Want to know how the downed state, armor durability, compass, event focusing, jumping puzzles, boons, and conditions have been implemented in the latest beta of Guild Wars 2? Look no further!

Man, I love hearing about nitty gritty design decisions. I also love it when they just straight up post NUMBERS for game mechanics - ie, the end of the article specifically.

@selfconfessedcynic said:

Man, I love hearing about nitty gritty design decisions. I also love it when they just straight up post NUMBERS for game mechanics - ie, the end of the article specifically.

They said that some of the conditions and buffs were really "mathy". I was like, "You say this like it's a bad thing!". Numbers are what make MMOs tick, so I too enjoy it when devs post them.

@shinboy630: I couldn't agree more.

Anywho - as for observations;

• I like the sound of the armour / "death penalty" changes, although it'll only really become apparent when we get our hands on the game.
• I still wish the compass showed enemies when you have LOS to them - or even better, combine the LOS of your party
• Hidden treasures sound like fun, if you're into the whole exploring thing
• As for condition changes, blind looks less than useless unless you're using it as an interrupt, but weakness sounds very formidable - and stacking vulnerable + might sounds like a crazy combo (necro + warrior strike team anyone?)
• Aegis still looks useless, but all of the other boons look pretty good now

The hidden treasures sound awesome. I know I'm gonna spend most of the time just wandering around the world trying to find neat things rather than actually killing things.

Have they given any clues if there'll be a LOD system in for WvWvW battles yet? And how large packets of data would a client in a battle like that go through? Did some brainstorming elsewhere, figured you could megaminimize it to 128 bytes if lucky and compromising.
 
Some of the scenes I saw reminded me of playing vanilla WoW on a slow machine with 512 megs of RAM

The more I read about this game the more I need it in my life right now. I don't know how much more I can wait.

This is why I love Anet so much. They aced it with Guild Wars (for what it was), and the fact they're dedicated on hitting the perfect 'feel' to an extent where they'll rework core systems late in the development cycle is fantastic.