ArenaNet hosted a live developer Ask Me Anything (AMA) chat on Reddit yesterday which was headed by Chris Whiteside, Studio Design Director, and President Mike O’Brien. Quite a few issues were tackled, but one of the most interesting was without a doubt Chris Whiteside’s reply regarding the addition of ascended gear, the brand new tier of gear introduced in November’s update.

Ascended gear is a controversial issue within the Guild Wars 2 community because it’s a new tier of stat-influenced gear in a game that was largely promoted as not having tiers of progression-based gear. A large amount of players gave Guild Wars 2 a try because they were tired of the gear treadmill prominent in almost every single MMORPG right now, and with this addition, those same players wondered what exactly was on the developers’ minds. There was little warning when the feature was added, and because of this fact, most players assumed ArenaNet had simply decided to go against their original philosophy.

There is now an ongoing Ask Me Anything on Reddit right now. Jump in and participate and find out what has already been asked. Stay tuned for when the AMA ends and we’ll have a final tally of the whole Q&A for your reading pleasure.

Hi, everyone.
This is Mike O’Brien, and I’m the President of ArenaNet. We’re working on a game called Guild Wars 2. We have a Beta Weekend Event coming up this week from June 8 – 10, and I’d like to take this opportunity to answer your questions about the game and the upcoming beta event.
I’ll also be joined by ArenaNet designers and developers and we’ll be here to answer as many of your questions as we can in the next three hours.
Here’s who will be participating (and our sigs):
Mike O’Brien – President/Founder – MO
Chris Whiteside – Lead Producer – Chris
Mike Zadorojny‎‎ – Content Designer – z
Mike Ferguson – WvW Designer – Ferg
Peter Giuntoli – Programmer – Peter
Jon Peters – Systems Designer – Jon
Isaiah Cartwright – Lead Systems Designer – Izzy
So without further ado, AMA!
~ Mike O’Brien