Guild Wars 2 game director teases 2013 content updates

The Wintersday event has wrapped up and Guild Wars 2 players will be wondering what’s in store as far as new content is concerned in the months ahead.

Game director Colin Johanson jumped in with an update for players which indicated that there are going to be some larger content additions within the next three months.

Just to help provide some clarity on this, we’ll be releasing within the next couple of weeks a high level summary of our big plans for the first half of 2013 to help provide more transparency into our plans with the game going forward. This will include providing more details about our goals for the game, information about the stories and features that you’ll see in the Jan/Feb/March releases.

To set expectations accordingly, the January release will be a relatively small release that sets the table for the stories and features we plan to roll out with the Feb/March releases and beyond. Also, there will be no new race, profession, or new region with these larger Feb/March releases. One of our major goals with these releases is making our existing world as strong as possible, ensuring there are reasons to go to all the locations in the world we’ve already built, and strengthening the core game we’ve provided. In saying this will be an expansions worth of stuff in these releases, we’re talking about the number of new features that will be rolled out across PvE, WvW, and PvP in early 2013, which usually you’d only find in an expansion for a traditional MMORPG.

More details and specifics to come in the next couple of weeks, but I hope that helps provide some more insight into what to expect at a very high level.

In other GW2 news, ArenaNet has handed out bannings for players who were taking advantage of a crafting exploit which allowed players to create an endless supply of ectoplasm with snowflakes. This undermined the game’s economy, although it has left some players a little perplexed that there was no real warning and it should have been spotted as a problem by the developers before it hit the servers.

ArenaNet’s Gail Gray posted to clarify why the bans were handed out.

I’ve seen the numbers, and the damage to the economy could have been substantial, if the exploit wasn’t closed down and if these people were allowed to use their ill-gotten gains. People whose accounts were terminated were the worst offenders. I’m talking a lot of ill-gotten gains that posed a significant potential impact on the economy.

Any time you take one thing and can make two, and then four, and then sixteen… ya gotta know that’s just wrong. (I won’t quibble on the odds, but overall, that form of doubling was not outside the realm of possibility.) And to perform that action hundreds and hundreds of times? That’s call “exploitation,” and that’s against the User Agreement, the Rules of Conduct, and all that is holy.

I know the OP will disagree. But we’ve been more than kind, in the past, and everyone needs to own up to his/her errors and recognize: We all are part of the game economy, and those who exploit it are hurting the rest of us.

Exploit closed.
Worst offenders terminated.
That’s what has to happen to make things right for all of us.

Thanks Guild Wars: IncGamers.