I’m afraid there won’t be a Guild Wars 2 WvW beta test this weekend, so rearrange your schedules. ArenaNet let everyone down gently on the official forums, referencing its October explainer for its earlier botched September test.
That month, issues with the first test and logging structure caused the studio to abort the whole event partway through, though the devs did learn the system and matchmaking were functional at scale. They were planning a second test for this weekend, but it was to be contingent on a set of specific wrinkles being ironed out first. This week’s post makes it clear there’s a new “must-fix issue” preventing the rollout; it revolves around player counts and server communication.
“This means we need to make a change to a core service that could have game wide implications if done incorrectly. As we mentioned before, the code used for map capacity management is used across the entire game, and it’s legacy code that we don’t modify frequently. In a case like this, we need to slow down, triple check our work, and thoroughly test the changes in a number of different scenarios. When changes like these are made under time pressure they become more prone to error and increase the risk that something bad will occur. We’d prefer to spend a bit more time with the problem to make sure we are addressing it correctly and not just introducing more issues by rushing. From our perspective, the September 24 beta attempt is still paying dividends. We’ve been able to identify and address several significant systems issues from that short test. We’re glad we were able to catch this one before running another beta.”
There’s some good news here, too, though: Riding high on its best quarter in years, ArenaNet will be taking the wraps off Echovald Wilds, one of End of Dragons’ core zones, this afternoon on its 3 p.m. EST stream.
