1581

It’s almost definitely going to be more than one.

1582

OMG, it looks like Amazon upgraded my pre-order to a pre-purchase, or at least that’s what the Guild Wars 2 website is telling me. The Amazon email also says I now have a 3 day headstart and access to all beta weekend events, so it looks as if Amazon’s pre-order is now a pre-purchase. Yay! :D

And I was talking about an announcement of a release date by the end of June, not an actual release, THAT would be crazy. :)

1583

And apparently people who pre-purchased are pissed at Arenanet for doing this:

waving goodbye oh hey guys! what’s up? I was just saying goodbye to all respect I still held for arena net. If it wasn’t clear that they didn’t respect their customers very much back at pre-purchase, I think its pretty clear now. anyone remember their quote on twitter about “Prepurchase is the ONLY way to get guaranteed beta acess” or something along those lines? Then again they also never said they would give us a month between release date announcement and release. I’m pretty surprised by them. AS several of you probably know I thought their pre-purchase program was less than honest but this is … idk if it’s funny or sad how badly they just bent us pre-purchasers over a barrel and ______ed us all.

Way to give the finger to your most loyal fans Anet. better be a release date announcement soon before the storm of angry fanboys come, but this time they will be coming after YOU.

1584

Internet drama queens.

1585

I think it’s understandable. If someone told me the ONLY way to get X that I wanted was to hand over some cash, which I did, and then later that person started handing out X for free, I would be upset. That’s pretty reasonable, I think. The big question is if A-Net actually did insist that the only way to get a key was through pre-purchase (I have no idea).

1586

They didn’t say it was the only way, they said it’s the only way to guarantee access to the BWEs - which is still true today. It wasn’t sneaky or underhanded, it was always pretty clear to me what was meant.

1587

Losing respect for an entire company because I get to play the beta too? That is even dumber than getting pissed at Blizzard for having a problem with servers on release day.

1588

Woo, BWE2 preview is posted. Lots of good stuff, but here are two that stood out for me:

Combat in Guild Wars 2 is more visceral than ever. We’re constantly making improvements to the entire combat experience—better timing, enhanced sound design, subtle camera shakes—to enhance what designer Jon Peters likes to call “the sense of hitting.”

And proper keybinding!

For those who want to customize their gameplay experience, we’re introducing a new, easy-to-use key-binding interface, which now allows you to bind modifier keys.

Too bad I’m going to be camping this weekend with no internet access, arg.

1589

Looks like they’ve been hard at work. Can’t wait until Friday!

1590

I love their willingness to talk to us. So looking forward to this.

1591

Yep, I’m excited about this BWE! Pretty surprised how much they got done in a month’s time.

The only bad thing: I’m going to have to play it like crazy this weekend if I want to get to level 30 and see the dungeon and new area. :(

1592

You can’t go there and have it auto-level you up to 30?

1593

You level down, you can’t level up outside of WvW and sPVP.

1594

This is the tough part for me…to play the beta or not. I want the game to give me a sense of awe and excitement when I first load it up, but that said, I am chomping at the bit to at least take a look an give a couple of builds a try.

Ugh, decisions.

1595

Well, already between BWE1 and BWE2 there have been changes (skill tiers) that have invalidated a lot of builds. If your main desire is to test out builds, I’d recommend waiting.

1596

Oh, I thought it worked either way like City of Heroes for some reason.

1597

Way back in the day, it was supposed to.

1598

I look at the BWE’s as an early extension of the early access period. The only difference being you will have to re-roll your character once the full game is released. I’ve purposely held off rolling certain types of classes so I have something new to try when the full game is released.

1599

Just a heads up that Arenanet is currently doing an AMA on reddit here.

1600

Here are some tidbits:

Are we going to see any increase in FPS this weekend? In other words, did you work on optimization after BWE1 and Stress test?

Our engine and content programming teams made a number of improvements since the last weekend. Ideally you should see at least some increase in performance, but we’re not even close to done yet so don’t be too discouraged if you’re still having performance issues. Please be sure to leave feedback on our forums over the weekend and let us know how it feels!

P4. This warrior has what appears to be a 2-handed axe. Are there any intentions on implementing 2 handed axes in the game, or will there be greatsword skins that are designed to look like axes?

Two handed axes are awesome. No reason to skin, lets save some cool stuff for expansions :)


GP2a. (followup to last question) Does the team consider big changes to the base game possible following launch?

Yes, we intend to listen to the community and figure out what changes will help improve the game for players, as well as which are technically feasible. There will be a lot of effort going into Guild Wars 2 support after ship.

Also if you take a look at the change list from BWE to BWE2, that is literally stuff we have done in the last few weeks. We have a great process here for making changes which helps us make good on our philosophy of iteration. This is the kind of progress we want to keep making on the game as we keep moving forward.

GP10. What is the status on fixing Pet AI?

We have fixed a large number of bugs with pet AI, but there are still some lingering ones. Anyone that finds a good case for reproducing them, please don’t hesitate to post about it in our beta forums or somewhere on the internet and hopefully it finds its way to us.

GP3. Sense of moving is a great idea, what about a sense of being connected to the ground with walking/animations? Players also experience a ‘sliding’ effect when walking.

We have worked hard on this issue. Just like any game there are cases where you can make it look crazy, but we feel like those are mostly edge cases at this point. We still have some things in mind that we want to do here, but what you see now is close to what you will get.

I will explain a bit how it works.

Visually we have transition animations that help blend between different states, but for those worried about responsiveness those transitions are purely visual so as soon as you press strafe left you are moving at full speed to the left. This disconnect is what sometimes causes the floaty feeling.

Is there a possibility that we could then see some “I just started moving” speed ramp-up times then? Maybe the character doesn’t start at full stride, but quickly works into it?

Strait from one of our animators: “we DID have a ramp up speed early in development and removed it because it (surprise) made movement feel sluggish and pissed people off”