Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: It seems like a smart design decision to put players on a level playing field in structured PvP in terms of level, skills, and gear. But will PvP include any kind of reward or advancement system to make it more appealing to casual players who may not be interested in the more competitive tournament play?

Eric: For competitive PvP it’s not going to include any power advancement, it’s going to include cosmetic advancement. So you’ll earn Glory in PvP and then you’ll use that to buy super cool armor. All PvP players start out with the exact same, low-level looking armor. It’s all statistically the same, but then as you gain Glory you can be like, OK now I have this badass armor, and people will know that guy is really good because he has that super awesome armor.

The thing that we really wanted to do was make it so that you didn’t feel like someone had an advantage over you because they’ve played longer in this type of PvP. We wanted to make it so that you felt like, hey I have the exact same chance because it’s going to be skill-based. But we wanted to give people something that they could work towards, so that’s where we’ve got the cosmetic stuff, and there are titles or achievements that people can earn in PvP as well.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the match system also factor in things like different players’ skill levels?

Eric: The way that it works is that you’ll go to that PvP map and you open up the server browser, and it will show you a list of servers. It’s entirely possible that we’ll have some servers that are maybe restricted by how much Glory you have or something like that if we feel that we want to have some beginner servers.

But the basic idea is that you can hop onto a server similar to an FPS, and if it’s like, wow, everyone is super pro on this server you can always leave and find a different server. So you can try and find a server that maybe fits your play style, or other players you like playing with. Or if you get onto a server with a bunch of jerks, you can always just quit out and go find another server.

Ten Ton Hammer: So overall, what we’ve seen so far is that both PvE and PvP will be available to players, but they won’t be so entwined that you have to do both, but if you want you can level completely in either.

Eric: That’s definitely a big part of our design philosophy. Take World v. World for example. You can level from 1 to level 80 in it if you want, and it’s very important to us that it is not slower to do that than it is in PvE. Nor is it incredibly faster to do it. We have to get that balance right, because if we don’t then we understand that what’s going to happen is one of those things is going to be ‘the’ way to advance your character, and we don’t want that to happen.

The same thing goes for things like dungeons and personal story. We’ve talked a little bit about our endgame philosophy of we don’t think you should get to max level and then suddenly be forced to play a different game. So if you didn’t like doing dungeons, and you really, really liked just being in the open world and exploring, or crafting, we don’t want to force you into doing dungeons when you get to max level. Because then we’re kind of bait-and-switching you. We’d be saying hey you played this game, and did you enjoy it? Well guess what, now you have to play ‘this’ instead.

So it’s really, really important for us that each of those types of gameplay – dungeons, exploring the world, personal story, PvE, PvP, competitive PvP – all of those things can be rewarding experiences, and we think that most players will do a little bit of everything. But if you’re the type of players that is like, OK, this is the type of thing that I like to do, we don’t want to force you into a place where you’ll have to do something else.

Ten Ton Hammer: Any sort of plans for Guild vs. Guild PvP?

Eric: No, that’s one thing that is a pretty big departure. The reason we didn’t want to do it is that even in guild vs. guild in Guild Wars 1, we found that what we had to do is create a lot of systems to circumvent that. It was just really hard to get that many people all from the same guild on at any given time.

What we’ve said instead is that our guilds are going to be about building social networks, and if there is a group of people that are the hardcore PvP guys they’re all going to be in the same guild anyway so that’s OK. And they’re going to register as a team, and be known as the team from a specific guild and build up a reputation. And then that gives them the flexibility that if they want to have a top team along with a team 2 and team 3, they can do that kind of thing. So we wanted to disassociate the two things.

Now in World vs. World there are things like guild keep claiming, so you will claim a keep that your world has conquered, and your guild can claim that and fly their banners, they can upgrade it, spend resources, and do all kinds of stuff.

We haven’t talked that much about our guild activities and things like that, but we want to have systems so guilds have reasons to play together, and we’ll talk about that once we have more of it developed. But guilds in our game are going to be all about social networking and giving them reasons to play together, but not forcing them to do anything.

We'd like to thank Eric Flannum for taking the time to discuss Guild Wars 2 PvP with us at gamescom 2011. Be sure to check out the rest of our exclusive content from the event, and keep your eyes peeled (not literally, or else you won't be able to read! ) for more GW2 exclusives next week when Ten Ton Hammer heads to Seattle for PAX Prime.