Who doesn’t like a developer that likes to open up? One of the great things about Reddit’s ask-me-anything series is that so many studios these days are willing to talk to their fans about what’s come before, and what’s still in the pipeline.
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The latest Guild Wars 2 AMA was even more impressive given that it featured 22 members of the dev team, including executive producer Mike O’Brien himself, and – as you might expect – the topics covered were wide.
If forced to boil things down to a few short points, however, the team revealed they’re working on delivering a new map per episode for each Living World update, with the cadence for episodes sticking at 2-3 months.
ArenaNet also claimed there are no current plans to retrofit old hearts to be repeatable, though it stated nothing is ever completely off the table. What’s more, when it comes to armor and weapons, the team added retroactive changes to make precusor journey streamlined like Eureka are also not in the plan as things stand.
O’Brien and co. also offered an update on insider trading, claiming some alpha testers and an influence who “abused their early access to content to generate profit” have been removed.
“We have a small, dedicated group of core alpha testers who help us test Living World episodes,” the studio added.
“They’re overwhelmingly trustworthy. But we recognize that it only takes one abusive alpha tester to make it all feel very unfair to those players who aren’t in the alpha test program. We’ve been ramping up other forms of testing, including internal testing and Live beta testing of WvW updates. But we’re not going to undermine our ability to put out great content releases. Content is still our top priority.
“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.”
You can read the AMA in full here.