerge] when we put it out and we’re just going to see how guilds interact with it and what they do and then it will help us determine what other features and additions we need to work on.

Make sure you read the rest of the interview at Dragon Season.

Yesterday the fine folks at Dragon Season had a nice, long lunch interview with Colin Johanson, Game Director, about a whole bunch of stuff. The interview touched on quite a few subjects, but one popular topic was future planned updates for Guild Wars 2. Yep, we’re talking details! The interview was so long (2 hours), that Dragon Season is releasing the complete interview transcript in batches. For now, they have released parts 1 and 2. Make sure to check out the transcript here. It will be further updated later today.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting tidbit about the guild missions we’ll be getting in the Flame and Frost: The Gathering Storm update coming February 26th:

What can we expect from guild missions?

Colin: It’s really spread out all over the game and it depends on which type of mission you’re doing. There are actually five completely different types of missions and based on which one it is – bounty hunts, for example, is the really basic one, that’s the one that you can get right off the bat when [February's] release first goes out. You actually have to unlock all the other missions types, so it’s literally going to take months for your guild to build up enough influence to unlock all of them. It’s really a progression here, [...] it’s on the whole unlock tree just like any of the other guild abilities, so you make your way down all that stuff and you’ll use influence to kick off missions as well. So, finally, you’ll have a use for that giant pile of influence. Some guilds are probably going to tear through really quickly cause they’ve got huge piles of it but it is going to take a while. With bounty hunts, you can pick which tier of bounty hunts you go on and it randomly generates bosses in different zones that get spawned because the bounty hunt started and it spreads your guild out all over the place. If you do a really big bounty hunt it will actually spread your guild across five different zones, where there is a boss in each and you have, say, 15 minutes to kill all five of them. So, you actually have to split your guild into five different groups and send them to all the maps and find them to take them out.

Bounty hunts, eh? Sounds fun! Read more over at Dragon Season.

For more than a few weeks now, players have been reporting issues when it comes to receiving loot for killing champion mobs and other difficult enemies. ArenaNet thoroughly investigated the issue and the team has now found that there is indeed an issue regarding killing mobs with high health pools and the flags that qualify players to receive appropriate loot afterwards. The good news? This issue will be fixed in the upcoming Flame and Frost: The Gathering Storm update on February 26th.

There’s more good news, too. Also in February, ArenaNet will be taking a look at the current loot tables for certain areas and zones of the game where the loot incentives aren’t that great. The team plans on making some loot updates to these areas to help encourage players to rediscover them. Keep reading to see Colin Johanson’s dev tracker response that was the source of this information.

Originally posted by ColinJohanson (Source)

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Hey all,
I wanted to quickly give an update on where we stand with upcoming releases for WvW to help give a sense of where we’re at, and set expectations for the coming months. We’re in the midst of finalizing our February release, which I know had been discussed as a potentially large month for WvW additions.

Because of how broad the WvW game type is, and how large testing for features for this area of the game can be we’re going to hold off on any major WvW updates until March to allow a bit more time to test and polish.
March will see the release of the WuvWuv progression system, new ranks you can earn in WvW visible to all other players, and new DubVDub specific abilities/bonuses that you can earn as you rank up. Our team working on WvW will discuss this system in more detail as that date approaches.

Other major systems currently in the works, which will see updates in the future, include:

• Continual work to re-build the way our game loads models and compresses data, to allow for more visible characters/names in WvW in the long run as we build towards removing as much culling as possible from the game.
• Expanding on reasons to be winning in WvW beyond the total weekly score, providing stronger incentives for specific objectives and additional short term goals/rewards for winning minute-to-minute in the WvW maps.
• Providing additional ways for WvW players to earn various power-progression rewards available across the game currently in PvE for participating in WvW content.
• Exploring ways to help get more people playing WvW, as well as dealing with queue issues that come with those inherent issues of player population and demand.
• And of course additional polish and cleanup features to make the general experience in WuvWuv more fun and exciting.

We’ll discuss timelines and more details for the projects for 2013 listed above as they get closer to being finalized and we can safely say we know for sure when they will be released. We’ve recently expanded the staffing on our WvW team to build up and expand this core part of Gw2 even more, and we look forward to sharing with you more details and features in the coming month as this group polishes and grows the WvW experience.

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.

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)

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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.

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Re Examples of rewards

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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.