There were a couple of interesting– if somewhat vague– PvP updates issued on the official forums over this past weekend. One of which was concerning the public, non-beta release of Custom Arenas. The other was a hint of sorts by Devon Carver directed toward future WvW and matchmaking updates.

Originally posted by John Corpening (Source)

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Hey guys, thanks for the question. There are a few issues and updates we want to address before we make Custom Arenas available to everyone. At this time there is no announced date for the end of the beta period. We are eager to get these out to you but we want to make sure known issues are addressed first.

Originally posted by DevonCarver (Source)

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In the coming weeks, nay months, you’ll see many changes to WvW. We should have something to announce regarding the matchmaking in the coming weeks.

‘Many’ changes to WvW? Let’s see what ArenaNet’s definition of many is, shall we?

As a preamble of sorts to today’s new Secret of Southsun content update, the ArenaNet team posted a few interesting information tidbits on the forums yesterday regarding the update and the changes we’ll see. First off, there will be parts of this Southsun update that will be permanent and others that will be temporary. The story part, in particular, will stick around for only one month. The story will also be more condensed and not so spread apart like Flame and Frost‘s story content often was. Today’s update will also bring other lasting changes to the island.

Originally posted by Robert Hrouda (Source)

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The Southsun Shore stuff will not be like the previous Flame and Frost stuff in regards to how time-spanning it was. We’re a separate team than that one, and we have been working on this content while you all were playing F&F content.

Our story will last a month and then be over with, and as a result is more condensed. We’ve been listening to the feedback on F&F, and tried our hardest to adjust where possible. So our temporary content will last just the month, but we are making some permanent changes to the island that will persist after the living story bit is over.

In another thread, Anthony Ordon also told players that the system to travel to Southsun Cove will change a bit with the update. We still won’t be able to skip on over to the island via the open world (boo!), but we will be able to finally use the standard practice for traveling across Tyria– an asura gate.

Originally posted by AnthonyOrdon (Source)

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There will indeed be a new asura gate linking Lion’s Arch to the new resort on Southsun Cove.

I agree that it seems possible to travel to Southsun from other areas when you’re looking at the map, but we’ve never had support for travel to other zones by swimming across the sea. In the context of the game world, I believe there are some pretty nasty things out in the deep water that would make it difficult to swim that far.

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.

Along with this week’s Flame and Frost: Retribution update, Guild Wars 2 received the new Molten Facility dungeon and the epilogue Living World story content that are both pretty awesome and getting rave reviews so far. There is one downside, however. Neither will be around forever. Temporary content is something that– by and large– we don’t see a lot of in MMORPGs except when it comes to holiday events and special expansion releases, but ArenaNet is trying something a little different with Living World content and the changes it brings to Tyria.

Colin Johanson talked a bit about the temporariness factor of Living World yesterday on the official forums. He also mentioned the fact that yes, Living World story content will continue to be a focus in Guild Wars 2 and will cause the game beneath our feet to shift, but not everything will be temporary. Keep reading to see what he had to say.

It seems that ArenaNet has finally found a solution to the good ol’ issue time zones bring to our WvW reset times. Beginning on the next WvW matchup this week, the North American and European Guild Wars 2 regions will experience separate WvW reset times. The North American matchup will reset at 9:00 PM EST and the European matchup will reset at 19:00 GMT. The team hopes that this will finally make it a little easier for guilds across various time zones to be around when it may matter most.

Devon Carver shared the announcement yesterday on the official forums, which can be found here.

WvW players received an important announcement on the forums yesterday regarding an incoming change to the time that our WvW matches reset every week. The time is being bumped back two hours in order to strike a better match finishing time for both our European and North American Guild Wars 2 communities. The new reset time will take affect this week. Here is the official announcement:

Originally posted by DevonCarver (Source)

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As part of our ongoing effort to improve the game experience with changes big and small, we’ve decided to change the time of the WvW match resets. The current time is 00:00 UTC on Saturdays, which is mighty inconvenient for our European friends who want to get in on the action of the newest match right away. We’ve decided that moving the reset time back by 2 hours to 22:00 UTC on Friday night to try and find a more happy medium for NA and EU servers. This will go into effect beginning this week and will be the new time going forward. Hopefully this makes it easier for you all to jump right in at the start of a new matchup.

The ArenaNet developer team who’s hard at work on improving Super Adventure Box (SAB) has been paying close attention to players on the official forums who have been providing their feedback on the awesome mini-world of nostalgia that has kind of taken the community by storm. Josh Foreman told the community that if SAB was a success in Guild Wars 2, the feature would see a few new worlds and updates. Well, it’s pretty safe to say SAB has been a success. Currently the team is working on World 2 for Super Adventure Box.

Keep reading to see some of Josh Foreman’s thoughts on how development for future SAB content will work and what the team may be able to improve upon.

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.

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.

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