The official website has just updated with some news on the direction the game will be taking in 2013, some of which seems rather interesting. The full article can be seen here.

Achievements

One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system. The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievement you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like ascended gear and infusions. We’ll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together. Later, we’ll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you’ll only need to do 4 of the 6. So you can choose the achievements that you’re most interested in.

We’ll continue to offer cosmetic rewards such as titles, medals (map complete), unique skins, etc. which will remain prizes earned for completing specific parts of the game. These will show off the prestige of your character, but will not make your character more powerful than other characters. Our reward systems need to be exciting, and include things you want to earn over time, but we don’t want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won’t see another tier between ascended and legendary in 2013 for example

Guilds

Guilds are an extremely important to the game. We need to ensure there is a volume of content to foster this strong community/social bond. To that end, we’re working on adding new types of content to the game in early 2013 that will allow guilds to go on missions together. Some of these missions may be content designed specifically for the guild to accomplish within certain constraints or time requirements while others see the creation of new content by a guild/s everyone in the world can experience. Over time we’ll continue to expand this system with new guild rewards, missions, and tools to allow guilds, of all sizes, to play a stronger part in solidifying the communities of the GW2 world.

WvW

Many of the features, expanded reward systems, and potentially even live event storylines described above will also play a part in World vs. World in 2013. We also have other specific features that we’re focusing on developing for our WvW community that we want to make sure you’re aware of.

Polishing the existing WvW experience to ensure it shines in every way possible is a major goal for us which requires addressing major areas we know need a lot of attention. We’ve been working on two of these projects for a while now, and both have proven far more complicated to solve than we’d hoped, but we’re getting really close and have made tremendous progress.

Firstly, we’ll be adding paid server transfers, with time limitations and WvW restrictions, and guestingability, which allows players to visit friends on other servers in every part of the game except for WvW. To encourage players to stick with a single server for WvW and fight for the pride of that server, server changes will incur a fee and have time limitations. Second, we’ll make improvements to culling. We recently ran small tests on Live to help us move towards eliminating as much culling from WvW as possible. The results have been promising, and we have a number of additional culling features in development. If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

PVP

Much like the other aspects of the game, our PvP part of the game also will be growing by leaps and bounds over the course of 2013.

For those more interested in progression in PvP, we’ll be evaluating our PvP reward systems and overhauling the way PvP operates to make it feel more rewarding and exciting and to give reasons to login and compete every day. We’ll be adding systems that make it easier for players who are less competitive to get matched only against people with similar skill sets, and stronger methods for players learning PvP to do so in a safe and fun environment with more information to help their skills grow.

I'm personally pretty excited about the new reward/achievement system and the fact they're actually going back and making the existing areas more worthwhile, not just adding new ones. Character medals, like the star you get for 100% map completion is also a much better form of character progression than the ascended gear was. I think they still need to work on the dynamic event system and make the game much more dynamic, but all in all, this seems like a good direction to take the game in.

nothing about the crap optimization that makes it run at 10 fps on good machines?

@Nasos100 said:

nothing about the crap optimization that makes it run at 10 fps on good machines?

Must be your machine, mine runs it at 75fps on the highest settings.

@Nasos100 said:

nothing about the crap optimization that makes it run at 10 fps on good machines?

I've not had any problems running the game on high since the beta, and my machine isn't exactly a powerhouse. Might be worth checking out technical support on the official forums if you're still having problems.

@Nasos100 said:

nothing about the crap optimization that makes it run at 10 fps on good machines?

Yeah I never had any issues, both on my old laptop and new desktop I just put together.

If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

Then 2013 is the year I shall return.

"Guilds are an extremely important to the game. We need to ensure there is a volume of content to foster this strong community/social bond."

Not implementing guild halls is not fulfilling that promise ANET.

Guild missions sound cool though. Hopefully it should get me back into the game again.

If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

Yes please. Probably one of the biggest issues I had with the game.

I'm not surprised that they are trying to polish World Vs World, I really don't think they realized people would take World v World as far as it has gone, to the point where many people just play the game for it :p I haven't played the game for like a month but since there's no subscription fee I can hop on whenever something interests me:P

I would like a better combat system, it's the game's weakest aspect I think.

@Imsorrymsjackson said:

@Nasos100 said:

nothing about the crap optimization that makes it run at 10 fps on good machines?

Must be your machine, mine runs it at 75fps on the highest settings.

Same here. I'm running an i7 3.0Ghz with 8GB DDR3 1333 RAM and an NVIDIA 520? 540? and it runs like a dream. No problems, even in large fights.

Nasos100, it looks like you might want to do some hunting as to why your performance sucks.

As for the topic at hand, I recently started getting on a hardcore kick for Guild Wars again. I bought it for the girlfriend for Christmas, and so I've been helping her level up as well as gearing up in CoF gear and working on getting a Legendary (doing 100% map completion right now). It's been hella fun all over again, and I even learned that there was a WHOLE ZONE I DIDN'T GO TO (Wayfarer Foothills).

Here's to hoping 2013 is epic as fuck.

@Morningstar: What is wrong with the combat? I love it.

@Subjugation said:

If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

Yes please. Probably one of the biggest issues I had with the game.

I didn't know what that was called but yes it fucking sucks and takes you away from the scale of the action.

As soon as Anet implements changes to the old content I'll start levelling my second character. I don't want to start playing again now when I could wait for it and see a bunch of new stuff.

I like more good things, so thumbs up from me. Controversial, I know.

about the optimization thing i said there is a 300 page forum on the official gw2 forums with ppl having problems with an even better machine than mine. I've contacted them and the response was wait for a patch or driver update.

So definately not my machine

2500k, 5850, 8gb ram and I get 60 with some high and medium settings but in big WvWvW fights it can drop to 10-20fps.

i7-3770k quad 3.5ghz, 16gigs DDR3, GTX 680 4gb and I run the game normally at like 20fps regardless of my settings. I don't get it. One of the reasons I gave up on that game, just couldn't get it to run properly.

@Artemesia: I have a pretty similar rig (less RAM and a 670 instead of a 680) and my game is pretty much locked at 60fps at max settings, so I don't know what is up with your machine.

@Artemesia: @Nasos100: Put -verify at the end of the shortcut and see if you have some bugged files. That's one suggestion I guess. That wiki article will tell you how if you don't know. Wish it wasn't so wonky. Also, with all that ram you are running 64 bit win 7 right?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

To the people having issues with the game playing well on their machines...

...try turning off V-sync?

Also, just picked up my last piece of CoF gear! TIME TO WORK ON A LEGENDARY! WOOT!

Still room for improvements in GW2 & happy to see these as a start. Curious about the achievement stuff & glad to find out that they are learning quite a lot from the holiday events. Now to just convince some friends who might have taken a little break from GW2 to get back in with this news.

What exactly do they mean by culling in WvW? I haven't played in a few months but I don't think I ever noticed anything when I was playing.

@SuperWristBands: Culling is ArenaNet not sending all the information about player locations to your computer. They do this to lower network traffic on their end and they also do it to hopefully not crush your computer if you are running on one that cant possibly handle it. So in WvW this leads to large groups of enemies (the zerg) rolling up on players but not appearing until they are right on top of you. So it leads to a lot of deaths by invisible foes if the enemy army is large enough to start having their numbers not shown.

Oh nice, looking forward to seeing what they do with the game. The achievements thing sounds pretty cool. Just started playing again this last week; forgot how fun it was.

@jesterroyal: Oh wow, that is not at all what I thought it might have been. Thanks duder.

Its good to hear this. I'm excited for anything they'll throw at us. And here they just announced guesting for later this month!

@jesterroyal said:

@Artemesia: @Nasos100: Put -verify at the end of the shortcut and see if you have some bugged files. That's one suggestion I guess. That wiki article will tell you how if you don't know. Wish it wasn't so wonky. Also, with all that ram you are running 64 bit win 7 right?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

Si. I know better than that. It's weird, though, the game runs at like 20fps constant no matter what settings I have it set to. I've tried lowering everything to its minimum and then back up to the maximum, vsync on, vysnc off, and it never really strays from that 20 mark. i dont get it i just work here

I just started playing this the other day, like level 12 or so. I really enjoy what guild wars 2 had done to the mmo formula. The archaic pick up quest, kill this, hand in quest has just been revamped! It's really cool to see all these dynamic things just pop up, and you can do them,or not. Even in 2013 a lot of these areas have fairly large numbers of players still playing (which plagued WARs system). The combat is fast paced, and actuall evasion plays a role, more than ever ( especially with my gs warrior build which focuses on 100b lol). I'm impressed, I came from wow which I decided to stop playing, and felt like I'd try gw2 with its lack of commitment type mentality. Think I'm gonna be staying I'm gw2 for some time, I ca be positive of that.

@Sayishere: Glad to hear you're enjoying it! Take a look at joining the GB community guild if you haven't already, we're always looking for active duders to hang out with in the game.

@Morningstar said:

I would like a better combat system, it's the game's weakest aspect I think.

Add an aiming reticle and get rid of auto-target. Problem solved. :P

Can't wait to see more footage of Elder Scrolls Online. From the brief footage they've made available, it looks like they absolutely nailed the combat system.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the PvP overhaul. It's way too barebones right now.

@UssjTrunks said:

@Morningstar said:

I would like a better combat system, it's the game's weakest aspect I think.

Add an aiming reticle and get rid of auto-target. Problem solved. :P

I initially thought that'd be an easy improvement, too, but it's basically what the various 3rd-party combat mods do and those feel like crap to play.

@Dark_Lord_Spam said:

@UssjTrunks said:

@Morningstar said:

I would like a better combat system, it's the game's weakest aspect I think.

Add an aiming reticle and get rid of auto-target. Problem solved. :P

I initially thought that'd be an easy improvement, too, but it's basically what the various 3rd-party combat mods do and those feel like crap to play.

It's because the game is designed around target lock. They'd need to tweak the combat system for it to work.

The combat in Elder Scrolls Online has really peaked my interest as it seems to pull this of quite well (although we've only seen limited footage).

@jakob187 said:

To the people having issues with the game playing well on their machines...

...try turning off V-sync?

Also, just picked up my last piece of CoF gear! TIME TO WORK ON A LEGENDARY! WOOT!

I'm almost done with my legendary, and I wouldn't recommend going after such a thing to my worst enemy. It's a boring and pointless and nigh-endless exercise in being a dullard. Less so, if you like playing the Trading Post, and are good at it. If you don't mind doing the same mindless routine every day for a couple of months, at the expense of any number of better things to do - go ahead. You've been warned.

Just like actual office work, grinding out a legendary certainly is a good circumstance to listen to podcasts. Many many podcasts. Thankfully I have a huge backlog of lasertimeto catch up on, so I didn't run out of good podcasts yet. Regardless - I do resent ArenaNet for what they've done with legendaries. Zero challenge. Pure grind. Lots of RNG to frustrate even more. Worst carrot on a stick I've ever chased.

At least Guild Wars 2 is a pleasant enough game to relax in, but it's as far from exciting as gaming gets. I can only play GW2's "legendary grind" during daytime hours - if I engage in the grind at night, I'm just going to fall asleep - it's just too dull. I'm looking forward to fulilling this self-imposed legendary commitment, and kick this game to the curb for awhile right after.

All things said, I wanted something different than the norm from Guild Wars 2 and I got it, but after playing it thoroughly, lots of what it does differently doesn't work as well as more classically put together MMOs, and I've had my fill of those for sure. From what I've learned of the Elder Scrolls MMO, it seems like it expands on what novelties work for me in GW2, while keeping classic and proven mechanics and designs of the genre intact - and it could be to Guild Wars 2, what World of Warcraft was to Everquest. Here's me hoping...

Anyways - DO NOT GRIND FOR A LEGENDARY!

@jakob187:

Doing the Hunter Epic Quest for Rhok'delarand Lok'delarback in the early days of Vanilla WoW is one of my favorite gaming memories and achievements ever. That questline should be the blueprint for any legendary pursuit in any MMO ever. Custom tailored challenges, requiring full class mastery of the highest magnitude, as well as social integration in a successful online community. GW2's design for obtaining legendaries has none of that. Just a slog of a grind wrapped in a vortex of eternal boredom. You're better off buying 5000 gold with real-life currency in the gemshop and buying Eternity straight off the Trading Post. Waste of time, with zero gameplay value to it. Might as well waste a grant on it.

@Seppli: I played Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 for a solid year (literally no other game went into my PS2 for one full year) just to get every trophy, first in the PGA Tour, and every unlock possible.

Grinding for a legendary is something that I'm sure might be problematic for some, but for me, it's just a challenge of endurance.

I just can't justify spending £50 on this.

I wish it had went on sale at Christmas.

@TheHT said:

If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

Then 2013 is the year I shall return.

What is culling when used in a gaming context?

@xyzygy: I don't know the specifics, but ArenaNet uses that to refer to other players not rendering for the client.

I never read up on what exactly is happening under the hood, but the big problem with it is invisible players you can't target coming and killing you. So yeah, pretty game-breaking.

@TheHT: Wasn't aware this was still an issue. Thought it was fixed months ago

@Dchao: It did drop to £35 on a lot of sites, but I wouldn't expect it to drop any lower anytime soon. They need to make up for the fact there's no monthly fee, and considering how much content you're getting, I really find it hard to complain.

The legendary grind does seem a bit insane, but I don't think it's something they really intended you to grind for, more just something you'd eventually have the materials for and considering some of the improvements they've been talking about, I think it'd be a big mistake go out of your way for one right now. Even just the precurser scavenger hunt should make things a lot less painfull

@WinterSnowblind said:

@Dchao: It did drop to £35 on a lot of sites, but I wouldn't expect it to drop any lower anytime soon. They need to make up for the fact there's no monthly fee, and considering how much content you're getting, I really find it hard to complain.

The legendary grind does seem a bit insane, but I don't think it's something they really intended you to grind for, more just something you'd eventually have the materials for and considering some of the improvements they've been talking about, I think it'd be a big mistake go out of your way for one right now. Even just the precurser scavenger hunt should make things a lot less painfull

I know this issue was for my brother at least that there is no free trial or anything of the sort, and MMO's have a lot of time investment so people want to know what they are getting into before spending money on it. And honestly it's hard to argue against that, I know there was a limited free trial during some event some time ago but there needs to be a way to let people know if the game is for them.

My big problem is that loadings since a patch I don't remember (makes a while...) takes me around 45 seconds... which is crazy loooong.

No one have an idea what could cause that, I'm about to redownload my client.

I already tried the local.dat thing.

I have a question, mostly it's for my brother who's interested in this game too. Does it have any role play scene?

@Dchao: With so much emphasis on customization and such a diverse world I'd assume so, though it may be difficult to find due to there being no specific RP

http://www.guildwars2roleplayers.com/

http://www.gwrpc.org/community/

Those would probably be your best bet in finding fellow roleplayers. That said, I tend to stick in character when I'm wandering the world though I normally do that for shits and giggles.

@jakob187:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_weapon

Just so you know what you're getting into. Myself, I've got the Precursor, the Gift of Mastery, and the Gift specific to my legendary (Gift of Rodgort), as well as about 3/4th of the final Gift (Gift of Fortune) - and I'm still hundreds of gold of away from being done. Unless you are the trader type, and have the stuff to make easy gold daytrading on the TP, you're in for an insane grind, that's not just impractical for most, but also a highly stupid undertaking as a whole. There's bound to be more productive and/or fun activities within the realm of gaming and otherwise, to spend your time on.

@WinterSnowblind:

What are they changing Precursor-wise? After hundreds attempts playing the slots at the Mystic Forge to get Zap - the Bolt precursor - I caved and grabbed me a cheap Rodgort precursor for 9g. Good thing Rodgort's pretty much the most awesome thing Legendary-wise, other than it being a lowly offhand. That said, a Frostfang mainhand would be baller too. Of course I'm likely never playing GW2 again, once I'm done farming that piece of shit Rodgort.

@Seppli: The developers have (unofficially) mentioned on sites like Guru and Reddit that they eventually plan to introduce some kind of "scavenger hunt", which would be a long/difficult quest chain that would eventually reward you with a precursor. But they've also said that it's in early design stages and probably won't be introduced for a while. No idea if the reward is something you'd get to pick or if it'd throw something random at you. Either way, lowering the prices wouldn't be a bad thing.

I'm really hoping the upcoming achievement/reward system has some way of giving loadstones too, since they're probably the most ridiculous material you need to grind. I guess it's also possible precursors could eventually be part of that system.

Legendaries arent so much anymore, largely for two reasons imo. First, you can buy them. Granted their price on the trading post is still out of reach for most gamers, but considering the Incinerator (my current goal) started at 3500+ gold and is now sitting around 2200 the time when the tradeoff between grinding hours vs paying the Chinese will soon become a moot point. I've honestly given up on grinding a second legendary myself, once i finally get that last damn VP in eternal battlegrounds and make Incinerator the price for Bolt will likely be under 2k gold. Second, i think the Fractal weapon/armor, which have great skins themselves plus better stats than normal exotics, are getting more attention these days. Why spend hundreds of hours grinding for what amounts to a fancy skin when you can get that plus better stats by grinding FoTM instead?