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ArenaNet has announced Guild Wars 2

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The news comes on the day the MMO releases its first expansion, Heart of Thorns. The news comes two months after the announcement the core game would be embracing a free-to-play model , with the expansion set to stay buy-to-play.The number of accounts includes those that were created following the title's recent launch in China, and spiked following the announcement of free-to-play. As with all MMOs, the truly interesting factor however is the number of active accounts, but that's a difficult number to divine when it comes to Guild Wars 2, given the fact many players go through periods of inactivity but inevitably return."We tend to see a tremendous amount of people who may not play for two, three, six months but then there’s a living world release or feature pack update, or even the expansion announcement that causes them to log back in again," explains head of global marketing Steve Fowler. "So we don’t have the same sort of indicators when we’re looking at lapsed and recurring players because for whatever reason it might be we’re still on the desktop and they double-click, patch and then they’re in the game despite having not played in the last six months."Today's launch of Heart of Thorns (which, at the time of writing, has experienced no issues) will likely see more players than ever before return to the game. A huge number of additions are coming to the game, including Elite Specialisations, where professions grow and turn into new, additional sub-professions; the Mastery System , which adds additional endgame progression to PvE; and raids , which offer really difficult encounters for 10 players. But alongside the features coming to the game, the philosophy behind the expansion's development looks set to change too."I think the biggest lessons we learned were from all the things that came out of launching Guild Wars 2 and everything that came out afterwards," says game director Colin Johanson. "I think we’ve applied most of those to the way that we’ve built Heart of Thorns – everything from starting by focusing on how we build the expansion, not just thinking about it for today, but also eight or 10 years from now when it’s still a really popular game. So we make decisions that enable us to continue to support the game in the future as well."One big piece of feedback from the base game that we weren’t really happy with either but I think the players really reinforced it was the main villain of the base game, Zhaitan, he didn’t really feel like a villain – you didn’t encounter him and so when you finally saw him at the end of the game the setup didn’t create this satisfying payoff. So with Mordremoth we’ve tried to really set him up a lot more throughout this expansion and personify him a lot more and end up with something that it feels like you want to fight. So those are just some examples of how we’ve acted on the feedback we’ve got."There've been over 40 free content releases made to Guild Wars 2 since the base game released, and this looks set to continue in the future. For now though, the team are very much focused on Heart of Thorns, our review of which will be coming very, very soon.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter