When ArenaNet started the first beta for Guild Wars 2's WvW overhaul, the event was shut down after just two hours. Now, the team has published a postmortem on just what went wrong and what's next for WvW.
Though live for just two hours, the beta did give the team some data to work with, so there are some positives, at least. The major issues started rolling in almost immediately just after the Friday reset and the initial opening of WvW beta on September 24th. They began seeing reports of players being matched to the completely wrong teams. Since the usual server reset time kicks everyone and launches fresh, it should have theoretically been the clean slate a beta needed. However, some players had some leftover bad shard data when they logged in, and the client would use that data to try and join, thus sending them to the wrong place. This, however, was just the first issue.
Next, they noticed that demand on their server was spiking due to duplicated Edge of the Mists instances, taking up about 30 times the normal resources.Their log servers, which keep track of all events during an event or beta, were also overrun due to an error. The log server in question is also part of the function of Guild Wars 2 as a whole, so they ended the beta..
ArenaNet identified 10 bugs that must be fixed before the next beta can happen. Though there were positives too. The WvW restructuring tech did work at scale, so this was a good sign. The new matchmaking algorithm also grouped players in a balanced way too.
With all of this, they're looking at a new beta week to begin on November 12th. For the full update, with all of the fine details on just went wrong, and their work to fix it, read it here at the Guild Wars 2 site.
