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Today GuildWarsInsider posted a large and very informative PvP interview they did with PvP Systems Designers Matt Witter, Mike Ferguson, and Jonathan “Chapman” Sharp:
...GWI: What was it about Team ArenaNet’s strategy that made them so difficult to beat? Do you think you’ll see a lot of the same strategy repeated after the launch?
Jonathan: Yeah I do. I was one of the players on Team ArenaNet, and one of the things we tried to do would be try to bring a lot of our damage and characters to one spot quickly. So imagine a quick 4 drop collapse to one spot to the middle of the map, and as soon as we knew we had that spot capped, we’d go back to positions.
The way that we viewed the game would be like soccer, where you have your front line, your mid line, your back line. So instead of seeing the more traditional and defined front line, back line, mid line; we saw the field as front line, back line and mid line. So we would do a lot of that, and I think it was also had a lot to do with player skill.
Mike: We play a lot.
Jonathan: We do play alot. A whole lot, so as to try and balance the game. So yeah, there was a lot of player skill involved too. We understood that if you could win the individual battles, you had a good chance of winning the war.
As players get better, we know they’ll surpass us on the individual skill level. and employ a lot of the same strategies that we were using. The Flex builds, the ‘attack this point really quickly’, ’everyone split up now’, and learning the secondary mechanics of the maps really well. All of those things will come into play for high level play, and even high level spectating.
They’ll see the builds and they’ll understand the trait sets. They’ll recognize the different weapon sets, know the strategies, and know what to expect with certain weapons. You can kind of assume what utilities go well their weapon sets, and what traits they’re probably running. All that high level stuff is what the DJ Wheat’s of the world will pick up on it, and hopefully the fan-base as well.
...GWI: So I heard rumors that the great Team ArenaNet might have actually lost a match.
Jonathan: What?! Never.
GWI: So you didn’t lose a match a G-Star?
Mike: That’s a bunch of rumors.
Jonathan: Lies, lies!
Matt: I call “rumor mill”.
GWI: Pretty sure I heard it from someone at ArenaNet, I’m not just speculating here. So, it didn’t happen?
Mike: Actually, Matt thought he had an idea about how the rumor may have spread.
Matt: We had the video cards to give out and impress fans, because we’re awesome like that I guess, so we needed a way of releasing the video cards
into the wild. So, we basically said whoever had the highest score wins the prize. I’m pretty sure it was at that tournament.
Jonathan: At first we were saying that if somebody beat us then we’d just give them the cards,
but nobody beat us. So we just gave it to the team with the highest score and maybe that’s what they meant, I don’t know.
Matt: They did kill Chap a lot, which is a pretty big accomplishment.
Jonathan: I felt like I had a big X on my back.
Mike: Killing Chap is a win.
They also state:GWI: Do you have an idea of how many people are in a WvWvW?
Jonathan: We’re estimating right now that we’ll be able to get about 500 people into each map.
Matt: Since there about 4 WvWvW maps, that’s about 2,000 players in total. So we have a pretty large capacity but we still haven’t done a whole lot of optimization passes either so we’re hoping we can get that number a little higher. We’re just estimating 500 as our cap right now.
See here for the full interview text or here for the mp3 version of the interview.Later this week we’ll have a set of all-new WvWvW and PvP screenshots coming your way, so be sure to drop by our forums or post on Facebook and let us know what you’d like to see.
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