Yesterday, Mike Zadorojny, a content designer at Arenanet, answered a ton of fan questions on Kotaku. Did you get your question answered? Here’s what we learned.

PWNy
How the PVP works in Guildwars 2? i saw some videos but i didn’t get it. Can you explain a bit more about it, Like World PvP or just battle grounds, and is the PvP a big role in GW2?

Mike Zadorojny
With any of your characters you can visit the sPvP lobby that will bump your character up to level 80 and unlock all traits, skills, armor and weapons for you to use. From here you can jump into any of the on going sPvP matches. For WvW, any player can open up the score window and jump directly into any of the 4 maps (1 central and 1 home for each world) in the ongoing battle. In WvW your character is scaled up to level 80 (not a true 80) and you have only the items and skills you’ve unlocked available to you. In WvW you can level your character just like in PvE by doing events and killing monsters/players to unlock additional skills and traits.

Keep Reading for the full Q&A list.

Kotaku takes us through their weekend of beta testing by diving deep into the beautiful world that the developers at Arenanet have created.

Except, of course, that I would. Because of the way that quests and missions pop up around the world, as live events, it’s easy to get carried away. Step across an invisible perimeter (which then becomes visible, on your map), and you’re in range for a ring event, quest, or straight-up mass melee. Up comes an alert, whether it’s for a farmer whose corn you can water or for a giant wasp who’s so far got a full dozen players running for their lives. Cross out of the circle again, and you’re on your own, the plea for aid vanishing from your screen as if it had never been.

Trained by other MMOs, I tried to stay respectful. When someone was fighting a centaur, I backed away; when someone was harvesting apples from a tree, I moved to another node. Only after several hours did I finally realize that the game was aiming for cooperation, not competition, and that kill-stealing was more or less impossible. If a nearby character and I teamed up on a kill, we both got credit and full loot, even without being grouped. Likewise, spawned bosses, like the giant wasp, are fights for any and all hands in the area. Anyone can heal themselves, and anyone can revive others. The game actively encourages the human impulse to come running over and lend aid in a crisis, which for me made a delightful change from the usual gruff “stay out of my way” mood I have felt in other games.

After our weekend in Guild Wars 2 we couldn’t agree more and really loved the cooperation aspect of the game.

Source: A Gorgeous, Living World Sets Guild Wars 2 Apart

To celebrate the successful press beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, the nice folks at ArenaNet gathered us all together in the main courtyard of Divinity’s Reach and killed us over and over again.

Just a warning, the video’s audio is a little rough.

Kotaku also has a full preview article titled, “10 Things I learned from Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend”

Combat in Guild Wars 2 retains the same simple elegance as the original game, a welcome in a genre that tends to lean towards complicated mechanics involving multiple rows of confusing icons. Here your weapons determine the first five abilities in your single toolbar and skills and traits determine the final five. There’s no need to rearrange your toolbar every time you switch weapon sets; those pre-defined skills populate automatically, leaving the player free to ponder which tools to use rather than how to use them.