When we added the World XP system to World vs. World, it was our goal to create a sense of character progression in WvW gameplay. We wanted to reward people who put time into WvW by increasing the tools available to their characters. The system has been a great success and we’ve seen thousands of ranks gained – top players are already surpassing rank 2,000!

I’m here to announce a major change to the system: We’re making World XP account-bound.

Why Are We Doing This?

Every system in Guild Wars 2 operates within an ecosystem that contains all the other systems in the game. It’s important to us as a company that players receive value for the time that they spend in the game and that we don’t overload players with an excess of long-term systems that are character-specific.

World XP was initially conceived of as a system that would provide depth to characters in WvW while also providing reasonably achievable goals that kept you interested in playing and earning ranks. That led us to the decision that World XP would be tied to the character that earned it in WvW. By tying the XP and ranks to the individual characters, we had a WvW system that closely mirrored our PvE XP.

When we initially designed this system, we envisioned a specific amount of abilities and lines for players to progress and unlock for their characters, to create builds and scenarios for their characters to use. As we begin to roll out our new core horizontal progression system of continually-expanded skills and traits, we felt there was no longer a need to have a character-specific progression system unique to WvW. The skill and trait system will provide game-wide horizontal character progression for all players.

How Will it Work?

With all of this in mind, the system is receiving the following changes:

All earned World XP on an account will be put into a single pool.

The sum of those points will determine the world rank and World Ability Points available to each character on the account.

World Ability Points can be allocated differently on each character; you are not creating a single, account-based, version of your characters.

With this change, we hope to still see that sense of uniqueness to different characters while providing much more value across all characters on an account.

Once the change is in, all World XP earned by each character on an account will be applied to the pool for that account. Rank up chests will be given to the character that earns the World XP that increments the account one world rank, much like daily achievement chests do currently. Retroactive rank up chests will be added to the bonus pool of any accounts that earn them via the World XP summing process.

Why isn’t it Live Right Now?

We will be building this change into the public test that [[we are currently holding/ will begin soon]] to test out the newest WvW map, the Edge of the Mists.

We want to get this change out to everyone in a timely manner, but it’s a complicated change that we want to test thoroughly before releasing. This system has a lot of interconnected parts, and we want to put it to use on a large scale to ensure that everything works as planned. The sheer number of people involved should allow us to test this change in-depth before putting it into the live game. We wanted to let you all know ahead of time because we wanted to give everyone as much advance notice of this change as we possibly could.

Conclusion

This change is going to make WvW a friendlier place for alts and is going to make the WvW rank system even more useful. We hope you are as excited as we are for this change, and we can’t wait to see who will be the first player to rank 3,000!