Guild Wars 2 September 2014 feature pack (III)

Here are more changes in the coming September 2014 feature pack. 

Megaserver System

Global Guilds (New to North America and Europe)—Instead of having a separate guild chapter on each world, everything in your guild—your bank, merits, influence, and upgrades—is now global and shared across all worlds. In this way it is built to make sure that nothing is being lost for anyone:

l  The influence and the merits that your guild earned in each world will now be combined into your global guild. To make sure that you’re not losing anything there, the combined merits quantity can go over the normal limit of 250. However, your guild will not be able to earn more merits until the count gets back under that threshold.

l  Any upgrade you’ve unlocked on any world will be available in your global guild. If you’ve unlocked the same upgrade on multiple worlds, the influence and merit cost will be refunded. Again, the refunded merits will be allowed to exceed the normal limit, but you will be unable to earn more merits while over the limit.

l  All guild consumables unlocked on any world will be available in your global guild. For this purpose, the number of consumables in stock can go over the usual limits, but you will not be able to build new consumables of the same type before going back under the usual threshold.

l  Guild boosts that are enabled will be returned to your guild inventory and you will have to reenable them from your global guild to activate them.

l  The guild vault from the world that had the highest number of slots will become your global guild vault. If your guild had the same number of slots on multiple worlds, it’ll pick the one with the most items. However, the items from other worlds’ banks will not be lost—instead, their contents will be put into extra slots, which will only be available to withdraw from and will disappear once empty.

Guild Missions Improvement—The megaserver system will be extended with a reservation system that is automatically enabled whenever a guild member joins a map to do a guild mission, which will prioritize adding guild members to that map. This system, however, is limited in the number of spaces that get reserved on the map instance, so it’ll work best for small- and medium-sized guilds.

Finding Allies in Different Map Copies—A new mechanism is introduced to solve the problem of having fewer and fewer companions in the map. When certain copies of a map need to be closed, the players on those copies will be notified and will have the option to be moved to a different map copy right away. This will help you make sure that there are always allies by your side, and it’ll help us more efficiently manage maps—which in turn makes everyone’s experience better. If you choose to volunteer to move to a new map,you’ll even get a reward in the form of a new effect, the Volunteer’s Blessing, which increases movement speed by 15%, karma gain by 5%, and experience from kills by 10% for 10 minutes. This effect persists if you move to another map,but the movement speed bonus is applied only in PvE.

Language in Europe—The megaserver system gives us an opportunity to expand the game world without having to fear that doing so would make some of the older parts of Tyria feel empty to the players who’d still like to enjoy them; splitting the European community by language would hinder that capacity to some extent. So several system updates are deployed to better sort players by language, especially when the population on a specific map is high.

Dungeon Instance Owner

To prevent the dungeon instance from closing when any one person leaves, the concept of a dungeon “owner” has been removed. If everyone leaves an instance, it will close, but you don’t have to worry about one person leaving your party and having to restart your dungeon! Instances will be more user-friendly, as the hidden owner concept was often hard to understand and resulted in people losing progress randomly when someone left.

Crafting UI

You can now open recipes and subcomponent recipes at the same time. This allows you to craft the parts required for a recipe and allows for faster navigation around the crafting interface.

Performance Updates

Many of the underlying systems are more cost-effective, which will reduce how often players will be seeing issues caused by performance. This is most notable in large combat situations like WvW and at the PvE world boss events. These improvements affect both the server and client performance, so in these situations, you should see increased frame rates as well!

That’s all for today. Thanks for your reading and stay tuned.