Eric Flannum answers our Guild Wars 2 questions.

ArenaNet has been a little quiet for the last few weeks, leaving Guild Wars 2 fans all over the internet starved for news. Accepting the fact that they weren't ready to break new ground quite yet we decided to revisit a plethora of older topics with Eric Flannum, the Guild Wars 2 design lead.

We cover a lot of familiar ground with WvW, dynamic events, boss fights, and potions, but there's also some very interesting information on a subject we've not heard much about at all: Stealth!

GuildFans: We've experienced something of a plateau in information released recently. Is this just wind down from the hectic convention season, or is there another reason?

Eric: There are many reasons for the plateau of information. You certainly hit on one of them though. It took a lot of effort for us to prepare all of that information for release. A ton of work goes into creating those websites, writing articles, and creating videos and many of the people involved needed to get back to focusing on actually creating the game. The approaching holiday season also factors into this, with many people taking vacation to be with family and friends towards the end of the year there is a limit to the amount of work that  we can realistically get done.

The main thing however, is that we don’t have anything ready to announce at this time. When we release information we want to be very certain that everything we talk about is in the game and working up to a basic level such that we believe that we won’t have to make dramatic changes to it. We don’t want to tell you all about our awesome crafting system if we haven’t nailed down the particulars of it since that usually results in some unsatisfying information that is either very vague or flat out untrue. That isn’t to say that we never go back and change things after we’ve talked about them (For example, even though we showed off the Sylvari a year ago we have recently gone back to improve them.) but rather that we want to be as certain as we can be when we talk about things.

That doesn’t mean that we haven’t worked on the remaining four professions, PvP, WvW, crafting, or underwater combat, just that we aren’t quite happy with where they’re at yet.

GuildFans: World vs World is said to be a weekly rotating match up between the three worlds. Does this mean that one of the worlds will have no opponent one week in three? Could you expand a little more on how that system works?

Eric: This means that every week each world (server) will have two different opponents. It is our intention that no world will ever go a week without any opponents. This does of course mean that the number of worlds we support must be divisible by three to ensure that everyone always has a valid matchup. We’ll be able to release more on this when we’ve finalized some of the details.

GuildFans: How do you measure a players participation in dynamic events, to prevent leeching for rewards or inaccurate scaling?

Eric: Each event has its own criteria for measuring participation and in many cases it is measuring against more than one thing. For example, in the Drake Broodmother event a player can earn participation by damaging either the Broodmother herself or her broodlings. Other events use criteria other than doing damage. The apple orchard event doesn’t award participation for damaging spiders or knocking apples out of trees but instead only looks at whether or not a player has turned in any apples.

GuildFans: We've heard about the addition of a 'town clothes' system. Will this function similarly to costumes in Guild Wars 1, an automatic swap of armor when you enter an outpost, or something else?

Eric: Yes, the GW2 design has called for a town clothes system from the start. I know everyone out there is tired of hearing this answer from us but we aren’t quite ready to talk specifics about how the system works. As I said before we prefer to avoid releasing information when we aren’t sure about it.

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