A month ago, Guild Wars 2 began and then aborted a botched test for its World Restructuring system for WvW. This week, ArenaNet has finally explained in full everything that went wrong – and how it’s going to proceed with another test.
According to the studio, the September test almost immediately went awry as players with “stale” shard data were being placed on the wrong teams, the UI was failing to display correct names, strong interest in the test led to long queues, and the game decided to mass-create a ton of unnecessary Edge of the Mists maps, thereby sucking down too many resources. And then the logging infrastructure started to crumble. Eventually, the team came to the conclusion that trying to put out all those fires on a weekend during a live test wasn’t feasible, so they shut the whole thing down.
“Once we made the call to end the beta, we were able to seamlessly revert back to World Linking after a quick cycling of the WvW maps,” the studio says. Fortunately, it wasn’t all for nothing. ArenaNet explains that it learned that World Restructuring was functional at scale, the matchmaking algorithm was good, and the rollback of World Linking worked too.
Now, it wants to run another test for players. The studio says it has 10 specific bugs it needs to fix first.
“As of right now, we’re targeting the November 9 release for these fixes, with our next beta week kicking off on November 12. We’ll be making some quality-of-life changes to World vs World in the November 9 release. Your feedback is clear: skirmish reward tracks take entirely too long to complete, especially for new players or players who are playing on the third-place team in a match up. To address this, we’ll be increasing the number of skirmish pips earned for match placement from 3/4/5 to 4/5/6. We’ll also be adding a new +1 bonus skirmish pip for players with a WvW rank between 1-149. Existing rank-based pip bonuses will also increase by +1 (so a total of +2 for Bronze, +3 for silver, and so on). We’ve also been taking a look at components of the skirmish track and participation system that aren’t achieving their intended design goals. In the short term, we will be experimenting with removing incentives from some unintended gameplay, and we’ll be removing the ‘participation grace time’ granted by repairing structures in WvW. We’ll also be removing the outnumbered pip bonus, though the outnumbered stat enhancement will remain.”
