Apr 9

Written by:
4/9/2012 12:33 AM 

 

A couple of days ago we were invited by ArenaNet and NCsoft to attend their Guild Wars 2 European Fan Day. Our own Tilion was present in Brighton, England where he got the chance to take part in a Q&A with the developers of the game. Lots of different questions were asked and several interesting answers were given.

Today, we are going to present you a transcript of that Q&A. We would like to thank Dutch Sunshine of GuildMag and Tasha Darke of Attached to Keyboard for permitting us to use it, as they are the ones who did the whole work. If you have not visited their respective websites, be sure to do so. The reason that we posted the transcript here as well is to mainly let everyone know about the content of the Q&A, but also to translate it for the Greeks.

As you may notice we were only given the chance to ask only one question. Fear not though! We were promised that we'll get an interview from the developers soon enough, as we got lots of hot questions in our sleeves. Enjoy...

Nerdy Bookahs: How does the overflow shard work? We know we can play PvE, but can we play structured PvP while we’re on the overflow shard and can we join structured PvP matches with friends who are on other servers?

Eric Flannum: So I guess I can take that. Yes you can join structured PvP when you are on the overflow server. People who are on other servers, the matchmaking in structured PvP are between different servers so you will be able to play with people from different servers.

Attached to Keyboard: What is the biggest challenge that you’ve had to face to get the game to its current stage, either programming or just trying to decide what it is that you want to make out of Guild Wars 2?

Josh Petrie: From a programming perspective at this point in the game the biggest challenge we have is optimising everything, making sure it’s all going to run as fast as we can get it on all the hardware we’re going to run it on.

Kristen Perry: From an art point of view its sort of the same thing we’ve been doing all along just making sure everything is as polished and as awesome as we can get it in the time we have going on.

Eric Flannum: I guess design wise balance is kind of the optimisation for us. You know working on creature balance, skill balance, making sure that all the various numbers that we have in the game work actually together and everything is exactly right. That’s always tricky and takes a while, but I think is often the difference between an ok game and a great game.

Ree Soesbee: From a story perspective we now have thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of text in the game written by lots of different people in the company from events to story, dungeons to everything else, and making sure that they’ve all said the same lore can be very difficult because someone will make a small point about a hylek in one map that absolutely has to be carried over everywhere else or it doesn’t make any sense and we have to find that tiny little assumption that somebody made and make sure it’s even throughout the game.

GW2NL: What mechanics do you consider unfinished and will be developed further in the future?

EF: I think just about every feature is eligible to be worked on depending on feedback that we get. So even if there’s something we think is perfect, it’s completely done, if when the game releases we then realise “oh ok well that thing’s not as great as we thought it was” we’ll absolutely work on it. We have a fairly sizable live team that we’re going to dedicate to creating all kinds of stuff after the game ships. One of those teams is kinda just an R & D team to come up with cool new things and to fix things that aren’t as good as they could be. You can expect to see a lot of additions and refinements and all kind of things after the game ships.

GuildMag: Can you tell us anything about the upcoming PvP maps and specifically the underwater PvP map?

EF: Upcoming PvP maps, I think we released a screenshot that showed a little bit of one the other day with the guardians and the warrior, both with hammers. So we’ve for 2 more PvP maps that we haven’t revealed yet, they’re both capture point, one of them… I don’t want to totally give them away ‘cos I think we’re planning on revealing them. One of them is actually going to be pretty nostalgic for GW1 players so you can expect that to be something that has a lot of familiar elements for GW1 players and the second one actually is a pretty cool one that has a lot of underwater combat and involves a pirate ship so those are both pretty cool and we’ll be talking more about those I think pretty soon.

CJ: Guild Wars 1 players are going to be pretty excited I think.

GWOnline/OnlineWelten: Most achievements in an MMOG at least in people’s interests, translate directly into time spent in game. At the same time these achievements have some kind of social value to them. People like to compare their characters, dungeon runs etc. How will micro transactions affect the social dimensions of MMORPG and game play?

EF: Some of the items in the shop that you guys have seen are basically things that can kind of circumvent a bit of time spent in the game and our achievements, if you go back and look at them, are a combination of things that take time as well, but there are also lots of things, I think even the majority of things, that don’t really take time and can’t really be effected by cash shop things. So achievements like killing other player in WvW or for PvP, or achievements for things like finishing dungeons or doing things like that, most of those things really can’t be circumvented or rushed along by using micro transaction and then we’ve got kind of just the way that our achievement score works, it’s kind of just an aggregate score and so there’s no real top limit to it. So when you’re comparing with your friends, you kind of just have this one achievement score that you’re comparing. I don’t think micro transaction, it will have some affect on it, but it won’t be the major determining factor in whether someone has a super high achievement score or not.

CJ: Some of those things too that you show off in game as achievements of stuff that earned, So like if you do explorable dungeons and collect the rare armor sets or rare weapons that come from that dungeon, those are things where you can’t take those items and trade them around with everyone. They’re bound to your character for completing that stuff, so it’s a sense of this is your ability to show off to everybody else “I did this” and people can’t get those abilities from the cash shop. Those are purely things that people playing the game, who are skilled enough to beat the dungeons can earn them and that’s the only way to get them. We think that’s really important too is things like that are achievements that allow you to show off to everybody. Those will stay limited to people who can earn them and the amount you spend will have no effect on those.

DragonSeason: What is your number one thing you are worried might just go wrong?  

(Everyone laughs)

KP: There’s always something to go worry about, it’s just preparing and making sure everything doesn’t go wrong.

RS: Yeah if we thought of something that we’re scared will go wrong, we’ve been trying to address it.

Everyone: Yeah

EF: The big thing is something always goes wrong. I think we learnt that from our previous game releases, so the big thing is to be ready for when that happens and be able to respond to it. But I mean, if there were anything that er, I mean the sort of the “I’m pretty sure this isn’t gonna happen” but you always worry about some progression stopping bug getting through right, like I think we had that with Nightfall where something snuck through, but with a game as big as Guild Wars 2 is, I think you always worry about the you know how can we have possible seen everything that could possibly happen with it. We worry about that. But the big thing is we’re always ready to respond to that. We know that the day we release is not the end day; it’s kind of the beginning. We always have the mindset of we’re ready to respond immediately.

KP: Yeah especially if there’s ever a wardrobe malfunction I need to be on that.

CJ: My biggest fear is that the day the game comes out people will forget to eat and sleep. That is very important. Please remember to sleep and eat. We don’t want to lose any of our community!

KP: Well look at it that way too, that the hallucinations from sleep deprivation will be some added special effects!

Wartower: I’m a big fan of raiding and I was very happy to hear an attrition mechanic so ultimately players are going to go game over and turn around. But what I didn’t like was the addition of a micro transaction that could circumvent this attrition. Do you have any plans for the raiding community to lock that item out of final group raiding?

CJ: That item is actually not usable in dungeons. It is not usable in the high level raiding type stuff.

Gaming-insight.de: I’m really interested in craftable items compared to normal loot you get from dungeons concerning the end game and raid content. How important will it be to rely on craftables and how much do I need my dungeon loot?

EF: Our basic philosophy on all of that is that the base power level that you need to get to in order to do things, is attainable multiple ways, its attainable in whatever way you most enjoy playing the game. So those items will be available to WvW players, I can get those items in WvW. If I’m a dungeon player and all I want to do is play dungeons then I can get sort of to that power level by playing dungeons. If I’m a player who really enjoys crafting and really enjoys being out in the open world, I can get those items by either crafting or through drops or like that. In a lot of game there’s sort of a power tier that’s reserved for a particular type of content and then what happens is that content suddenly becomes the end game of the game, it becomes the thing you have to do because it’s the only way to get that power. And so what we did is spread that power out, throughout all the different types of content so you shouldn’t feel like you have to do dungeons or that you have to do WvW or that you have to do this.

A big part of Guild Wars 2 is all about playing the game the way you want to play. And as Colin mentioned before, if I get that tier of items by playing dungeons those items will have a certain appearance and the only way to get that appearance is by having attained those items through dungeons. The same goes for crafting, there’s a certain look to the super high level crafted items that you can only get by crafting the item. There’s a certain look, there’s a WvW armor set that you can only get through playing WvW. And so that high end reward thing, appearance is really the thing, but as far as power goes, you can get power by doing any part of the game.

Guild Wars 2 Fan Blog: I wanted to ask you a question about Martin Kerstein’s blog post about building community. Recently he wrote that you will be opening new forums, the official ones, and I wanted to ask what kind of a shift does it mean for your community policy. I mean your community managers were often present on different fan forums like Guild Wars Guru, does it mean they will be coming back to the official forums and they won’t be appearing on community forums? When will the forums officially be launched and will they be available only in English or will there be sub forums in other languages? 

Regina Buenaobra: I guess that’s my question. In terms of what it means for the community, it means that we will be participating on the official forums but we don’t think that it means that the fan sites will die out as some people have been predicting. The thing is that a lot of people enjoy having the freedom and being able to speak their mind. They don’t want to be moderated by “the man” which can happen on official forums and our community philosophy is that is that we want to have a welcoming and friendly community with productive discussion and we will moderate to that effect. And it does mean that we might not have as much time to communicate on different fan forums, but that doesn’t mean we won’t still be reading and that we won’t still be watching. In terms of supported languages the forums will be in languages that we have community managers for, so the main languages for the game.

CJ: Wherever you post we’re always watching!

RB: Even if we don’t post, we’re reading.

Guild Wars 2 Spain: (audio unclear) What you can tell us about Ebonhawke?

RS: Ebonhawke is the last real bastion of the Ascalon resistance, the Ebon Vanguard. They’re being assisted by the queen of Kryta who has sent seraph, who have an Asura Gate in Divinity’s Reach through which she sends supplies to make sure they’re provided for against the charr. They’ve been holding out for a very long time right now and they’re on the edge of a treaty with the charr. If that goes through Ebonhawke’s position will probably be a lot more stable but as it is they are sort of losing the battle against the charr in Ascalon. The charr have had Ascalon now for a very long time and have pretty well kept the line against the humans; the humans have resorted to guerrilla tactics to try to keep the charr off balance. But they just don’t have the forces to commit to taking any part of Ascalon back, they can only really keep the fortress.

A lot of people in Ebonhawke feel that if the Queen would give them more support, more troops they might be able to take part of Ebonhawke back, so there’s a certain amount of friction there. There’s also friction in the fact that the people holding Ebonhawke tend to be the descendants of Ascalon, the descendants of King Adelbern and so forth, and the Queen of Kryta sort of rules them right now and they feel like they should be an independant country but they’re trapped in the position where they have to rely on Kryta so they can’t really be independent. They’re hoping that if they can work this through, then they can once again have their own leadership, their own king.

Guild Mag Spain: My question is focussed on the lore in Guild Wars 2. In the game how will we be able to explore the lore of the early Tyria?

RS: There are a lot of ways that we get lore across to the player. One is in the personal story where your character actually goes investigates the Durmand Priory which is very big on finding out ancient lore finding anything that was left by the (not clear, lords possibly?) in particular hopefully to fight the dragons with, but you can follow a story chain, you can make choices that will give you more information on that if that’s what you’re interested in.

Throughout the rest of the game we’ve also got places you can go find, people you can interact with, locations you can recognise from Guild Wars 1 and some that are even older than Guild Wars 1. When you go to Orr you’re going to get a lot of information going back and forth from place to place about how that country operated, how the people there lived and that will give you a lot of very initial information on the humans in Tyria.

CJ: There’s a lot of unanswered questions from Guild Wars 1 that the answers are scattered all throughout Guild Wars 2 as well, so there’s lot of great Easter Eggs for people who love Guild Wars 1 lore. And we tried to give all the lore of the world in there so people who have never played Guild Wars 1 can actually understand the story and understand the history without having to go back and play GW1. You’re going to learn all that by just playing Guild Wars 2.

RS: By playing Guild wars 2 we want you to love Tyria, and if you love Tyria then this past information, this historical egg, stuff in the background is going to be important to you as well.

Guild Wars 2 Spain: Will the game be made available with Spanish voice acting as well as text at some point in the future?

KP: I don’t think we’re sure about that.

EF: I think that’s something that we’re continuing to investigate, I’m not sure we actually know about that. Sorry.

CJ: The people who can answer that are not sitting in this room.

Mediavida: In our community, everybody plays a lot of games especially esports like for example League of Legends our mates are very interested if you’re likely to orient your PvP into an esport in a more competitive way, organising tournaments etc.

EF: We would definitely like our PvP to become an esport. I think there are a lot of things you have to do to support that. The first thing you have to do is come out with a game that is sort of broadly appealing that can bring in a big PvP audience and keep those players playing it. So that’s kind of the thing that we’ve been concentrating on the most, is trying to make the PvP game that is really accessible that people that can kind of get into and really play and has a lot of ability to really master it. I think once we do that then you have to kind of come in with that second tier of support like observer mode and being able to watch matches and having tournaments and having support for all of that. So it’s fully our intent to support the game as an esport and right now we’re concentrating on releasing a broadly appealing accessible and fun to watch form of PvP and that’s kind of our concentration at the moment to do that, but we definitely look at our competitive PvP as an esport.

Mmorpgmania.it/gw2italia.it: We had a chance to try the game and noticed that the side kicking system didn’t work inside instances. We were wondering if you are going to confirm this or if in the future or in the release there is a side kicking system inside instances or dungeons?

CJ: There is side kicking in all of dungeons in the game. Each dungeon whether it is a story dungeon or an explorable dungeon has a correlated level that your character gets side kicked down to if you are over the level of the dungeon, but we do not sidekick you up to the level of the dungeon. So to do any of the dungeons in the game you need to get be high enough level to participate in it and then if you go over level for it, we’ll side kick you down to keep it challenging and fun for you. So for example the Ascalon Catacombs story dungeon is a level 30 and if you get up to say, level 38 we’ll side kick you down to the level of the dungeon so you can keep playing it with everyone and have it be fun and challenging for you.

EF: One thing to note is that, earlier we talked about how we were going allow players to sidekick up in level we actually don’t have that functionality in the game and the reason we don’t have it is because when we were going through the game we thought one of the really important moments in the game was kind of that moment where you ran into something and you weren’t quite powerful enough to overcome it, or skilled enough to overcome it, and we wanted to give people the ability to kind of be able to build their character in such a way that you could by those moments instead of just bypassing them by getting artificially side kicked up a level. And so we don’t have side kicking up anymore in the game anymore except for in WvW. So if you want to think of how our dynamic level adjustment works is that it automatically happens downwards in PvE and automatically happens upwards in WvW. And competitive PvP obviously you get set to equal level everybody. So that’s kind of how that works now.

Jianji: You’re allowed to be a member of more than one guild at one time by a stating which one you’ll be representing. Is there going to be any form of restriction or penalty for continually changing your guild (during PvP)?

EF: No, there won’t be any sort of penalty or restriction, placed on you as far as changing guilds. We kind of look at Guilds as groups of friends and the thing that led us to making the [guild system] the way it is, is the realisation that I have different groups of friends that I play the game with for different reasons and it’s nice to be able to join those friends for different ways. In Guild Wars 1, even though I had some friends who played the game, I had to choose whether I wanted to be in a guild with them or if I wanted to be in a guild with the people I worked with. That necessarily wasn’t any fun choice for me. So what we’ve done is that we’ve allowed it so that I can be in a guild with my friends from outside work, I can be in a guild with my friends from work, similarly if you go to school still, you got some random school friends who’d play, you can be in a guild with friends from school, or you could divide it between say, I’m in a guild but it’s PvP orientated, and I’m in a Guild that’s PvE orientated and I jump into a guild I kind of feel like playing in, depending on what I’m doing.

We really want to allow that freedom for players, so we don’t want to place any restrictions on it. Now we do realize that there’s nothing artificially tying you to a guild, and there’s that criticism that ‘well, guild membership doesn’t mean anything’, well, we kind of don’t buy that argument, and the reason we don’t buy that argument is because it’s not like my friendship with my friends doesn’t mean anything, there’s nothing binding me to have to be friends with the people I’m friends with at any given time, and I have different groups of friends. So what we wanted to do is to make a guild system that more closely mimicked sort of real human social interaction and a real human social structure, so that you didn’t need to forsake any group of friends for another group of friends. We feel that any kind of penalty to that is far outweigh by the positives to it. We’re not particularly worried about that system and we think that people will really, really like it, once they get in and start playing with it.

GuildWars2.pl: How will people be ranked in structured PvP? Will the rank be given to a certain player, to a certain team of players, or to a guild itself? Or maybe to all three types of playtypes?

EF: So in competitive PvP guilds are not really a thing that’s recognized as a particular unit, instead what you have is individual player recognition and team recognition. If all five of us here were part of a team, we would be recognized as that team, you people would be able to see what guild we would be part of, so it’s entirely possible that you get a famous team in which every single one of them is from a different guild, or more likely to be the case is that those people are going to join a guild and that’s kind of going to become their identity, it’s going to become their team name.

Again, the flexibility of the guild system means that if the five of us want to make a five person guild for our team, we can go ahead and do that, and we do not need to be in our regular guilds to do that. We just join into this other guild whenever we want to. You will be able to see in which guilds the various people are when you sort of look at how good they are as a team or how good they are individually, but guilds are not necessarily, sort of officially recognised the way they were in Guild Wars 1.

GuildWars2.pl: So there would be only a ladder for teams, not for the guilds?

EF: Yes, not for guilds.

CJ: Guilds can claim keeps in World versus World PvP, so that’s kind of where we directed that area a little more. It’s a location for them to really band the whole guild together to do that stuff, because we think that’s a more involved process for everybody who plays at the same time, as to only having like, a group of five.

Mondes Persistants: You just said that you’d reveal two new maps, out of which one map would please the Guild Wars 1 players right?

EF: We said that one of them would be very nostalgic and familiar for Guild Wars 1 players. I don’t think I want to say more than that, it’s still a capture point map, so it’s not different, but the secondary mechanics will be very familiar to the people who played Guild Wars 1 PvP.

CJ: Can you tell them when it’s done?

EF: Yeah, the map is not quite ready to sort of be revealed yet and I don’t really want to steal the thunder from our PvP team revealing it, but I think people will be very pleased with it.

Mondes Persistants: What do you want to say to your fans who aren’t very convinced about the capture point system as a primary objective for an eSport to succeed? Do you have anything to tell them to take away their fears?

EF: It is the case that there aren’t any super popular PvP types that are straight death match. Counter Strike has secondary objectives, League of Legends has secondary objectives, DOTA like games in general have secondary objectives. The reason why we choose capture points as our primary-secondary objective mechanic is because we want there to be a score, we want it to be really easy to tell who is winning and who is losing. We also want to encourage movement across the map, we felt that capture points did that in a way that was very easy for people to understand and in a way that could be consistent and that could be used to get multiple types of games out of it. Capture points are extremely flexible and we think that as we start revealing more and more maps, people will be able to see how flexible capture points are as being able to encompass a lot of different sorts of playstyles, but still have that sort of capture point mechanic, as its core.

Univers-Virtuels: Will it be possible to create less perfect characters or older [characters]? Because your human especially, are very young and the female all are very pretty. So would it be possible to be more flexible in the character creations?

KP: All of the characters creation and the different kinds of options that you have with your characters, all of the races have a  lot of variety. We have facial sliders now, so that you want to have a larger nose, or smaller mouth or maybe a broader jaw, those are available for that and so in addition to that, we’re trying to also lay around different outings like charr. They have the fur that you can choose, there’s your base colour, but then there’s just a multitude of different kind of animal patterns that youll be able to put on them. The asura have similar things, the sylvari have similar things as well, the tattoos with norns and facial hair and different beards and everything like that, we always intended to have a various static and beautiful [character]. Visage for a lot of our character creation, but we’re also trying to give a lot of variety for the people to create what they want to look like.

Univers-Virtuels: So, at the moment the humans are very young and it’s not possible to make it older as a character, or it will be possible to turn off the make up for woman?

KP: I’m not sure, we have some variety in there, but largely we want an idealized beautiful base face, so I think the humans are probably going to remain within a certain spectrum.

Univers-Virtuels: So will it be possible to have no make-up for the womans?

KP: I think there are bases with different kinds of make-up on them, so you would be able to choose a face that we have more or less make-up on, if you want something a bit more natural and then use the facial sliders to customize it from there.

AT: So there’s no chance to make a really old ugly character then?

CJ: I’ve seen a few norn characters that looked pretty beat up.

Luna-Atra: The cross-combo profession – when two professions stick together, they make a cross-profession combo attack, but they can’t see the effect of the cross-profession combo. What solution do you have to help the player recognise this cross-profession combo?

EF: There are a couple ways in which we try to help players see that they’re forming a cross- profession  combo. The first is that we actually have an effect that plays of some sort like any key mentions. You can see the arrows catch fire or you can see the smoke going out if you do a stomp effect inside of a smoke cloud. The other thing which you get is a little pop-up that says ‘Combo’ whenever you’re performing a cross-profession combo, and it’s up to players to notice that we will probably do a little bit more refinement on it. I don’t know that is that noticeable just yet, but yeah, those are the two tools that we kind of want to rely on, it is the combo pop-up as well as the visual effects in the game.

We think that players will have players learning, which is a big part of the combat system,  what the different combo’s do and figuring it out. We don’t actually spell out: ‘this does this, this does exactly this and this’ anywhere. We rely on players to kind of observe and figure things out like: ‘Okay, if I fire projectiles through a smoke field it looks like I’m getting a combo of some sort… Oh! It looks like those guys are getting blinded [by an attack that usually doesn’t blind people]’. So it’s up to you to notice those kind of things, we don’t spell it out. Other, I’m sure that for people who want to have things spelled out, it will be on the wiki, you know, a day after the game releases.

Manaflask: When you opened your website, you gave people a chance to opt-in for a beta invitation, I think you did get huge feedback and a lot of people are waiting to get their hands on the game. When are you starting to get more waves into the game and make it more accessible, and have people actually enjoy parts of the game themselves.

RB: As far as I know for the past, the NDA will still remain in effect for those tests, certain numbers of the press did get exceptions to those particular tests, players will remain under NDA for those tests. However, it’s not to say that we do more events in the future that might not be under NDA, but we’re still kind of evaluating.

Manaflask: Okay, but we’re not going to see a huge wave of invitations coming in the very near future then?

RB: If you pre-purchase the game, you will get guaranteed access to Beta Weekend Events. If you signed up during the 48 hour period a couple months ago, you have a chance to get into those Beta Weekend Events, but it’s not guaranteed. So the best way to get in, is to pre-purchase the game.

CJ: The next beta event will be when it is ready.

Guild Wars 2 Journal: I’ve already seen the upgrades and the resource for guilds, and that was pretty impressive, but I was also wondering about a few more features that you may be able to say something about. Like alliance chat for guilds in World versus World, or in general what kinds of benefits a guild can get through World versus World?

EF: I think we’ve shown a piece of guild chat, we’ve shown the guilds influence system with Guild Halls and all those things, Guild Emblems , different guild permissions – those are basically the features I think we’re going to ship with, and again, we don’t consider guilds done by any stretch of imagination, when we ship, we expect that we will be enhancing guilds. There are a lot of features that I think we could add, and a lot of features I think we want to add. I don’t know exactly when, since we haven’t developed a timeline exactly for those features, but I think that, just to throw one out, I think we’d love to see something like a guild calendar where you can put guild events down and things like that, which should be totally cool. That’s not the sort of thing will make it in for launch, but that is the sort of feature that we will be doing in the future at some point.

So I can’t say when exactly but I think the features that are in the guilds now, you can expect them to be refined and improved and will be done before launch, but I don’t think you’ll be seeing any big new features for guilds. So things like alliances, all of those things, we’ll have to look at how much we think that [those are needed]. We have to launch the game, then prioritize based on feedback from players and what we think the state of the game is, this is more important than that to add, we’ll try to have things that, based on importance we think they have for players. Like what do players really need as far as guild features go. So yeah, I think we will definitely release more guild features, but the features that are in right now are the ones that we’ll have at launch.

GW2.fr: I played PvP in Guild Wars 1, and I really liked the emotes related to the titles, so I was wondering if there will be some emotes in Guild Wars 2 for the PvP? Will it be tied to the PvP rank?

EF: No, there will be no rank emotes, if you’re talking about the deer and all of that, so no rank emotes this time around for Guild Wars 2.

GW2.fr: Will there be any special emotes in Guild Wars 2?

EF: There are no special emotes for PvP, but I guess that if you consider finishing someone an emote, we do plan on eventually coming out with hopefully more finishing moves somewhere in the future, but for right now, there are no special emotes. People have not seen dances yet, which will be pretty spectacular cool, they will be like they were in Guild Wars 1, which is very involved. We’ve got a couple of emotes that we haven’t revealed yet. By and large there will not be any kind of special emotes just for PvP or just for one particular kind of gameplay or the other.

GW2Blog.com: Hi guys! Just a little question about races, the missing races. Will these be playable in future betas, or not?

EF: The different races, like the sylvari and the asura? We basically haven’t talked about what content we’ll have in future beta events. We do plan on expanding the content that’s available in future beta events. What we have to do is to sort of draw a line of revealing too much so that things are spoiled to people alongside trying to get more people testing various areas. We have some kind of a [team with]core testers that have access to the entire game so there’s a lot of testing going on for the game. And these beta events where we invited tons of people are more for stress testing and getting a lot of people on the areas. So we do want to keep things fresh and keep expanding the content that’s available on beta weekends, but at the same time we don’t want to get away too much, so I’m not sure exactly how we’re going to go with that. You may see additional races available, and you may not. I think there are lots of distinctions that have to be made, and we’ll be announcing those before each particular events, all the new things that are going to be available on these events, so you guys will have some warning if the sylvari and the asura become playable in the future.

Millenium: Hi guys! So you spoke about observer view in PvP. Can you tell us more about this?

EF: Since that feature is not in yet, it’s really hard to say anything about it. We thought it was a great feature in Guild Wars 1 and we want the game to be really watchable, so in the future we’ll definitely have something like that. It’s not going to make it in for the release of the game, but sometime after release. But it’s not a feature we can talk too much about, because quite frankly it doesn’t exist yet. So we’ll definitely talk about it once we’ve got any work in. That whole thing about we don’t like to talk about things is because I could speculate on what it might be like, but it could end up completely different from that, and so I really don’t want to do that because I don’t want that you guys get gaming expectations in one way, and we actually go into another way. So we really can’t speculate on that yet. But it is something we definitely want to have on the game after release.