Greetings from the Mists!
Floyd Grubb here, Senior Game Designer on World vs World. On behalf of the entire WvW team, thank you for participating in our most recent World Restructuring Beta test. This was my first beta event as a member of the team, and I learned a lot in the process! Overall, the event ran smoothly, but there were a few issues that I wanted to take some time to address.
The two most reported issues were 1/ players being placed on the wrong team, and 2/ players being reassigned to a different team during map transitions. We were able to identify some of the root causes behind the issues and are currently working on addressing them. We have reason to believe that there are other code issues at play here that we haven’t identified yet, so our investigation is ongoing. Another common issue we observed was that some players had insufficient data (i.e., recent playtime in WvW) for the matchmaking process to place the player properly on a team. We’ll be putting in some safeguards to cover those edge cases, which should mitigate the issue in the next beta.
We’ve also seen your feedback about how these beta events are communicated – some players were taken by surprise. For this beta, we relied on the GuildWars2.com blog and our social media accounts to broadcast the message. We’ll be looking into ways of improving the communication of these events without making it a nuisance for players.
While I'm here, I want to acknowledge your feedback regarding the August 23 profession balance update and the lack of changes for World vs World. This update was focused on addressing lingering PvE issues stemming from the June 28 update, but that doesn’t mean that WvW shouldn’t get some attention.
As a team, we’ve been reassessing how we approach profession balance for all game modes, and World vs World is no exception. As the Senior Game Designer for World vs World, one of my new responsibilities will be to ensure that WvW balance concerns are represented in our internal discussions. WvW is a complicated game mode that’s played in a number of different ways, and we want to make sure that any single change doesn’t overly reward one playstyle at the cost of others. That’s a tricky problem to solve for, and I expect we’ll learn a lot as we work through it. As an example, due to your feedback, we pulled the Mantra of Liberation WvW change from the August 23 update, and it forced us to reassess how we want to achieve our goal of improving support profession representation in WvW (more details from Cal here).
We’ll have a better sense of concrete timing for the next beta after we finish investigating the issues we saw last week, but we’re currently looking at late September or early October. Something to look forward to: we should have the new WvW-exclusive weapon set ready to dole out as rewards for beta participation.
Thank you for your feedback and your passion!
-Floyd and the World vs World team