Hi there! Couple questions from a newbie!

[Ozoug]

Heya, i haven't played an MMO in about 5 years. The last game i played was DaoC and i was addicted to the PvP. I was hoping Guild Wars PvP would suck me in as much as DaoC did, but i have some questions.

I read that in PvP everyone would be the same level / items. Does this go for just the casual PvP, or also the tournaments etc? I really hope it doesn't as one thing i liked was gearing my guy up to be better in PvP. If PvE doesn't help me in PvP i really dont see a reason to do it, ever. lol.

Do you get anything from PvP? In DaoC you used to go up ranks, and get new abilities, anything like this in GW2?

Thank you for your time,

Ozoug

[Centaur]

Hello Ozoug, welcome to these forums.

There are two types of PvP in Guild Wars 2.... competitive pvp (either casual, hot joinable, which can be anywhere between 1v1 and 10v10, or organized 5v5 tournaments), and World vs World vs World. In all types of competitive pvp, everyone is automatically raised to level 80, same stats, max gear. This was specifically done so that this type of pvp is really about your skill in battle, and never about who has the best gear.
See this article on the official website for more info on competitive pvp.

The other type of pvp is World vs World vs World. This is (huge, dedicated areas of) 3 servers against each other, fighting out a large scale battle for points over a period of 2 weeks... with castles, sieges, siege weapons and all that. This can be hundreds of people against each other. Here, although your level is also set to 80, your stats and gear are scaled up using a ratio of your actual character level, and you keep the skill set that you had in pve. So in this type of pvp, a true level 80 character with max stat armor, all skills unlocked and various enhancements on his gear, will definitely have an advantage over a level 1 character. However, by playing WvWvW you will be able to gain xp for your character, unlock other skills and find better gear as well... so if you want, you can raise your (pve) character all the way from 1 to 80 by only playing WvWvW pvp. And you can also take the skills you unlock there and the gear you get back to the pve world (although it will be scaled down using that same beforementioned ratio).

So if you don't want to, you never have to play pve... although the way pve is set up in GW2, with large scale cooperative dynamic events, I would definitely recommend giving it a try at least once.

As for rewards... this is what lead designer Eric Flannum said about rewards in competitive pvp:

For competitive PvP it’s not going to include any power advancement, it’s going to include cosmetic advancement. So you’ll earn Glory in PvP and then you’ll use that to buy super cool armor. All PvP players start out with the exact same, low-level looking armor. It’s all statistically the same, but then as you gain Glory you can be like, OK now I have this badass armor, and people will know that guy is really good because he has that super awesome armor.

The thing that we really wanted to do was make it so that you didn’t feel like someone had an advantage over you because they’ve played longer in this type of PvP. We wanted to make it so that you felt like, hey I have the exact same chance because it’s going to be skill-based. But we wanted to give people something that they could work towards, so that’s where we’ve got the cosmetic stuff, and there are titles or achievements that people can earn in PvP as well.

They haven't talked about the individual rewards in WvWvW yet (other than the gear you gain there).

I hope this helps.

[Ozoug]

Yes it did, thank you very much for taking the time to write that out! =p

Looking forward to this game, hopefully it comes this year =p

[Centaur]

Glad to be of assistance. As for the release date... they have announced that closed beta will start towards the end of the year, after that they will take time to fix or change whatever came up during the closed beta testing. Then the open beta will start, after which they will again take time to do fixes/changes. And only then will the game be considered ready for release. So I definitely wouldn't expect it this year. My personal estimate is around Q2 2012.