The addition of custom arenas, rated play, leaderboards, and spectator mode have already been big steps for Guild Wars 2 PvP in 2013. Going forward, we’ll continue to work with and support the rapidly growing competitive PvP community with our eyes towards an extremely exciting future as we work towards solidifying the base. We know we have a lot of work to do to continue that momentum and ensure our PvP experience is everything we ever wanted it to be, so what are some of the things we have coming to get there?
The major focus of the PvP team for the second half of the year will be tied to improving the sense of reward in PvP. In the spirit of the high-level strategy listed above for PvE/WvW rewards that ensure players feel rewarded for their time, we’ll need to build systems that achieve the same goals in PvP. Our PvP team will go into more details on these systems once they are further along.
The addition of new skills and traits on a regular basis will of course mean expanded variety of abilities, builds, and tactics in PvP as well. As these additional skills and traits are added, they’ll be automatically unlocked and available for competitive PvP just like all existing skills/traits work today.
We’ll also expand the competitive options for game play: providing a queue and leaderboards for solo rated play separate from team rated play, adding new map types, adding the ability to gain legendary weapon skins in PvP, providing additional rewards and growth to our major competitive PvP tournaments, hosting our own Year One PvP Championship at PAX, and more!
Our WvW team coordinator Devon Carver did a fantastic job summarizing where we want to take WvW in the future in his blog here. One additional exciting release you’ll see on top of the high-level notes Devon called out in his blog post is the replacement for the original WvW orb mechanic in our borderlands maps. This change should provide more diversity in the gameplay of WvW and make our borderlands more exciting. Of course, everything I’ve talked about in terms of progression and rewards in this post so far will be available in WvW as well!