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.

ArenaNet announced for the second Beta Weekend Event, several features that they have made to the game since the last time players entered the world of Tyria.

One of the items that stands out to me is Improved Overflow Servers. In the first Beta Weekend Event, there were significant problems getting together with friends. According to ArenaNet, they’ve implemented a new party UI that notifies you when party members are in different overflow worlds. This is a great start, doesn’t fully rectify the problem of having people separated to begin with.

Today we see the publishing of a new Developer’s Blog by Mike Ferguson on the topic of World vs. World.

We have amazing PvE gameplay and intense competitive PvP in Guild Wars 2, but we also offer huge, open-field, server-versus-server warfare the likes of which you’ve never seen. We call it world vs. world or WvW.
Hello, everyone, I’m Mike Ferguson, one of the systems designers here at ArenaNet. I’m here to tell you about one of the most eagerly anticipated aspects of Guild Wars 2: world vs. world! This is a huge game type, and there’s a lot to talk about, so get comfy!

In the blog, Mike gives us an incredible amount of information regarding WvW maps and how things work and what ArenaNet’s philosophy is behind this part of the game. World vs. World is comprised of three different sides against each other. ArenaNet knew right away that they wanted to use three sides instead of the typical two that you see in today’s MMORPGs.