ArenaNet will soon begin beta testing two new features aimed at enlivening the PvP experience in Guild Wars 2.

The first is the advent of custom arenas. You’ll be able to buy or rent these dedicated spaces and (more importantly) determine the rules for participation. As server programmer Steve Bikun puts it, “you can make your place to play, you can organise private tournaments with friends, and you can challenge other teams to scrimmage.”

If you’re keen to use these zones for training or even e-sports purposes, you’ll be pleased to hear that a spectator mode is also in the works. According to gameplay programmer Even Lesh, “it will allow expert players to watch each other in order to refine their skill. It will also be an amazing tool for shoutcasting games between high-level teams!”

The new modes will become available for top ranked players on 30 April. It isn’t yet clear when these features will be offered to the broader Guild Wars 2 community.

Source: Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet have very happily announced that culling, the behind-the-scenes process which keeps your game lag-free and the servers happy by reducing the amount of people who are visible in your WvW games, is soon to disappear. In an upcoming patch on March 26, culling will be removed entirely from the game.

“While (culling) achieved our goal of limiting bandwidth and client-side resource utilization, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing large battles in WvW to be confusing, as there were sometimes many enemy players that were completely invisible,” ArenaNet admit in their latest blog post. “Additionally, there were side effects of culling which could result in stealth characters getting up to two seconds of additional invisibility when coming out of stealth.”

“By removing culling, we’ve been able to eliminate these negative side effects and greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.”

A new series of graphical options will be added for WvW, that will allow players to manage the huge amount of new players expected to appear on their screens. You can choose from high-resolution regular models, lower-resolution placeholders or nameplates only, as well as set up filters to mix the three.

Source: Guild Wars 2

One of the frustrating parts about MMOs can often be when your friends ignore your advice and start playing on a completely different server the one you’re on. Those jerks! Well, be angry no more as Guild Wars 2‘s ‘Guesting’ feature is launching on January 28, and will allow you to effectively just pop in to their servers and run around with them like normal… with a few restrictions.

For one, WvW is out — try to jump into some WvW and you’ll be booted back to your own server. And for another, guesting only works within the same region, so if you’re on a European server you can’t guest onto a North American server. You can also only guest on up to two worlds at a time: each time you guest on a world, that becomes one of your eligible guesting worlds for the next 24 hours. Once those 24 hours have passed, you can guest on a different server.

As a result of guesting becoming active, free world transfers will cease to operate. “Make sure that you will be on the world you intend to play on before January 28th,” writes ArenaNet, “because after that date, you’ll have to pay a gem fee to transfer worlds.”

Check out all the info and details on how guesting works over on the Guild Wars 2 site.

Source: Guild Wars 2

Since its August release, Guild Wars 2 has sold an impressive three million copies, ArenaNet revealed overnight. But they’re not resting on their laurels, and are keen to get into 2013 and change up a few key areas.

“One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system,” claimed game director Colin Johanson. “The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience.” Support for daily achievements is coming, with different achievements each day of the week.

Johanson also touches on the importance of guilds, saying “We’re working on adding new types of content to the game in early 2013 that will allow guilds to go on missions together.”

“Some of these missions may be content designed specifically for the guild to accomplish within certain constraints or time requirements, while others will see the creation of new content by a guild/s everyone in the world can experience.”

Paid server transfers are also on their way for 2013, with time limitations and WvW restrictions, and improvements to culling are planned to help eliminate culling. There’s more — a LOT more — so if GW2 is important to you, cast your eye over the official blog.

Source: GW2

An exploit in Guild Wars 2 that allowed players to receive infinite ectoplasm has now been patched, and any egregious offenders “terminated”, according to a thread on the official Guild Wars 2 forums, where outraged players are claiming they’ve wasted their time without knowing it was wrong.

The exploit allowed you to craft a Snowflake Jewellery item using a singular ectoplasm as an ingredient, then salvage it to get two ectoplasm out of it — repeat ad infinitum, and you have what ArenaNet’s Gaile Gray calls “a significant potential impact on the economy”.

“I’ve seen the numbers, and the damage to the economy could have been substantial, if the exploit wasn’t closed down and if these people were allowed to use their ill-gotten gains. People whose accounts were terminated were the worst offenders.”

“Any time you take one thing and can make two, and then four, and then sixteen… ya gotta know that’s just wrong. (I won’t quibble on the odds, but overall, that form of doubling was not outside the realm of possibility.) And to perform that action hundreds and hundreds of times? That’s call ‘exploitation’, and that’s against the User Agreement, the Rules of Conduct, and all that is holy.”

Source: Massively via VG247

This weekend marks the first free trial weekend for Guild Wars 2, when the lands of Tyria are expected to be flooded by people whose friends have gifted them a weekend pass code. But what if you don’t have a friend to give you a referral code? What then? Well, never fear: games.on.net is here to help you out.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: the enemy of the Lost Shores event is, in fact, giant enemy crabs.

Well, not exactly. But they may as well be: they swarm out of the sea, as big as houses, scuttling like nobody’s business and trying to stomp you into the dirt. They’re called the karka, and they want to move into Lion’s Arch and set up a new home there. Over the corpses of you and your friends.

Sounds like fun? Well, it is, actually — although it’s tough as nails, so bring your best level 80s and let’s get down to bidness.

That’s right: if you’re one of the many who put a name aside from Guild Wars 1 to re-use literally hundreds of in-game years later in Guild Wars 2 but who hasn’t actually got around to re-using the name yet, hurry up!

ArenaNet announced late last week that those reserved names will be released as of November 8th at 2:00 PM PST (which works out to 9:00 AM Sydney time on Friday, November 9).

“If you have a character name reserved from Guild Wars and haven’t gotten around to making that character in Guild Wars 2, this is the time to do so,” reads the announcement. “If you’ve been waiting for a reserved name, your wait is almost over!”

Source: Massively

As reported last weekend, Guild Wars 2 is celebrating Halloween with a significant update called Shadow of the Mad King. As we draw closer to the fateful kick off date – October 22 – ArenaNet has gone into further detail of what the update brings. As well as the trailer below, the update’s promotional page now gives a timeline for the four acts of the new storyline, and gives a little bit of context for it. According to legend, a tyrannical king was slain 500 years ago, returning only on Halloween. Although he hasn’t been seen for 250 years, the tales have sprung up again in the wake of strange stirrings in the night.

Source: ArenaNet via Ten Ton Hammer

ArenaNet has released details of its first major seasonal update to Guild Wars 2 since the wildly successful MMORPG launched in late August. The Hallowe’en themed expansion is called Shadow of the Mad King, and will go live on October 22.

Decorations will be strewn across Tyria, along with new mini-games, bosses, jumping puzzles, mini-dungeons, achievements and dynamic events, but on the weightier side, “an adventure in four acts” runs through October 31, when the “barriers between the realms are weakest”. The Black Lion Trading Company will offer a variety of holiday goods, and paid PvP tournaments will offer more significant prizes than usual, as well as handing out participation points to competiting teams, which will qualify them for future events.

Source: ArenaNet

If you haven’t heard about Guild Wars 2, this is probably your first time here at GON, and welcome to you. But seriously, what’s wrong with you? In any case, you’ve probably heard about the amazing new MMO experience Guild Wars 2 offers, but what if you’re not convinced? What if, like me, you are convinced, but there are still some things that are strange and confusing for you? This new trailer-type-thing should help with that!

While not exactly a launch trailer, or a trailer at all, the video below is far more accessible (and less terrifyingly bizarre) than the actual launch trailer and explains some of the things that never really get mentioned in the game. Like that whole dragon business. How did I miss that!

A Guild Wars 2 player by the name of ‘pvpPROJECT’ has created a mod for the game that locks the camera to your character — as if you were constantly holding down the right mouse button — and overlays a new cross hair onto the screen, thus turning it into more of a third-person-shooter style experience. Unfortunately as we know the Guild Wars 2 EULA makes it illegal to use any mods or scripts, and indeed a thread on it has already been locked by GW2 community management. Still, interesting stuff! Check out the video below or visit this Reddit thread for more.

Source: Kotaku