Greetings, folks! I’m here to announce an exciting new development in World vs. World!
We are in the process of designing a brand-new map that will let you enjoy WvW while waiting to enter the existing Borderlands and Eternal Battleground maps. This new map, the Edge of the Mists, will be able to accomodate as many people as want to play in it at any given time. Unlike the existing WvW maps, once a version of the Edge of the Mists fills up, another will be created so that anyone who wishes to take part can do so.
While this map will allow you to earn rewards that will help you in WvW, it will not contribute directly to your world’s score. This means worlds with a large population won’t be able to use their size to gain an unfair advantage with this map. This is a place where you’ll be able to test your WvW skills, earn World XP, and experience content at the cutting edge of WvW.
It’s imperative to us that we provide space for as many players as possible before we continue to make improvements to WvW, because every time we make changes and updates, more players get stuck waiting in line. This new map will eliminate that entirely and make it so everyone can experience the grandeur of WvW whenever they wish.
We’ve been looking into tackling the problem of limited space in WvW for some time now, and we have finally reached a point where we can get you, the players, involved in our solution.
We are telling you about this map now, long before we are ready to launch it, because we want your help to make this the best possible experience we can. We will be inviting thousands of people to come play in an public test version of the map to provide us with feedback, stress tests, and to help guide the design and development of the final version of the map. We are looking for guilds that are WvW-focused to provide us with the numbers we need and to provide some of the basic structure we’ll be looking for in these tests.
We’ll be starting off with small testing windows that will become more expansive as we get closer to finalizing the map. To apply for a spot in the test for your guild, please have one representative from your guild fill out this survey.
Testing of the map will go through the beginning of 2014, at a minimum. To be considered for inclusion, your guild needs to have at least one fluent English speaker capable of compiling feedback for us. None of this testing will be under NDA, as we want as many people as possible and we need your input.
We’ll have more details about the map as we continue to develop it and as we start the actual testing. Your involvement in this process will be critical to the final implementation and design of the map. We will be making decisions based on the feedback we get from these tests and that feedback will determine the final version of the map.
We are thrilled to be entering into a new phase of development for WvW where we get large groups of players in to test and provide feedback on large-scale projects before they go live.
We’ll see you on the battlegrounds!