- The beetles were designed to not displace all the other mounts, but they might be tweaked to be less annoying in the future. Existing mount packs won’t retroactively include beetle skins.
- Don’t expect accessories in the wardrobe, but it’s “exceptionally likely” that future collections will nudge us back to classic Tyria.
- The next raid is “essentially done” and on the way next. Fractal reworks will continue too, but “new fractals are absolutely prioritized above reworks” – one fractal every two episodes.
- New PvP maps are on the way too. “We have several new maps in development,” studio reps said. “A new desert themed conquest map, 2 additional small arena maps for custom arenas and a large arena map for custom areas.”
- And what about Joko? “We had other story debt we needed to pay off this season, and a limited number of episodes in which to do it. We kept him around as long as we could justify to tie up his arc from PoF, but we couldn’t make him the main threat this season.”
As for all the problems last week after the episode actually rolled out? It was chiefly a problem with map crashes. This is probably the best breakdown we’ll see:
“The morning of the patch, initial runs through the episode by internal QA before we distributed the build and external players looked good, but quickly started crashing in a way that we didn’t see in our development or staging environments. When the map would crash it took down every instance or map running on that server. To protect the rest of the game we isolated all of the new instances to specific servers which contained the crashes, but blocked everyone from getting into the new map. The rest of the day we were investigating the crash reports which gave us completely bogus data and was a red herring to the server issues. It took us some time to realize that as we’ve been increasing the size of content inside instances the way we’ve been calculating the required resources on the server was no longer accurate enough to predict performance. The system to protect us was actually making an assumption that the development team hadn’t considered.Once we knew what the problem was we rolled out new servers around the world that night to make sure we could stabilize the game in such a way that people could make it through the story and into the new map. We’ve made some changes on the content side to help with the issue but continue to investigate the core problem and other anomalies we saw in the reports that should prevent this issue from happening in the future.”
