Guild Wars 2 AMA covers maps, hearts, raids, and insider trading

Following the launch of the Rising Flames episode in Guild Wars 2 yesterday — and the announcement that legendary weapons have returned to the developers’ to-do lists — 22 members of the ArenaNet team (plus Mike O’Brien himself) conducted an ask-me-anything on Reddit to field queries from the playerbase that for some reason was lounging on Reddit instead of actually playing. Weird incentives, right? Here are some of the highlights:

• Future episodes will also ideally include a new map. The cadence is still 2-3 months (although Rising Flames beat that).
• Anet has no plans to make old hearts repeatable, though “nothing is ever completely off the table.”
• Legendary armor sets are “a big step up visually” and will all be released together when completed.
• New fractal islands are being worked on (and the underwater fractal will be revisited at some point). The next raid is also in production.

Finally, Anet acknowledged the long-running row over certain early testers abusing insider knowledge to manipulate the live market.

“Since July we removed some alpha testers and an influencer who abused their early access to content to generate profit for themselves or others,” says the team. “Today’s release has new uses for 16 existing items. We tracked their prices and were ready to hold the release, even this morning, to change recipes if any of the 16 experienced a price spike prior to launch. None did.” Given what we know of the way yesterday’s embargo was lifted, that sounds legit to us.