The Guild Wars 2 team continues work to fulfill promises of greater transparency and advance notice when it comes to profession balance changes. This week, there will be a stream with team members discussing the future approach to balance updates, along with their overall philosophy and goals for planned changes.
The stream will take place on the Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel on Friday, at noon PT. Developers Cal Cohen and Roy Marks will cover the future of profession balancing and the team’s goals and philosophy for the different kinds of content. After the stream is over, ArenaNet will share a full balance philosophy document on the forums.
This new policy came after this summer’s major balance update was quietly shared in just patch notes form, days before the update, without any notice of justification or purpose for some of the changes. After some changes got lots of negative feedback, the team promised to release notes with plenty of time for feedback and to present much clearer intended updates and overall goals for the process.
Their approach has been in line with those promises, and for the most recent balance change patch, the notes and the reasons for the changes were shared with the community weeks in advance. When the patch was implemented, there were a couple of changes that had been fueled by community feedback.
Going forward, this sort of feedback is encouraged, and it is a space that the team is definitely watching. With Guild Wars 2 marking its 10th anniversary since launch this summer, along with a Steam release and the announcement of a new expansion beyond this year’s highly successful End of Dragons, this further attempt at keeping the player community engaged is an important step to keeping things running for years more.
