Warhammer Patch 1.2 Highlights

Warhammer Online producer Jeff Hickman has written a terrific overview of the Warhammer v1.2 patch that is scheduled to go live sometime next week on the public test server. Find out what is in store below:
WAAAGH!!!
Man do we have a set of notes for you…we’ve been talking about them, and
hinting, and finally the first draft of the Public Test Server notes are here
for your enjoyment! As always PTS notes are constantly changing throughout the
testing process.
We’ll see you on the PTS next week, there’s a lot to test so be sure to bring
your game face…for now relax, read, swtor smuggler enjoy, and most of all have fun!
Producer’s Note
Well here it is; The Public Test Patch Notes for Game Update 1.2. Many hours
of blood, sweat and tears went into these notes, and it shows. From the sheer
size (over 55 pages!) to the numerous improvements being implemented, it’s all
been a labor of love (or was that WAAAGH!).
In the notes below you’ll see over 500 bug fixes, 10 plus pages of career
balancing, numerous RvR improvements, UI improvements, continued building on our success with improving swtor bounty hunter performance and server stability and a considerable
review of our dungeon loot itemization.
While these notes are still technically a “work in progress” they represent
the majority of the changes that will be implemented with Game Update 1.2.
Please keep in mind, these notes are for the public test server and can change
periodically throughout the Public Testing Process.
As always, thank you to our Players for their continued support.
Jeff Hickman
Executive Producer
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Highlights swtor species
•New Careers! Unleash the savage fury of the relentless Orc Choppa, or take
up the doom-laden oath of the unstoppable Dwarf Slayer. These two new
melee-focused careers relish the thrill of fighting on the front lines and
laying waste to all foes that come within reach of their mighty blades.
•Bitter Rivals join the battle! Introducing the newest live event for
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. “Bitter Rivals” focuses on the ancient
hatred that burns between the Dwarf and greenskin races. Millennia of conflict
in the Worlds Edge Mountains have honed runescape quest guide the enmity that exists between the Orcs and Goblins and the stout Dwarfs to a razor-sharp edge, and when these nemeses meet in battle, it is war without mercy.
•Fight for control of the warped Twisting Tower! The battle rages in this new Tier 4 Scenario found deep in the heart of the maddening Chaos Wastes. Here, the warping power of Chaos is at its peak, transforming the very fabric of reality in defiance of all reason. Warriors of Order and Destruction must grapple for control of this ancient citadel, for if the secrets of the Twisting Tower should fall into enemy hands, runescape cheats the tide of battle will surely turn. Like the Reikland Factory, the Twisting Tower will be available for all players for a limited time as a preview to accompany the Bitter Rivals event. Be sure to stake your claim to the Twisting Tower while you can!
•Answer the Call to Arms with new Realm vs. Realm gameplay enhancements! Introducing the new Open RvR Rallying Cry system that summons you to key battles for Tiers 1 and 2. The new Zone Control Domination System for Tiers 2 through 4 rewards a realm that truly conquers the battlefield. Also, many improvements to siege weapons ensure that the mighty engines of guide to runescape war are now more lethally effective than ever. See below for additional details.
•New treasures await! Across-the-board itemization improvements have been made to the Fortresses, world dungeons, and city dungeons of WAR, including better world drops, quest rewards, Influence rewards, and more!
•Crafting System Improvements! We’ve made many improvements to the game’s crafting system, including pairing-off specific gathering skills with specific production skills in order to make crafters more self-sufficient. Also, the leveling curve of trade skills has been improved and fewer components are
required to create items. Last, but certainly not least, is the addition of new
craftable items!
•Easy Public Quests make their debut in Tiers 2, 3, and 4. Scaled for
courageous bands of 1 to 3 adventurers, these Public Quests offer a rewarding
PvE experience without a large commitment of forces. You’ll find one Easy Public Quest in each Chapter, so gather a few friends, or venture out alone… if you dare!
•Multiple mail attachments! Now you can send several attached items with a single mail message.
•Two new secret lairs await! Finding the new hidden lairs is only half the
battle. Figuring out how to open the door – and surviving the dangers inside -
is another matter, entirely!

Take risks&Do it well or don’t do it at all

Take risks
“Let’s try it.” You hope to hear that phrase at the end of a meeting, especially if that meeting was contentious, or if the idea discussed is new and radical.
Imagine a playground full of kids playing. At its best, playing is making mistakes in a safe environment and learning from those mistakes in a way that encourages growth. Trying out new ideas or making drastic changes is the way we as designers get to d3 gold for sale play with the game. It’s where we slip and fall, scrape our knees, and otherwise monkey around on the jungle gym. While we don’t try out every idea, we use our collective experience to get a sense for what has promise—what we should follow down the rabbit hole. We look at where our ideas break, how they break, and why they break. You can see this in how we redesigned the sylvari, d3 gold fast delivery or in how we have developed the professions. They’ve all undergone quite a bit of transformation over the last few years as we have tried out different approaches and learned from those very playful experiences.
Purpose: To reinforce our general design culture of iteration. You can’t innovate in an environment that is averse to failure. You must embrace the risk of making diablo 3 gold mistakes. At the end of the day, if something doesn’t quite turn out the way you wanted, it’s not failing, it’s playing—and you grow for having done it.
Do it well or don’t do it at all
With a game as big as an online world, you need to pick your battles very carefully. Every feature you choose to invest resources in something means some other element gets less attention in one way or another. Hopefully, at some guild wars 2 gold point, you get a good idea of what it takes to make a profession, a skill for that profession, or whatever the feature or set of features at hand may be. You get a sense for the overall resource cost of any particular element. When that happens, you start seeing how parts contribute to the whole, and you are able to see where some features would drain resources away from more important core areas. With Guild Wars 2, we tried to err buy diablo 3 gold on the side of doing a few things great, rather than doing everything less than great. What does that mean? It means that we focused on the core of the experience instead of the unnecessary trappings. It also means we chose to cut features. If you make the wrong decisions about what you focus your development resources on, you may create an aberrant experience. But when that focus is applied correctly, you end up with the superior level of polish that is only possible through the devotion of sufficient time, energy and talent.
Purpose: This enables us to focus our resources on the most important game elements we want to make great. The result is a game that has a consistent quality bar, and thus a consistent feel. If any feature isn’t going to be able to meet that bar without hurting something else, then it needs to go for the sake of the greater whole. It’s a vicious jungle those little features live and die in.

Gaming Outside the Game: Rick Ellis Talks The Guild Wars 2 Extended Experience 0

Video games have evolved far past the button-mashing days when your entertainment was easy to forget because the game was simple. Games today often influence our emotions, making us feel as though we are part of the story, part of the game universe, and that we matter in important ways. The end result is that, very much like other forms of entertainment, we find ourselves drawn to the experience even when we aren’t in-game. Proof of this are the fan sites, forums, and other applications that we devour in order to continue the in-game experience. The bragging, information sharing, and verbal sparring we engage in on these sites are all signs of high levels of passion and our desire to continue the experience outside of the game.
This is where my team comes in. My name is Rick Ellis, and I’m a Tech Director at ArenaNet, leading a dedicated extended experience team that provides extensions for Guild Wars 2. These extensions allow players to participate in and contribute to the Guild Wars 2 universe in relatable and interesting ways without requiring d3 gold instant delivery a gaming rig. The use of web and mobile technologies means this can be done virtually anywhere.
“You shouldn’t be wondering what your friends are doing in-game; you should always be connected to them to chat.”You shouldn’t be wondering what your friends are doing in-game; you should always be connected to them to chat. You should be able to help or otherwise contribute to your guild or the game. While we’ll be providing mobile and web apps for our Marketplace and Hero Viewer, along with functionality you’ve already seen in other MMOs, these are not what we refer to as extended experience components. Why, you ask? These applications, while useful, don’t really allow players to participate in the game world. The auction functionality of the Marketplace gets close, but it’s essentially a solo activity that has little to do with the actual gameplay experience. I know people will argue this point, but think of it this way: not many MMO players play a game just for the auction diablo 3 gold quick delivery capabilities, but many play to socialize with their friends.
One thing that separates what we’re doing from the rest of the MMO market is that we aren’t using a simple, one-way connection to get information from the game. We have constructed a high-speed connection to the Guild Wars 2 server and database architecture, allowing us to not only retrieve information from the game but also push data into the game in real time.
It’s really this key piece of technology that opens the door for us to create an almost endless number of applications. This is why we referred to our PAX demo as the “tip of the iceberg.” For those of you who were unable to attend PAX this year, I’ll describe our demonstration in more detail. We were showing an iPhone and iPad, both running a real-time world map display. We demonstrated the ability to watch your friends move around in the game and see dynamic events as they become active, all exactly as it’s happening in-game. We showed that users have the ability to chat instantly d3 gold with anyone on their friends list. It’s the two-way connection with our servers that makes it possible to chat between a mobile device, located anywhere in the world, and in-game players.
Additionally, the world map shows the locations of all points of interest, all teleport locations, any visible lore locations, and the locations of all vendors and trainers, even if they are moving in the world. Of course, being an iPhone/iPad application, you can scroll and zoom the map as well, then quickly return to the selected character if she is off-screen.
The PAX demo was a sneak peak at some of the things the Extended Experience Team is working on and was intended to make people think about the possibilities of what can be done. We’ve since seen many great ideas pop up on forums and, of course, many questions as well. (See below for a few answers!) We look forward to interacting with the community more to keep you up to date on the cool stuff we’re working on.
“We are committed to making our games more accessible and allowing our players guild wars 2 gold to experience our game world anywhere, at any time.”So, it’s as simple as taking Guild Wars 2, adding water, and—voilà!—cool stuff happens, right? Almost. We can say that if we take a rabid fan base (all of you), add current mobile and web technologies, and mix with some magic ArenaNet dust, we do have some awesome ingredients for providing applications to our player base—applications that are very different from what’s been seen in the MMO space in the past.
The mission of our Extended Experience Team is to focus solely on building world-class applications. We are committed to making our games more accessible and allowing our players to experience our game world anywhere, at any time.
Now that you know the team and our philosophy, I’m sure the real question on everyone’s mind is “What else can we expect to see in the future?” Without giving up too much more information—we do have to keep some secrets—what you can expect to see is a series of apps that will share information with each other and the Guild Wars 2 system in ways that simply haven’t been done buy guild wars 2 gold before.
The most prominent features for mobile and web users will probably stem from the ability to stay connected to the game world and, more importantly, your friends and guildies. We’ll be doing as much as we can to remove the communication barrier that exists between in-game players and out-of-game players. How many times have you been away from your computer on raid night and wished you could connect up with your guild, monitor their progress, share your insights, and ultimately share in their victory? The ability to socialize beyond the game boundaries is essential, and it’s one of the first things we’re working on. Naturally, security and the protection of personal information are of paramount importance with social features like this. With the broader possibilities for communication, we want to ensure people are always in control of who talks to them and when.
Beyond communication, we’re exploring features that allow out-of-game friends to help in-game friends by locating places or items. Additionally, we will have a much tighter system for accessing and consuming wiki content. This will greatly reduce the need to continuously jump out of the game to access web sites for information.
Future features for our mobile world map will include the ability to select a player and open up the Hero Viewer, which shows information about that character: stats, equipment, achievements, etc. Further, the user will be able to select a piece of equipment and retrieve information about where that item came from: a location, an event, a certain boss, or even a portion of that player’s personal story. Mobile users will also have the ability to tap a location on the world map, causing their in-game friends to see a radar ping appear on the mini-map and world map. This is a great feature to help less-experienced friends and guildies learn their way around the Guild Wars 2 world.
This is just the start of where the Extended Experience Team is going. In the end, we will make all of our extended experience features tightly integrated with each other and the game, so that it becomes less and less important which piece of hardware you are using to experience Guild Wars 2.

The Artistic Origin of the Charr 3

As Charr Week rumbles on like an unstoppable war machine, let’s take a look at the origin of the charr from a visual point of view. I talked to the three ArenaNet artists most responsible for the look and feel of the charr, Katy Hargrove, Kristen Perry, and Kekai Kotaki, to get their take on this iconic Guild Wars 2 race.
Character Artist Katy Hargrove created the original concept art that evolved into the charr, the main adversaries of mankind in the original Guild Wars.
Q: Katy, what was your main inspiration for designing the charr in the original Guild Wars?
Katy: The charr would be the main threat to the humans of Ascalon, so we wanted something inhuman, iconic, and intelligent.
The original concept for the charr was a race of animalistic creatures that have a variety of forms and functions. Some of these creatures would be brutish brawlers that ran on all four limbs, while others would be more intelligent magic users who would stand on their back legs, performing rituals and holding magic artifacts with their hands.
Initially we were considering an orc-like race of creatures, but I think everyone buying d3 gold soon agreed that we didn’t want to make orcs, ogres, or trolls the main bad guys in our game. They’ve been used in many books, movies, and games, and have been done very well. We needed something different, something that would grab at your gut without needing to be explained.
In our world, if you are a human, large cats are terrifying. They’ve been eating people for thousands of years, and they come for us out of the trees and the brush and the darkness. So we took a risk and tried concepting cat people. However, the original concepts weren’t impressive, and even came troublingly close to being cute. We began incorporating fire and horns into their designs to push towards a more threatening, demonic feel. We ended up with a fire worshipping race of hell cats. As we fleshed out more of their story we followed through on less of the varied forms than we originally planned, but you can still see remnants of the original design in the stances of the magic-using and weapon-wielding charr in Guild Wars.
Q: Did you work from a text description of what the charr diablo 3 power leveling looked like, or did you just set out to design an aggressive, animalistic race?
Katy: The original text description for the charr didn’t describe their look much. It mainly described the charr attitude as a race and some of the things they might do in terms of play mechanics. We had a lot of artistic freedom when it came to designing the charr.
One of the ideas that helped sell the charr as a race was they wouldn’t just be dudes with cat heads. When talking about cat people as a concept, that is the mental image that met with the most resistance. I began talking about the charr in terms of being not dudes with cat heads but as chimera-like monsters that joined several animals together, with heavy feline features. I remember a key meeting when I drew a quick sketch of a bipedal cat beast to get the point across, we then began concepting to flesh out the race and really sell the idea – and a charr was born.
Kristen Perry was the character artist who volunteered to craft a viable design for the female charr in Guild Wars 2. The female of the race had diablo 3 items not been seen in the original game, so creating a concept that was both recognizably female and recognizably charr was a challenge.
Q: Kristen, can you talk a little about the different approaches you tried out for the female charr before settling on the final design?
Kristen: As a team, we had many discussions regarding the direction of the female charr, and a lot of that back-and-forth was in the form of thumbnail sketches and theoretical debate. These discussions centered around the tension between making the female charr attractive to the playerbase while still making it look like part of the same race as the male charr.
Much of the problem was in making the female charr more universally attractive, which leans towards a more human appearance. Those initial designs explored the tension between an acceptable human notion of beauty and an animalistic design that is cool, but just too “creature” for the average player to find engaging. This exploratory process brought about one model design that was indeed more humanoid and catgirl in appearance. It had the back leg joint articulation gw2 gold of the charr, but stood much more upright, had a human neck, slender arms and almost hand-like paws—and, yes, breasts. The problem with this design, though, was we were trying to find a solution between both goals, which meant we didn’t really satisfy either. The human part of our charr catgirl wasn’t human enough to be cute, and the charr part of her wasn’t charr enough to be fierce, let alone look like a female of the same race. So while this experiment was very important for visualization, in the end it didn’t give us the result we wanted.
By this point we knew we didn’t want a catgirl, but there was still another conundrum to solve. The males of the charr race are large, overly muscular, brutish, and monstrous. We couldn’t give the female of the race the same hulking masculine proportions, because then there’d be no real way to see any gender difference. But how do you make a smaller, less muscular, less imposing member of the race feel just as powerful as their male counterparts?
Q: So how did you strike that balance and create something that was both feminine and charr-like?
Kristen: Well, when I started designing gw2 gold for sale the female charr, I definitely wanted her to feel just as fierce as the male of the race. She had to feel sleek and agile while at the same time have an appearance of strength and power. By thinking in terms of movement, it became clear the answer was in optimizing nuances. Yes, she had to be large and robust like the male, but we could tone down the testosterone by really extending her body lines to gracefully flow from the top of her head to tail tip.
I didn’t see any reason whatsoever to give her less clawing power, so I rebuilt the sabers on her hands and feet and brought out the padding design. The face and horns were designed with style and movement in mind, but also incorporated markedly more feminine cat-like features instead of the more monstrous male features, though there will be those options too. The horns don’t have a particular direction to denote gender; they just have to look cool. The female’s tail, however, has long hair. This was a very specific thing I wanted to include, as I love the sweeping feel to the long hair, and it’s an easy detail to note from behind in telling whether the charr is male or female.
Finally, there was the matter of the chest. It really didn’t make any sense to have boobs on a charr female, particularly with all the effort we took to make her sleek and fierce. We thought they should have no breasts at all or at least hide them under some fluffy fur. Above all else, we needed to be true to the race, of course! There was still some debate, however, so I gave them a choice: either be subtle and downplay the breasts (it wasn’t a point of the race, anyway) or go full-on realistic. Yes, that’s right —none or six!!
But really, the armor augmentation required for six boobs would be just as ridiculous, so none it was!
Concept Art Team Lead Kekai Kotaki was responsible for bringing the look of the charr 250 years into the future, to the time of Guild Wars 2. The warlike charr have changed a great deal since they first appeared in Guild Wars, so their updated design had to reflect their more industrial culture. I thought we’d let Kekai get in the final word on the charr.
Q: Kekai, how did you approach the charr design for Guild Wars 2?
Kekai: My approach was simple: make the charr badass. And then make them even more badass.

Video: Growing the Sylvari

Four years ago, the Guild Wars 2 writers and designers came to the artists with a crazy direction d3 gold for a new race. They are a brand new species to diablo 3 gold Tyria—less than 25 years old—innocent to the world, they nevertheless buy d3 gold possess a collective wisdom. They have a certain noble quality, incorporating gw2 gold Arthurian chivalry as well as all the secrets that the darker places may reveal. guild wars 2 gold They are mysterious. They are unusual. They are unique. They are the sylvari. Oh yeah, and they are plants. In buy wow gold the following video, Continuity & Lore Designer Ree Soesbee and I take a look at the unique background of the sylvari and how our enigmatic plant race has grown and flowered over the years from the initial designs to where we are today. We hope you enjoy it!

Announcing Guild Wars 2 Spanish Localization

ArenaNet is excited to announce the confirmed language list for the localization of Guild Wars 2. As you may already know, the game will include full localization of both voice and text into German and French. d3 gold Today, we’re happy to announce that we will also feature Spanish text localization for Guild Wars 2 at launch.
Game text will be translated into Spanish for our large diablo 3 gold and diverse player community in Spanish-speaking countries. Partly due to the diversity of spoken Spanish in different regions of the world, voiced content will remain in English buy d3 gold but be accompanied by Spanish subtitles.
Adding Spanish text localization to our launch plans for Guild Wars 2 is a big deal to us here at ArenaNet. Like our players, the ArenaNet localization gw2 gold team cares passionately about the quality of Guild Wars 2 content, and we are striving to provide a polished game experience in all the languages we support. To this end, we work closely with our design guild wars 2 gold and development teams to ensure that the localized versions stand on their own and meet the high expectations fans have for the game.
¡Estamos entusiasmados de ofrecer la versión en español de Guild Wars 2 para nuestra buy wow gold comunidad global hispanohablante! Lo más importante para nosotros son ustedes, los jugadores. ¡Estamos creando un juego especialmente para ti!
ArenaNet is seeking a Spanish localization editor and a Spanish community manager
As we plan to offer game text in Spanish, ArenaNet is now actively recruiting for a qualified Spanish QA and localization editor located at our offices in Bellevue, WA, as well as a community manager based in Brighton, England. Qualified candidates should apply here.

EuFanDay: The interview

As I said in my last entry here on Talk Tyria, Nerdy Bookahs had been invited to the EUFanDay that took place this Monday and Tuesday in Brighton. I was the one representing our blog there (a first post about this went up on our blog. It includes a growing link collection for write-ups etc. from the EUFanDay). As part of this event, we got to talk with some of the developers about Guild Wars 2. Or rather, each of us (the invited fan sites) were allowed to ask one question. I’d collected a few more than just that, so that was a bit sad. Fortunately, I didn’t have as many questions as some others, so the disappointment from those who sent in their questions wasn’t that big on my site.
Tasha Darke and Dutch Sunshine have just posted the transcription of the interview. You can find the first part on her blog and the second one on GuildMag.
As those cheapest d3 gold two already transcribed the interview, I will refrain from doing the same. It’s a lot of work and time, after all (thank you for doing that, by the way!). Time which I rather want to spend on ranting and musing about which we got to know from the interview.
I’ll assume that you’ve read the interview now. But I’ll try to write in a way that you know what I’m talking about even if you haven’t. As I said, we had about 25 people (give or take 3) who all asked one question. So the questions were very mixed. We had a few about PvP and what we now know is that ArenaNet want to have structured PvP as an esport. We don’t know anything new about the observer mode but it’s probably a safe bet that they’ll do everything they can to include this as fast as possible post-launch because it’s needed if they want d3 gold for sale it to succeed as esport. Other than the observer mode, I don’t see a reason why they shouldn’t succeed here. Every character in structured PvP is the same level, has the same quality gear, access to all skills, etc. They also want their structured PvP (and WvW) to be easy to understand and get into. Overflow shards will also allow you to join structured PvP matches (but not WvW), so even if your server is crowded, you can still join those PvP matches. From the interview, I take it that we can expect some kind of announcement about additional PvP maps before release. They mentioned one that has lots of underwater combat and a pirate ship! Another one is supposedly going to make GW1 players feel nostalgic.
On to another area of the game, the community. It was stated again that there will be no restrictions diablo 3 gold or penalties for switching guilds. You’re supposed to be able to switch whenever you feel like it. How that works in the end remains to be seen. It requires us to let go of what we’ve gotten used to (it really shouldn’t surprise us anymore as it’s not the only thing that will work differently than in previous MMOs). Another thing that a lot of people are worried about is how the fansites will survive (I think there was a huge discussion about this on guildwars2guru) when Guild Wars 2 will have official forums. Regina said that while they will have less time, they’re still going to read the inofficial forums, fan sites etc. and that there will, of course, be people who’ll rather post on non-official sites than on the official ones out of fear of being censored on the official forums. If you ask me, I think it’ll be like we have it now: There isn’t guild wars 2 gold just ONE fan site and ONE blog out there. We have so many different ones and so far, there’s space for all of them. Because people have different preferences and thus, will want to post on one site but not on the other. The official forum will just be “one more” site that you can go to but it won’t be necessary. If all you want is get news about the game and chat with a few friends, why not do that where you’re currently doing it already? There’s no need to move on to the official forums as ArenaNet won’t ask us to shut down our fan sites or blogs.
Something that disappointed me greatly were the answers about the customization for female humans mostly. ArenaNet want them to be idealized and beautiful. So no wrinkles, scars, etc. From what I have seen in pictures (or the customization videos from GamesCom), it looks like all female humans are dolls. I’d buy guild wars 2 gold really like there to be the option to have different faces (I’m thinking of Warhammer Online here which made it possible to add scars. We’re fighting dragons here, after all! It’d make sense to have scars!). But oh well, it can’t be changed, I guess. And since I want to play Asura and Charr anyway, I don’t really need to worry about the humans. The thing that then made me squeal again was when they mentioned that there will be dances. I feared that we wouldn’t get those (again, like in Warhammer Online where I first realised that I really love fluff like that and I miss it when it’s not there… just like minipets, emotes,… – thankfully, Guild Wars 2 will have all of those!).
One last thing that I want to comment on is the question by gaming-insight.de about where to get the “good items” (that is, the high-level armor). ArenaNet’s philosophy about how we should be playing the game is “do what is fun for you”. In other words: If you enjoy WvW, you should be able to get the gear from WvW. If you enjoy crafting, you should be able to get similar gear with similar stats (in power) from crafting, and so on. However, certain looks will only be obtainable through WvW, crafting etc. So that when you see a player in a certain armor, you know they have done WvW a lot. But they’re not more powerful than you are when it comes to the stats they have on their armor. If you ask me, this is a great direction and one they’ve already done in Guild Wars 1. There’s nothing wrong with having bragging rights. But make them about the look/uniqueness of the gear and not about the stats on the gear! This will make the game much better than handing out gear with much better stats because it means that the whole game world remains open to you even if you decide to ignore a certain part.