For those of us who are diving headfirst into Guild Wars 2 from other MMOs that don’t feature microtransaction/cash shops, the idea of such a shop in GW2 may still taste a little bitter on our tongues. We’ve all heard the horror stories of games drifting to unwanted pay-to-win territories, and we’re all hoping that ArenaNet avoids going anywhere near that path. Will the company succeed? I sure hope so. They’re doing some excellent things with their cash shop. Still, my eyes remain sharp to the changes being made to it. As a result, I’ve been tracking the shop’s differences between beta weekends.

Every beta weekend event has seen some pretty large changes to the in-game gem/cash shop. Since BWE2, it now sports a new name: Black Lion Trading Company. For those interested in tracking the changes made along with me, here are the changes made between BWE2 and BWE3.

One more Dev Blog has been released, ramping up our excitement for this week’s BWE. This blog talks about the opening sequences and tells you a little bit about them.

Regarding Humnas:

We wanted to establish several key points in this cinematic: humans were once the predominant race, a people with many kingdoms spread all across Tyria, but now they are in decline; and despite these dark times, they still have faith, even if it feels more distant. Visually, we wanted to show the amazing vistas of Divinity’s Reach and the last great human nation of Kryta.

The second half of the cinematic is set by a player’s choice of social class—is your character a member of the gentry, a hardworking commoner, or do they hail from the streets? The moving imagery in each option is very different, and the writing is designed to convey the mood and give you a distinct feel for each background and setting.

Find out about the Norn and the Charr over at Arenanet.

We get some pretty good information with the latest dev blog for this weekend’s BWE. Here are a few tidbits that should help out your guild’s strategy launch.

To help account for the rapidly fluctuating populations at launch, we’ll initially use the 24-hour match format until world populations settle down a bit and we are able to get some data that will help avoid having two-week-long extreme mismatches. Once most worlds are reliably matching up against worlds of similar strength, we will switch over to playing the two-week-duration match cycles.

What this change does it hyper-inflate the initial competitiveness of launch. Established guilds were most likely aiming to control maps from day 1 and over the course of the first two weeks, stake a claim for world dominance. Initially this gave them some breathing room. Now with this change, it appears worlds will be reset and you will have to repeatedly claim W3 territory every day.

This should provide for some amazingly competitive battles and PVP rushes as guilds attempt to claim influence every day until things settle down.

The second piece of news is:

As you’ll see, there will be fewer worlds available initially than we had during BWE2. Why do we have fewer worlds for a much larger beta event? There are a few different reasons for this, ranging from being able to have a larger player limit on all worlds, to a shift in focus for how we utilize our server power.

Larger server populations! This should definitely help head start angst about getting locked out of the server of your choice. We found that many guilds were focused on a few different servers. Hopefully now players won’t be stuck on another server not being able to play with friends and waiting on server transfers to open up.

You can read the rest of the dev blog on Arenanet’s official website.

With BWE3 coming this weekend, Arenanet will be wiping all characters and will also be adding both the Sylvari and Asura race. Since launch is only a month and a half away, what will you being doing this weekend? Will you be checking out the new races or will you be trying out multiple classes to figure out what you’ll be playing at launch?

Beta is a great time to get prepared for how you’ll be playing once the game goes live. Since there is no public ongoing test server, there are tons of changes from Weekend Event to Weekend Event. Rumor has it that a few of the classes, namely the Engineer, have gone through some major changes. Are you an engineer itching to get your hands on a flamethrower again?

Regardless of your chosen class or race, there is a lot of content to be tested. Arenanet is opening up new pvp maps, adding new things to W3 and allowing players to choose between two brand new races. There is certainly a lot to be tested and most likely, you won’t have time to check all of it out. If you’re a min/maxing Junkie then you might want to focus on one single area and get the most out of your time.

Here are two things that would most likely be important to discover, keep reading to see if you agree.

World vs. World
New objectives have been added to the Mists of W3 called Sentries. A good place to start is to find all of their locations and see how many points or experience they give. These may be good places to hit as a low level player to receive some quick rewards.

Asura and Sylvari are Now Available
The final two races are now available to play, and if you plan on playing one at launch, now is your opportunity to explore and learn the maps. If your objective is to level as fast as possible, you might want to learn the flow of the map so that you can get the most out of your time at launch, gain levels and skill points faster, and crush your opponents in W3 swiftly.

There is one caveat that is worthy of testing. The bulk of anyone’s experience comes from events and events are more rewarding when there are more players available. The more people around, the faster events are completed which gives you more experience. Typically in other MMO launches, you want to stay ahead of the tide of players so you don’t run into competition. In GW2, this is not an issue, and staying at the crest of the wave might be more beneficial (assuming you don’t have a large guild to level with).

So this weekend you can test which is faster, leveling with the masses or shooting out ahead. The Sylvari and Asura maps will most likely be more crowded and give you the opportunity to test this.

Assuming that you’ve spend a lot of time throughout all the Weekend Events playing GW2 and you won’t be playing just for the pure joy of the game, what will you be doing this weekend?

A German website called Wartower had a chance to interview Bobby Stein, Guild Wars 2 Lead Writer. You can find the interview (podcast) over on their forums.

Continue reading for an English summary (provided by Wartower).

If you’re getting ready for this weekend’s BWE then you’ll want to read this latest dev blog and find out what is new.

Introducing the first minigame activity playable in a beta weekend—the wildly popular, incredibly macho norn pastime known as Keg Brawl!

Activities like Keg Brawl are fun minigames that are available in many Tyrian cities. In the great norn settlement of Hoelbrak, players can speak to the Brewer NPC in the northwest corner to begin the game.

In Keg Brawl, two teams attempt to score points by toting a full keg of ale across an icy lake and turning it in to the Ale Collector that belongs to their team. Participants are free to tackle, pummel, kick, and otherwise rough up competing players in order to seize control of the keg.
Keg Brawl—you’ll never look at a keg of ale the same way again!

There is much more, including Vistas! Make sure you read the whole blog.

This week brings us a new episode of Tales of Tyria.

Episode 40:

• 10:30 – Feedback: Role Playing
• 11:40 – News: End Game / Lgendary Weapons Video, Trivia Contest
• 46:20 – Mailbag: Too many Legendaries, Whistle Blowing in MMOs

Question of the Week – How long would you bother spending to craft a Legendary?

Continue reading for the video.

One of the aspects of leveling in Guild Wars 2 that players are most looking forward to is the game’s dynamic event system. Let’s face it, questing in a static world gets pretty boring, and the promise of dynamic content– content that actually shifts, changes, and presents danger to us– seems like a breath of fresh air to us after years of plugging away at killing boars and wolves. A game world that actually comes to life based on the acts of players in the area? The ability to make a difference in this world? Sign me up.

The system sounds fantastic on paper, and has proven to be enjoyable in beta for most players who have taken part, but some remain skeptical. Why? Because we’ve heard the promise before. We’ve seen it in other games. Warhammer Online’s Public Quests are advertised as dynamic events, and so is a large portion of RIFT’s content. RIFT is an interesting comparison here, because RIFT’s dynamic content is one of its main focuses. RIFT is about, well, rifts. And huge, planar invasion forces. And zone events that can make an entire map gloomy until danger subsides. Despite all this, however, RIFT’s dynamic content is very different from Guild Wars 2′s. Let’s talk about how.

German Community Guild Wars 2 Manager, Ramon Domke, made and released a video tour today of the ArenaNet studio. In the video, he makes the rounds and chats a bit with a large number of the game’s developers and staff members. The team, overall, seems very enthusiastic about the fun they had during the beta weekend events, and thanks fans of the game for all the feedback that is given during this crucial time in development.

Over the last two days, Guild Wars 2 Hub published a great two-part interview they had with Guild Wars 2′s Lead Content Designer, Colin Johanson. In it, he discusses some behind-the-scenes design details about the beta weekend events, renown events, the difficulty of the game, the impact of player feedback, the goals of the design team, and the atmosphere at the office. Good stuff!

Here’s one of the questions that was asked, with an answer that hits close to home for many MMO gamers:

Lewis B: Something that many people continued to say to me during the first Beta Weekend Event was that they couldn’t believe how polished the game was, that it could undoubtedly be launched tomorrow. Do you think this is a fair assertion? Where are you in terms of your overall timeline and assessment on the products level of “finish”?

Colin: First, let me say that we’ve seen that comment a lot, too, and it makes us, in particular our QA team, extremely proud of the hard work everyone has been doing. In an age where new-game releases have been ripe with bugs and unfinished products, one of our goals is to try to buck that trend and release a truly finished game that is as bug free as possible. We’re all gamers first at ArenaNet, and honestly we’re sick of paying for released games that aren’t ready to be released—it drives us nuts and we don’t want to do that to our fans. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to play our own game if it wasn’t ready for release either.

Make sure and check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the full interview!

Today we received news that we’ll be able to finally play as the asura and sylvari races in the next beta weekend event, which runs from July 20th to July 22nd. Along with the news, we also got a sneak peek at some screenshots and details about the lush landscapes these two races call home.

For asura players, this means beginning your tale in Metrica Province, a vivid, exotic jungle area full of high-tech laboratories, quirky golems, and competing krewes of mad scientists. Nearby, the massive monoliths of the asuran capital Rata Sum hum with technomagical power. These diminutive geniuses may seem cute at first glance, but never underestimate an asura…

Sylvari players begin their story in the Grove, a luminous living city nestled in the shade of the Pale Tree, the “mother” of every member of this young race of plant humanoids. The sylvari are an enigmatic race of chivalrous explorers who are driven by an insatiable curiosity and guided by a collective Dream.

The two starting areas sound amazing. Make sure and check out the full developer blog and the accompanying screenshots!

Oh, and if you’re curious about some in-game asura footage, check out this Gamespot video.

GW2 Hub has published a great interview with Jon Peters in regards to class balance and the overall balance of the game. There are some interesting tidbits for everyone. One point that stood out was an update on the Engineers:

Lewis B: I was enjoying the engineer over the last few phases as it’s so fun to play, but have developed a list of concerns or issues, especially around kits, the tool belt, and trait line synergy. I think out of all the professions in the game it needs some tweaks at the moment. Can we expect any changes or significant improvements over the next few patches? I noticed their traits have had a tidy up…

Jon: The engineer is the first profession we have addressed since the last BWE. Changes have been made to many skills and to the trait lines as well. The previous list of traits contained many holdovers from the old trait system that did not fit into the new tier paradigm.

Read the rest of the interview at GW2Hub.

Today brings another Dev Blog from Ben Miller, a Game Designer for Arenanet. In this blog Ben goes over almost every aspect of designing a game. He talks about MMO combat, UIs a sense of character development and much much more and provides a really great insight in the mind of a game designer.

Some developers might wish there was a secret recipe book for designing an online world—some big ol’ Betty Crocker-style book with chapters like “Combat System” and “Interactive Story Telling,” containing recipes for “Melee Weapons” and “Compelling Main Characters.” And they’d wish all you had to do was add in the particulars specified and work on each bit for the required amount of time.

The truth is that designing an online world is a lot like the real world. It’s messy business. It’s organic. It’s chaotic. The mental space in which you are creating is different from moment to moment with assumptions and extrapolations piling into a confusing tangle that only your gut has time to sort out. It’s like a turbulent ocean storm of ideas, processes, people, and collaboration.

Source: The Golden Rules of Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has eight crafting disciplines to choose between, and players can have two. They can also have all three of the gathering disciplines, which thankfully aren’t tied to any of the crafting trades. Players can choose to become a jeweler as one of their crafting disciplines, which allows the player to craft jewelry– amulets, rings, and earrings, as well as upgraded gemstones to use in equipment. Both will be undoubtedly useful in GW2, and hey– every profession benefits from shiny things, right?

Mining and logging are the two gathering trades essential to the jeweler discipline. Logging may not seem useful on the surface, but one of the gems needed– amber– is found while chopping down logs. Gemstones are randomly found while mining and logging all types of gathering nodes, and the chances of finding them can be raised by using special gathering tools. The appropriate gathering tool must be equipped while gathering (luckily all three– mining pick, logging axe, and harvesting sickle– can be equipped at once), but they do run out as you use them. For long gathering sessions, keep a few stacks handy.

We got a chance to ask Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer, Eric Flannum, a few questions about the game ranging from World vs World, class balance, PVP vs. PVE progression and more. We’re very excited to share this with, especially on the same day that Arenanet has announced that the game’s launch is August 28, just two months from now!

GW2 Junkies: Guild Wars 2 has some amazing character models, ranging from gigantic norn to tiny asura. With any competitive MMO, players worry about hit boxes and how character models affect gameplay. Since a player can get hit by stray damage, how have you designed the hit boxes for all the varied sizes and shapes that GW2 has to offer—asura are short, norn are tall, charr are wide (and low to the ground when they are running), etc.?

Eric Flannum: Every player character in Guild Wars 2 has the exact same sized collision cylinder. For asura this means that the cylinder is larger than they are and for norn it means that it is smaller. Very early in the process of making the game we knew this was going to be the case, so the min and max sizes of our races are heavily influenced by this.