Yea... I always believed rainbows were created by leprechauns and pots of gold...

So eating a unicorn for it's happiness, nothing wrong with that in my opinion...

Sorry Bona Dea Ubume

Good article, nice to see them delve into the details of how the development process is affected by not having to follow the subscription based model of using a gear treadmill to keep players playing.

Also...

If our model was subscription based, we might be spending all this time racing to add as much filler content as possible to keep players chasing the carrot. Instead, as content designers with the goal of creating fun, we get to spend this time refining our content and making it amazing. As designers, this is both liberating and refreshing in an industry in which developers rarely get time from publishers to actually polish their games. (High-five, NCsoft!)

As a fun aside, as a result of allowing our QA team to be so involved in the development process, it helps us find people with amazing minds for design based on their feedback and suggestions. Many of our current content designers on GW2 originally started their careers in our QA department. Names of a few of these folks who may have built some of your favorite events, story steps, or dungeons include:  Will “Willipedia” Fairfield, Devon “The Knife” Carver, Matt “Wolf” Wuerffel, Kim “The Truth” Kirsch, Ben “Zen” Kirsch, Mike “Z-Axis” Zadorojny, Leah “Giggles” Rivera, Theo “Thor” Nguyen, Anthony “Put a Buff on It” Ordon, Leif “Fly-By” Chappelle, and Jordan “Action” Anton. (Note: Some of these nicknames may have been invented for this article, but will now be used around the office…constantly. —Colin “Optimist Prime” Johanson. He didn’t start in QA, but Eric “The Commissar of Common Sense” Flannum deserves a shout out for helping make all of this possible by building a design culture that lets us chase fun!)

I love ArenaNet's humor in coming up with nicknames for a lot of their staff.

Total conspiracy here:
June 28th, 2012 at 14:30PDT (2:30PDT), message from ArenaNet: "it is ready"

That message would throw the entire GW2 community into a frenzy...

Well... I found two more I would love to find in game:

DUCK!!!


Billz, look at what you've done. Because you mentioned the , Martini sent some gnomes to Duck to infest the forums. Now we have to deal with not only Canadians but Canadian gnomes as well...

http://imgur.com/a/MK9Q1
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/v7xqc/anyone_have_pics_of_geargear_progressions/

Collection of different armor sets in Guild Wars 2.

Good mix of showing skimpy versus full on armor sets for female characters (as well as male characters).

My personal favorite of the lot is:

* Medium armor, Norn racial *

Another nice looking armor set:

* Level 25 Tailoring, Shadow Set *


What is your favorite armor set shown here (either linked on imgur or reddit)?

Welcome to The Guardians.

My main problem and this is something I noticed last night running with Thranx, Athyr, and Jag in both Kingsmouth and Savage Coast. Funcom claims there are no levels and that you are free to go wherever you want right out of the tutorial. This is so far from the truth. You are forced down a semi-linear path of progression in seeing the zones. Heck... even the equipment has Quality Levels that gate (lock) certain content. If you don't have a high enough QL, well then you're SOL...

Because of that the game was always giving me this feeling of more of the same. Yes... the skill wheel is nice but the rest of the game feels like something I've seen and played thousands of times already (the investigation quests are great but only the first time you play through them...).

I also have to agree with Jag. The quest system is very poorly designed. I cannot tell you the number of quests we all had to pass up when playing last night. It was also very hard to determine how far along each party member was if we had the same mission unless someone spoke up in Mumble.