MMORPG: For small guilds, the grind to unlock and have their own guild hall seems really daunting. I don’t personally have to worry about this, but I have more than a few friends in smaller close-knit guilds that feel like they’ll never be able to have their own GH. Is this being looked into?
Colin: Acquiring a guild hall isn’t terribly difficult for a small group of players to do at all. To purchase the expedition you need to do one guild mission of any type to have enough favor, save up 100 gold combined between all your friends, and get together five or more people to do the expedition to claim it. We balanced the cost for a ten player guild to be able to do in a week or two if they started from scratch and had almost no real cash in their bank. Assume it’ll take a little longer for smaller guilds – but also take into the account the reality that almost everyone in Guild Wars 2 has some amount of gold/silver already in their accounts, or that they could clear out of their bank on the trading post. We’ve seen numerous small guilds already claim a guild hall. Shoot, a commander tag costs 300 gold, I think the cost for a guild hall is very reasonable to acquire for small guilds by comparison. For guilds of say two players, we offer a home in Lion’s Arch at the guild HQ for them to operate out of for free, generally we feel guilds that small really aren’t large enough player communities to own a guild hall – though if they really want to they can acquire one as well, they’ll just take a long longer and need to get some friends to help them run the expedition. We designed guild halls assuming around 4+ players is a guild, and anything less than that is really just a small group and can use the Lion’s Arch HQ hall. With all that said, we have no plans to change the cost structure to acquire a Guild Hall at this time.
MMORPG: A side effect of having all this new open world content to do is that it seems World V. World is a bit dead for some folks. Did you expect this?
Colin: We generally see a rotation where when a lot of stuff is going on in the PvE part of the game, the amount of folks actively playing WvW tends to take a bit of a dip – and likewise when WvW has a huge event going on like a tournament, populations actively playing PvE take a bit of a dip. This is because there is a lot of overlap between players in Guild Wars 2 who actively play both PvE and WvW. We expect over time we’ll see the populations in WvW even out a bit more as mostly right now it’s predominantly the folks who only play WvW that are battling it out in the mists. We gave people an awful lot of stuff to do in this expansion, and even more is coming still.
That being said, I’d also add one of the goals of Heart of Thorns was to address every major game system to ensure they had all the core components we need for the future of the game. Our goal was to ensure we didn’t really need to tweak any major game system again after this expansion and our focus could be entirely on adding new content, and building on top of – rather than expanding outward systemically. WvW is the one major feature I’d say we didn’t end up accomplishing this goal, the project is so large it didn’t end up fitting into the scope of the expansion and we still have work to do to address core fundamental issues like population balance, rewards, scoring, night capping, etc. As always we don’t discuss features in development until they are far enough along to share meaningful details, so for now we’ll just say WvW is the final big game system on our radar – and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with our players about what they’d love to see from epic large scale PvP combat.
MMORPG: Will you all ever consider doing “weekend” events like “2X ranks in WvW”, “Double XP in the Jungle” or something like that to help drive people around where you might want to see them?
Colin: We do occasionally do events like this in PvP when major PvP competitions are going on, and we did this with WvW tournaments as well which are currently on hold until we’re able to resolve the core issues with WvW I mentioned earlier. We’ll continue to think about how we might be able to expand this concept more where it makes sense. Ultimately I think things like our new upcoming PvP league feature ends up being a more robust and exciting version of this same concept – so we’re excited to see how that goes for us, in particular with the explosive growth we’ve seen in Guild Wars 2’s PvP population.
MMORPG: Just one more for now then… when can we expect to learn more about what the Living World holds for us this season?
Colin: Right now we’re focused on making sure the remaining expansion features to be activated all go smoothly – we’ll discuss what to expect out of live and living world from Guild Wars 2…when it’s ready!