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Fansite: Guild Wars Underground (site no longer operating)

Date: 25 February 2005

Number: 34

Q&A

Question: The ladder system right now is still a great work in process. Can you tell us what kind of plans ArenaNet has for the Ladder? Will Guild Wars offer more types of ladders for various PvP? And will the ladder provide more information, such as total wins in an arena, total deaths?

Answer: Well, I'm sure that you're aware that we have stated that we do hope to have "stat sheets" for each player. Whether that feature will be in the initial release or perhaps streamed to you in one of our free updates, I cannot say for sure. But beyond player stat sheets, we have always said that we want you to have the information that makes playing the game as fun and interesting as it can be. This means we intend to provide guild information at a far greater depth than currently available. A win/loss record may be the most important thing to know about a guild, sure. But there is a lot more that the guild's members, casual observers, perspective guild members, and opponents would like to be able to learn.

As you know, we're working right now on content that will be previewed in the upcoming Beta Weekend Event. This new content will provide several types of guild challenges. I can imagine that competitive guilds would like to know stats about success and failure of their opponents in guild-versus-guild play, tournament play, and arena play as well. They might like to be able to check out the stats of individual players, too. Perhaps they'd like to appraise how well a player performs individually and as a member of a guild. I'm not sure that the distinctions would be easy to make, particularly since a person may play in different groups within a guild, or may join several guilds in the course of his involvement with Guild Wars, but that may be seen as useful information by other players.

As we head towards the next BWE, I'll try to find out if we will have more statistical options for you, or where we are in the development of those stat sheets for the release of Guild Wars. But you can be sure we're thinking about how to incorporate more player and guild information into the game in a meaningful way.

Question: How will the new quest concepts play a role in the overall Guild Wars world? Will it change explorable areas just for you? Or will everyone be affected when you complete certain quests?

Answer: If you are in a party, the mission area will be one that all of your party shares. You won't see something different than your party members, no. But you may well see something different than what another party sees on the same map, depending upon their experiences leading up to that mission.

I believe you are asking, also, about how the dynamic mission system will affect party members when they have a different 'history.' Let me see if I can explain: Say you go on a mission with three people who have each completed a different number of quests. If you have participated in several missions and if you have completed all the quests leading up to this point in the story, you will know more about the story that those who has worked straight through and have not completed anything but the main quests that got them to this point in the game.

Now, the dynamic system is developed to respond to the person who has the greatest depth of quest completion. So you, having done a side mission, know that a certain character dies, where another player may be totally unaware that the character has gone on to his eternal reward. How does that affect the mission that you're both undertaking now? In the new mission, you have progressed farther, meaning you have greater information about the game. Therefore, your presence will determine the content of the new mission. If a key figure was killed, your party may read an NPC message about the character's death. If you completed the previous mission and undertook a quest that left a building on fire, the building might be a scorched shell in the next mission. Your party member will also see the text about the death of the character, or view the burned building, even though he skipped the related quest or quests in an earlier mission. When I learned about how this would work, I remember thinking, 'The moral of this story is that for maximum story involvement, you want to do the quests.'

Question: When most people reach and beat the last mission, what will the ArenaNet live team do to add variety and life to the game? Is it possible they will add more explorable areas, new PvP concepts?

Answer: Like most roleplaying games, when a player reaches the end of the missions, there will no doubt be a draw to play through the game as a different character, that is, a character with a different profession set. There are, after all, 30 possible combinations. And of course, playing through the missions no doubt will result in a character that is ideally suited to PvP play, as well, which is where many players will choose to become engaged. But yes, it's entirely possible that we will add new areas to the game when we conduct our regular updates.

We will actually have three areas of focus for various parts of our team:

• We will support the existing Guild Wars players with such things as technical and account support, a growing Knowledge Base, and our website
• We will add to the existing game with new and updated content
• We will develop the next chapter of Guild Wars

The additions to existing content will be conducted by our Live Team, and Team 2 will be focused on the development of the next chapter of Guild Wars. There will be some overlap, of course, and we'll need to decide what types of things to roll out for updates, particularly knowing that the game will be expanding over time and being careful that everything supports the expansion of the story. But I can foresee that we'd definitely want to consider content that adds fun and freshness to the game, such as seasonal events, perhaps a new area, a quest related to the story that has been told so far, and so forth.

And it just occurred to me that, after the first chapter has been out for several months, it would be super to add a "teaser" or two. Maybe an area that was previously inaccessible is now reachable; perhaps you find that a character that you thought was dead is actually back and alive and causing monster-sized problems all over again. I didn't ask Jess Lebow, our writer, about this directly, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him and his team foretell a bit about the coming chapter in the first chapter of Guild Wars.