Hello, everybody, I’m Isaiah Cartwright, the lead game designer on Guild Wars 2. I’m going to be introducing you to three of the changes to Guild Wars 2 coming up in the September 2014 Feature Pack.

Dungeon Instance Owner

We’ve changed the way dungeon instances work. Currently, the instance is “owned” by the first person to enter the instance; this creates some issues when that person leaves or is kicked from the party. To prevent the dungeon instance from closing when any one person leaves, we’ve removed the concept of a dungeon “owner.” If everyone leaves an instance, it will close, but you don’t have to worry about one person leaving your party and having to restart your dungeon! Our goal here is to make instances more user-friendly, as the hidden owner concept was often hard to understand and resulted in people losing progress randomly when someone left.

Crafting UI

We’ve made a change to the way the crafting interface works! You can now open recipes and subcomponent recipes at the same time. This allows you to craft the parts required for a recipe and allows for faster navigation around the crafting interface.

One example of something you could do is filter for ascended items, and then navigate from the ascended item to all the subcomponents. You can also select any of the recipes in the list and it will navigate back to that recipe. These improvements make it easier for crafters to quickly build things.

Performance Updates

We‘re always working on the performance of the game with every update, but we have a big batch of improvements coming in this feature pack. We’ve changed the way many of the underlying systems work, making them more cost-effective, which will reduce how often players will be seeing issues caused by performance. This is most notable in large combat situations like WvW and at the PvE world boss events. These improvements affect both the server and client performance, so in these situations, you should see increased frame rates as well!

That’s it for today! Come back tomorrow and learn about some of the cool new items we’re adding to each crafting discipline!