Greetings, Mist Warriors!

We’re excited to announce that the next World vs. World tournament is starting on September 12, the Friday after our September 2014 Feature Pack launches! We’d also like to welcome our Chinese players to experience their first WvW tournament! We’ve got some exciting changes in store for the World vs. World Fall Tournament 2014, so let’s get to it!

What’s New?

Tournament Duration

Our next tournament will be an extremely intense, exciting four-week-long tournament battle. The shorter format will ensure that worlds will not be repeatedly matched against one another, which will more closely resemble a true Swiss-style tournament. Each matchup will be unique, and every win—or upset—will make a huge difference!

Posttransfer Lockouts

It’s important to maintain a sense of loyalty during a WvW tournament, but we also want players to have the freedom to move around. In the past, we balanced these goals by implementing a lockout period after transfers, which lasted for the current and subsequent matchups. The purpose of this feature was to encourage players to give transferring careful consideration by imposing some risk to the reward. Because the World vs. World Fall Tournament 2014 will only last four weeks, we will not be enforcing these lockout periods.

Achievements

For the fall tournament, participating players will earn a weekly achievement based on completing a small number of events in World vs. World. This differs a bit from previous tournament achievements in which players were required to complete several of each event, such as capturing keeps and supply camps. We wanted to experiment with a simplified version of the achievements to encourage players to focus more on playing WvW, rather than checking off an objective checklist. Siege objectives, defend your land, and you’ll be rewarded! Complete all four weekly achievements to unlock the meta-achievement and earn this tournament’s title, “Mist Treader”!

Reward Structure

We want to continue to reward a world’s overall performance in the tournament, but we’d like to focus the incentives on each world’s struggle for dominance each week. To accomplish this, the arrangement of rewards distribution will be slightly different in this tournament. The majority of rewards will be dispersed at the end of each matchup based on your world’s performance. This means that even if your world doesn’t come out on top of your entire league, the efforts you put forth in each match will be rewarded!

How Do I Get Rewards?

To be eligible for rewards for any given matchup, you need only earn that match’s weekly World Contributor achievement. Then, all you have to do is talk with the Battle Historian NPC during the next week’s matchup to earn your rewards. It is important to note: You must claim your rewards in the week following the matchup in which they were earned. Rewards that are not claimed during the following week will be forfeited. Please refer to the table below to make sure you don’t miss out on your rewards!

What Rewards Will I Get?

The Battle Historian, located at the portal keeps in each WvW map, will continue to offer WvW-exclusive weapons and other tournament rewards.

A new statue will also be added to each citadel in World vs. World to help celebrate the tournament victors!

At 00:15 UTC on Sunday, October 12 (5:15 p.m. PT on Saturday, October 11), this majestic dolyak statue will bestow upon its visitors a one-time buff granting them increased WXP and XP gain for a short time. The duration of the buff will be determined by a world’s overall placement in the tournament, which breaks down as follows:

We hope you will enjoy the changes made for the World vs. World Fall Tournament 2014, and we look forward seeing you on the battlefield!