Guild Wars 2 – new changes released
Changes were announced for ArenaNet’s popular Buy-to-Play MMO Guild Wars 2. A new dev blog posted by the game’s lead designer Isaiah Cartwright outlines some of the new changes coming to the game’s dynamic leveling system. For those who may not be familiar with Guild Wars 2’s nuances, the dynamic leveling system basically allows higher-level players to advance their characters by playing through lower-level content by “scaling down” their stats and attributes.
While the system is a fun and unique way to encourage higher-level players to go back and play through zones they may have missed, it isn’t without its flaws. The most recent patch for Guild Wars 2 (which went live on January 28th) addressed two of these flaws and Cartwright’s blog post explained how:
“We changed the formula for how attributes are calculated when the dynamic leveling adjustment system scales you down. This makes returning to lower level zones more fun and better balanced.”
According to Cartwright, this change was made because many higher-level players found that, even after being scaled down, they were still much too powerful for the lower-level zones and therefore quickly grew bored with the lower-level content. The second change dealt with a similar issue:
“We changed the formula for how rewards are calculated when scaled down to make it more rewarding for high-level players to visit lower level areas.”
Not only were higher-level players breezing through the content, they were also receiving lower-level rewards, which also took away the incentive of doing lower-level content. With the new changes brought in by the patch, not only will lower-level zones be more challenging for higher-level players, but the rewards earned by higher-level players in lower-level zones will scale up to be more useful. Cartwright did acknowledge that these changes would make certain lower-level zones slightly harder for level-appropriate characters, but that in the long run they were vital for keeping the game fresh for both low and high-level players.
The full blog post can be found here.