In Guild Wars 2, the Wintersday holiday has begun and runs through January 3rd. ArenaNet also issued a hotfix to fix several issues that popped up yesterday, including to fix post-processing changes that were set by default by mistake.
It's that time again where Wintersday is full of activities to earn yourself some cosmetic unlocks and new items. The festival was updated this year to award several new goodies. If you complete the activities, you learn Festival currency like snowflakes, Karma, and Snow Diamonds, that you can exchange for some minis, guild hall decorations, recipes, and more. If you unlock achievements during the festival, you'll be able to get some new rewards like the Wintersday snow boots and the Snowdrift weapon set.
In order to take part, just find the locations on the map that are marked by peppermint candies and check them out. There will also be world events happening regularly in the open world, these will look like giant presents that explode when they are unwrapped, with both enemies and the gifts inside.
In yesterday's update, the Wintersday Festival was enabled, but part of that patch also mistakenly enabled postprocessing settings for everyone by default.
The community was surprised by sudden forced post-processing set by default altering the way the game looked with it on. Guild Wars 2 Game Director Josh Davis responded to comments on Reddit sharing that they were looking into the situation but that it was likely the result of preparation work that was unintentionally set live but was supposed to be added to the build for the devs to work on the transition to DirectX 11.
Later on, after investigating more, the post-processing was enabled by default and it also did not give players control over the settings, so they reverted the entire thing.
Read the patch notes over at Guild Wars 2.
