Guild Wars 2

I wish Guesting worked across territories, I would play.

 

It's really hard to say, so many factors. I wouldn't risk it, adding that kind of distance to the servers is like a ticking timebomb. To be honest, the America side isn't all that populated either.

 

One of the many exciting features coming in the April 2014 Feature Pack is the new Wardrobe, an account-wide system that allows you to collect every skin in the game!

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Account Wardrobe: The Basics

Guild Wars 2 has a tremendous variety of gear to collect. From vanity skins to gear with specific stats to all manner of beautiful armors and weapons, there are a lot of ways to customize the look and function of your character. But currently, it can be a little overwhelming to try to sort through it all and choose a look and feel. Our answer to that is the Wardrobe, which makes it easy to customize your look at any time and to share cosmetic items across all the characters on your account.

When you log in after the April 15 release, you’ll see some big changes. In your Hero Panel, the manner in which you equip different stat gear will remain the same. However, you’ll also see the Wardrobe tab, which collects every armor and weapon skin you unlock in the game on any character on your account!

The Wardrobe tab is the home of our new simplified transmutation system. When you’re in the Wardrobe tab, you can select skins to apply to your weapons and armor to update your look without losing your awesome stats. You’ll be able to preview your look right there in your Hero Panel and click “Apply†once you’re satisfied with your look to lock in your changes with Transmutation Charges. It’s as simple as that!

Another addition to the Hero Panel is the Dye tab, which has received some significant updates. We’re really excited about the updates to the dye system, which Curtis Johnson has talked about in detail.

To talk about our approach to designing the account Wardrobe, here’s Kate Welch, UI artist.

Creating the Wardrobe UI

The Wardrobe system has been a very exciting project to work on, one we feel will really enhance your in-game experience!

We started thinking about the Wardrobe by examining what features currently felt disconnected—the skins that were cluttering up our banks, transmutation crystals and stones, and the transmutation UI itself, to name a few—and thought of them as puzzle pieces that we wanted to assemble into a better, more unified solution.

The Hero Panel already allows you to equip your armor and weapons, so we decided to use that as a jumping-off point to create a one-stop-shop wardrobe-modification system. We had just one question to answer: How can we make this system smooth, painless, and fun to use?

Everybody interacts with the Equipment tab frequently, whether they’re experienced Fractals runners or newcomers just learning their way around Tyria. We wanted to make sure that adding the Wardrobe feature would cater to all types of players without colliding with their current play styles. It’s a delicate balance.

Wardrobe-UI-Equipment-Panel

We designed the Wardrobe to be expandable going forward, which can be tricky for an MMO whose development environment is constantly evolving. Our plan is to continue augmenting the Wardrobe system, and our current design opens up a lot of possibilities to do that in the future.

The best part about working on UI is putting ourselves in the role of the player and trying to invent new interfaces, large and small, that will make our game more enjoyable to play. Hopefully your time in Guild Wars 2 gets a little more enjoyable with the Wardrobe!

Now I’m going to hand it off to Ryan Diederich, one of the programmers who worked on the Wardrobe system.

Programming the Wardrobe

The Wardrobe has been a long project in the making. I’ve personally been working on it since the Wallet was released. It’s been quite an undertaking to transform our original transmutation system into a much more user-friendly and intuitive system. The PvP team had solved some portions of the problem with gear lockers, but we’ve been making strides to try to unify game modes and progression for players who like alts, so we needed something bigger.

We remade the system from the ground up, finding the best user experience for both designing your look and setting out to make that look a reality. Here are some areas we wanted to improve on:

Collecting Weapon and Armor Skins

For the Wardrobe, we’ve changed skins to an account-wide unlock system. Skins can be unlocked by using consumables, equipping items, salvaging equipment, or right-clicking on equipment and account-binding it. Items that you acquire that are already bound to your account automatically unlock their skin when they go into your inventory. Unlocked skins can be applied to items infinitely (for just one Transmutation Charge), which makes it much less stressful to try out a new look for your character, since you can always switch back!

When the feature pack is released, log in with each character on your account to unlock all of the skins bound to that character.

If you have an item that has gone through skin progression, like a legendary weapon or one of the Spinal Blade backpacks from the “Escape from Lion’s Arch†and “Battle for Lion’s Arch†releases, you will unlock all of the skins in that direct line of progression. That means that if you made Twilight, you will have access to both the Twilight and Dusk skins across your entire account. If you’ve created the Dynamic Tempered Spinal Blades, you’ll unlock that skin and all previous Spinal Blade skins.

Town Clothes sold through the gem store as outfits, such as the Pirate Captain’s Outfit, will be usable as a single outfit skin through the Wardrobe. Purchasing an outfit will unlock it for all characters on your account to use. Outfits will replace the look of equipped armors, are equipped in a separate appearance slot, and do not require Transmutation Charges to use. Single items, such as the Fuzzy Hats and Scarlet’s Spaulders, will be unlocked for your entire account and usable with any armor weight. Some basic clothing items that are no longer available for purchase will be converted into endless tonics.

Simplifying Transmutation

The old transmutation process had a very high barrier to entry. The system was also destructive, since it required you to use two items to make one new combined item. Sometimes this meant losing the art on one item forever, and it still cost a Transmutation Crystal. Now, with our new paradigm of weapon and armor skin unlocks, seeking out all the possibilities for that perfect look feels better than ever!

If you’ve been hoarding Transmutation Stones and Crystals, don’t worry! When the Wardrobe goes live, you’ll be able to convert your them into Transmutation Charges. Transmutation Crystals can be directly converted into charges, and Transmutation Stones can be converted at a three-to-one rate.

If you currently have items that have been transmuted, you will unlock the appearance for both the first item used for stats and the last item used for appearance in your final transmuted item. This means that if you have only transmuted a given item once (for example, if you’ve used a single Transmutation Stone to combine the appearance of Dawn with the stats of another greatsword) you’ll unlock the skins for both items in that transmutation.

Use a Transmutation Splitter on any transmuted items if you want to have access to the stats of both components. For example, if you transmuted a high-end piece of gear with a white item to get around soulbinding restrictions, you’ll probably want to use a Transmutation Splitter to retain the stats of the high-end gear, now that you’ll be able to give that appearance to any character on your account.

Discovery

Even when I started working on this project, I had absolutely no idea what to expect on how many different skins there are in the game. The PvP locker was a good starting point with about 2,000 skins, but it didn’t include everything. We’ve made the Wardrobe in the Hero Panel show you every unlocked skin you can apply to a piece of gear, so you know what you’re capable of looking like. If that wasn’t enough, we’ve updated your bank with a Wardrobe Storage vault that includes every skin that you could potentially unlock! In that tab, you can sort, filter, and search to see not only the skins you have access to, but every skin available in the whole game. This makes it simple to look through every option open to you to find the look you really want. I’ve lost several hours to just clicking through all the skins that I didn’t even know existed, and I even ran out to collect my favorite newly discovered skin!

Appearance Preview

In the past, planning out a whole look, including correct dyes, could be difficult. In the new Wardrobe, you can set up all of your skin preferences and adjust the dyes on each individual piece before committing to the changes! We’ve also made a small adjustment so that just hovering over armor dye channels will show you what applying your selected color will look like. This will help both with matching dyes across different armor skins and with making sure that you apply your dye to the proper dye channel.

That’s it for the Wardrobe today! Be sure to learn all about our improved dye system!

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With the new Wardrobe system changing the way you interact with your gear’s appearance, we felt that this was the perfect time to introduce some updates to the dye system. In the April 2014 Feature Pack, dyes will be getting a significant overhaul. Check out the changes we’re planning to make below!

Dyes as Account Unlocks

One of the biggest changes we’re making is that dyes will no longer be unlocked per character but per account instead. When you unlock a dye after the feature pack is released, all characters on your account will have unlimited access to that color.

If you already have the same dyes unlocked on multiple characters, when you log in on additional characters, you will receive one unidentified dye for each duplicate dye already unlocked on your account.

Unidentified Dye Drop Rate

With dyes becoming account unlocks, the demand for dye will decrease and unidentified dyes will no longer drop as loot but will still be available from the Mystic Forge and select in-game rewards.

Both specific colors of dye and unidentified dyes will still be tradable and available on the Trading Post, and hue-specific dyes can still be crafted. The process for identifying unidentified dyes will remain the same.

Dyes in the Hero Panel

A new section of the updated Hero Panel will be devoted to dyes. Here you will be able to dye your armors and outfits as well as view your dye collection.

The new Dye tab in the Hero Panel will feature greatly improved dye confirmation, and you will be able to preview dye colors on your equipped armor by simply selecting a color and moving your mouse over the armor dye channels.

We believe all these changes will make dyes more accessible and easier to use than ever before. We are very excited to get a chance to make big changes to such a core customization system!

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To me it is, I've got over 200 hours into it and still enjoying jumping back in. The game is steadily improving still and while the living world updates aren't always the best content, fun can still be had and it changes every 2 weeks.

I'd suggest keeping an eye out for a free weekend, they seem to do them every now and then.

 

Free trial during the weekend.

 

We’re implementing some changes in the upcoming feature patch to the economy and want to tell you about them now. We’re excited about what these alterations will mean for the game.

The End of Repair Costs

Despite his recent defeat in the Captain’s Council elections, Evon Gnashblade has magnanimously decided to put all of Tyria’s experts in armor repair on salary. That’s right: the day is fast approaching when you will never again have to pay for another repair! Explore and experiment all across Tyria with no cost to repair your armor damaged in trial and battle. We feel the time penalty to return and repair accomplishes our goal enough to not need a secondary cost that punishes newer and less experienced players the most.

Event and Champion Loot

With the changes we’re making that remove some of the systems that take gold out of the economy, we need to make sure the economy remains balanced in terms of gold input as well. We’ll be reducing the amount of raw gold that comes out of champion loot bags and events in an effort to keep the economy balanced and spread out player activity a bit.

Mystic Forge

The Mystic Forge is going to get a lot of changes this year. To kick things off, we’re adjusting the way Zommoros distributes rare and exotic rewards a bit, allowing for more variation in output. This is just a stepping stone to further changes that will make the Mystic Forge a much better experience in the future. Please note: the rate of precursors will not be affected.

Trait Resets

With the coming feature build, you’ll be able to respec your traits anywhere in the world without returning to a profession trainer. To make the deal even sweeter, you won’t ever have to pay to reset your traits! We think the cost hinders experimentation and takes away from the fun of experimenting with builds in PvE, so we’re removing it entirely.

We think these changes will lead to a healthier game and more long-term fun. With the China launch coming up, there is no better time than now for us to improve the economy of the game.

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We’re using the April 2014 Feature Pack as an opportunity to introduce some improvements that we’re really excited for: account-bound World XP and ascended and legendary gear! We want you as a player to feel appropriately rewarded for the time you spend in-game, no matter how many characters you choose to play. Devon Carver and Linsey Murdock are here to explain these updates:

Account-Bound WXP

Hey everybody! I’m World vs. World Coordinator Devon Carver, and I’m here to talk about a topic I know is near and dear to the hearts of all WvW players. Account-bound WXP is coming with the April 2014 Feature Pack! We’ve been working hard at getting this change ready, and we are very excited to make the conversion from a character-based system to an account-based one.

There are some important things to know about the way the transition will work when the feature pack goes live. To begin with, you will need to log into every character on your account that has earned WXP to have their WXP total added to your account total. You don’t have to visit WvW for this to work; any map will do. Once every character has logged in, your account is good to go. From that moment on all WXP you earn on any of your characters will be applied to your account total!

As a part of this change, we will be resetting everyone’s spent World Ability Points on the day of the build. This gives everyone the opportunity to re-allocate their points on each of their characters. You will have the same number of World Ability Points to spend on each of your characters, and you’ll be able to uniquely allocate those points. For example, if you want your necromancer to be a Supply Master but your ranger to be a Ram Master, you can do that.

We’re very excited to take a great system to the account level. We look forward to seeing you on the field of battle, and can’t wait to see WvW continue to grow!

Legendary and Ascended Binding

Hey folks, game designer Linsey Murdock here to tell you about an update we have coming to legendary and ascended equipment. I’m going to be brief because the awesomeness of this update really speaks for itself:

In the upcoming April feature build, we will be converting all legendary and ascended equipment to be account-based. This means ascended equipment will always remain account-bound and will not soulbind to a character when equipped. Legendary weapons will continue to be tradeable until equipped, at which point they will become account-bound (rather than soulbound). As part of this change, we will convert all the existing ascended and legendary equipment that is soulbound to be account-bound instead.

The big reason for this change is that we believe acquiring a legendary weapon or piece of ascended gear is an accomplishment that should not be limited to a single character. By all means, share your rockin’, unicorn-shootin’ bow between your thief and your ranger! Pass down your set of Zojja’s gear when you decide to go for a more balanced build. Above all, take pride in the accomplishments of your account and enjoy those accomplishments to the fullest!

As exciting as they are, these changes are just one part of the April 2014 Feature Pack! Visit the feature pack’s release page to learn all about the new systems, updates, and improvements coming April 15.

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As part of this upcoming feature pack, we’ve been working on community-focused improvements to a few of our core systems. I wanted to take the time to point out just a few of these highly requested features before they come out on April 15.

First, guild leaders who have wanted a little extra help with managing membership will be pleased to learn that you’ll now be able to see the last login date for guild members.

We’ve added some additional support the Looking For Group (LFG) system. You’ll now be able to filter your searches through the WvW category if you’re looking for some fellow Mist warriors. To support this, we’ve added a separate channel for each of the three Borderlands, the Eternal Battlegrounds and the new Edge of the Mist map.

Separately, to assist with multi-language servers you will now be able to specify which main language the group will be using. This should help groups organize better and find players who can understand each other.
Finally, we’ve improved the support for guild members in the system and made some improvements on the back end to reduce opportunities for griefing.

These changes are just some of the ways we’re making it easier and more exciting than ever to share the world of Tyria with other players – check back tomorrow and next week to learn about more upcoming features!

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