On the latest episode of Guild Chat, host Rubi Bayer was joined by some of the developers who worked on the recent Player vs. Player update to discuss the changes—and challenges—that accompanied the release.
Game Designer Ben Phongluangtham said that instead of letting matches fizzle out at the end, the team wanted to give players fun tools to celebrate their victories. That led to the creation of the new end-of-match feature, which teleports the winning team to pedestals and gives them a set of emotes and fireworks. The PvP team also developed a feature to honor monthly tournament winners, where winning players have their likenesses transformed into statues in the new PvP lobby. Although players can play in PvP tournaments without any armor equipped, Ben said that unclothed characters will receive an emergency fashion intervention and have a set of generic armor appear on their statue. Producer Grant Gertz cautioned that outfits and backpieces won’t be displayed on your statue, so make sure your armor set is worthy of a champion!
The developers took a few questions from livestream chat. Grant said that the team decided to build a dedicated area to support 2v2 combat after they were inspired by players who ran their own 2v2 tournaments in the Legacy of the Foefire map. Ben talked about rewards, explaining that the team erred on the side of caution when implementing daily rewards because they were concerned about the potential for abusive farming. However, they’re open to making adjustments and are always keeping an eye on player feedback.
Next, Server Programmer Ray Patrick and QA Embed Cal Cohen talked about automated tournaments. They explained that while the tournaments looked stable in testing, there’s no substitute for a mass of players accessing the content. When the tournaments began, some teams hadn’t been completely confirmed, and a bug caused the game to place those incomplete teams in the bracket. This resulted in situations where single players ended up in maps all by themselves, and Ray had to unstick them all by manually clicking a link for each stuck player. Cal showed off the results of a match in which an ArenaNet team found themselves facing a single player. Cal found an area of the map that let his character take fatal fall damage, granting five points to the lone member of the opposing team.
You can watch a recording of the episode below!
