The WvW Alliances Beta occurred this past week. And it was a bit of a disaster. The beta was up for a couple of hours before being pulled down. The developers have announced what went wrong, and how they plan to fix it.
“On September 24 we attempted to run the first live beta for the World Restructuring system—a long awaited moment! As most of you are probably already aware, it didn’t go exactly as we had planned,” says the update post. ArenaNet goes on to lay out a few major causes behind the issues with the beta, and why it had to be shut down so fast.
Player activity on the beta was much higher than anticipated—leading to many issues—mostly relating to server load, and how the game processed a few things. The short version is that a bug led to the game’s logging servers being completely bogged down. At the same time, players were being improperly placed in the wrong matchmade teams, leading to even more bugs.
One of the other core issues is that because of the way matchmaking had been broken, players would not be able to get the correct connection data. This caused the game server to try and put players into overflow maps. The problem was, the server spawned way too many instances of these maps, completely choking its resources with requests.
The decision was made to pull the plug. And so the devs have to return to the drawing board. The longer explanation reveals that their QA team was ready for this, and was able to rollback the changes without a server shutdown.
Since the core of the WvW Alliances Beta was to test reworks to the game mode, players are getting some balance adjustments prior to the main launch. Along with bug fixes for the issues identified during the beta, the team is rolling out some minor changes as prep.
What’s Coming Next
Anyone who has played the WvW mode knows that Pips are the bane of your existence in Guild Wars 2. The idea makes sense; active players in the game mode get rewards on a timer, but, it takes entirely too long. Some players could legitimately farm for dozens of hours each week to get Pips. This was a big struggle for players doing Legendary crafting, so the workarounds came in short order. A big part of why this happened was that Guild Wars 2‘s WvW mode took entirely too long to hand out some rewards. Pip farming through map-hopping and semi-AFK gameplay was a huge problem.
ArenaNet has teased a few changes coming soon to the game that will fix some issues. So to recap, a few changes are coming in the November 9 release of GW2 to address Pip farming. In short, we’re getting more Pips overall, but some players will have to be more active to earn them.
- Skirmish pips for match placement based on team scores are being increased by 1 in all levels. So now the skirmish pips earned for match placement is getting boosted from 3/4/5 to 4/5/6.
- The base bonus for WvW ranks is being increased. Under the current patch, anyone of rank 1-149 will get +1 bonus Pips.
- The bonus to pip generation for outnumbered teams is being removed, stat bonuses will remain.
- Participation Timer refreshing from repairing damaged structures will be removed, making it so that semi-AFK repairs can no longer be farmed for pips.
So when does the WvW Alliances Beta return? The developer has announced that the next beta period will be kicking off on November 12. They also expect to have the major bugs squashed by then.
