Hey everybody, Matt Witter here. Our team has been hard at work on a new WvW character progression system that will be coming to Guild Wars 2 on March 26. I know a lot of you are curious about what that entails, so I thought I’d go into some more detail about the new system.

WXP and World Ranks

When you participate in WvW events and defeat enemy players, you will earn World Experience (WXP). When you earn enough WXP you’ll unlock World Ranks. Every World Rank earned will come with a World Ability Point, and some ranks can even give you a new World Title.

The amount of WXP you receive from defeating another player is directly related to how long the victim has been alive. Players who have recently been killed are potentially worth no points, while a player that has survived for a longer period of time is worth more.

World Ability Points

World Ability Points can be spent on unique WvW abilities that improve your character in whatever role you may find yourself in—anything from increasing the amount of supply you can hold to increasing defense from siege attacks to new siege weapon skills. You can train multiple times in the same ability, which increases the effectiveness of the ability, but also increases the cost.

Keep in mind, the choices you make with your World Ability Points are permanent. Much like our skill system, over time all of the abilities will be unlocked as you progress in World Rank.

World Titles

World Titles are a great way to show off your expertise to your enemies. World Titles, which are given to players at specific ranks, replace the display name that your enemies see. Currently when you see enemy players in WvW, you always see their server name plus the title of ‘invader’ after it, like so: “Sanctum of Rall Invader.” With the new system you will see players as their world name plus their World Title. For instance, if your enemy has reached the rank that gives them the World Title of “Recruit,” you will now see their name as: “Sanctum of Rall Recruit.”

These World Titles have no effect on any already existing titles or achievements. This is a separate system in addition to what is available now.

Overhauled WvW Scoreboard

The March 26 update will also bring a new and improved WvW Scoreboard! The new WvW UI is accessed the exact same way (press B) and will house multiple tabs to maximize the flow of information for players spread out across all maps. It will also have a tab to house all of our World Rank information.

On this tab you can train World Abilities, view your current World Rank, and much more.

Our Goal

The goal for this system is to ensure that players always have something to constantly work towards. We want each character to have a unique experience in WvW, so World Ranks and WXP are all character-based values rather than account-based. We believe that in the long run, this will actually help incentivize players to experiment with various different ability builds for each character. It also creates a long term goal for players of multiple characters, as they can strive to rank up multiple characters to help show off their dedication to WvW.

One of the goals our team set for ourselves with the WvW progression system was to ensure that it could be expanded in the future. In fact, we’re already working on additional abilities that we plan to release in the future, and we’ll increase the amount and variety of abilities available for purchase in future updates. We do hope you enjoy the abilities we are initially releasing with this system, and we appreciate any feedback players have so we can improve on the system in the future.

We’ll see you on the battlefield!