Today ArenaNet announced that they’ll be releasing significant updates to its Player versus Player mode in Guild Wars 2. The features are designed to encourage more high-level competative play between players to further enhance the PvP experience. With a release date of 2nd December, it’s designed to coincide with ArenaNet’s inaugural World Tournament Series (WTS) Championships in Bejing. For weeks the top teams from North America, Europe and China have been vying for a chance to win $50,000 USD in prizes during the live event.

The update primarily includes:

Significant improvements to matchmaking

Player ranking systems and map selection

Giving players more opportunities to find level opponents

A dishonor system for leaving matches early

When the update arrives on December 2nd, matchmaking will now use a Glicko2 Rating System as well as other factors such as player rank and team party size. The biggest and best change however has to be the addition of a dishonor system, where players who quitting matches will see their rating affected. Alongside this ArenaNet are also intending to implement a new Ladder Formula and conduct a test season in mid-December. Besides that, there will be new PvP modes to encourage practice skirmishes such as an unranked “Practice” mode.

Besides the above there’s very little information on this announcement that we can comment on and no mention of new maps. Improvements for PvP are definitely welcome and it’d be great to see more players try their hand at it. My only concern however is that GW2’s PvP stays largely stale (though fun) because its Meta is so fixed. Considering the same class builds haven’t changed in months it desperately needs a shake up. I freely admit I’ve absolutely loved watching the World Tournament Series but it’s also disheartening to see many of the teams running exactly the same builds.

As far as the mention of new “PvP modes” is concerned, that sounds a weird one. A practice mode is surely just Hot-Join PvP, isn’t it? Either way, we’ll find out in the next few days what we can expect as ArenaNet begin to reveal their blog posts. If you want to watch the World Tournament Series and I’d highly recommend that you do, the details including the full press release are below.

All aboard the hype train!