Earlier this week, just ahead of the game’s ninth anniversary, Guild Wars 2 dropped a fresh roadmap to get us through the fall. Your eyeballs were probably busy looking for the dates for the various End of Dragons beta events, but you might also have noticed that ArenaNet was planning to roll out its usual round of seasonal festivals as well. The next one on deck is the Festival of the Four Winds for August 31st, which the studio has just confirmed is still happening.
Readers will recall that ArenaNet brought back the Cantha-themed festival in 2018 after multiple years of dormancy, though usually it’s a bit earlier in the summer; we don’t have a full run-down of what might be different this year, but traditionally it includes races, hot air ballooons, dolyak flying, and other goodies.
Meanwhile, the game’s anniversary celebrations wind on, though players on the Reddit are… pretty grumbly about the situation both with the sales and the birthday presents. There’s been a deluge of threads complaining about the quality of the sales this year; in particular, players are mad about the lack of account and character upgrades planned for the sale, which some players are blaming on the influx of gems currently added to the game thanks to the End of Dragons preorders. (I was hoarding my gems for this sale too, so maybe there’s something to that idea.)
As for the anniversary gifts themselves, some players are miffed because the individual character gifts no longer include exclusive dyes as they have for all previous birthdays; instead, the dye is given out in a single gift to the account. I do say “some” players here as others are just as happy to defend ArenaNet and call out a lack of gratitude.
Birthday gifts can’t keep escalating every year, but they absolutely shouldn’t go Backwards. from Guildwars2
