Snippets of news...

[Centaur]

First, John Stumme is getting married (on July 9). If you happen to read this, John... congrats!
Second, the Feature Build appears to be making good progress...

Interesting weekend that I've had, here. I suppose the biggest news (for me, anyway) is that my wedding date is now set (July 9th), as is the location. It has a beautiful view out over the lake, and providing the weather decides to cooperate (GG, Pacific Northwest) it should be amazing. It's a good thing we've got this all set in stone - after revealing the contents of the FB to the Test Krewe, several members have proposed to me. Several guys. I guess that's its own barometer of how good a build is, so the moral of the story is "look forward to it."

Source: John Stumme's wiki page:

On a sidenote, maybe this isn't really something that deserves its own thread, so I'll just make this an ongoing thing, and update it with new interesting tidbits of news whenever I find them online.

[Centaur]

New update on John Stumme's wiki page:

Things certainly have been busy lately. We've been getting more into the Embark build than I thought we would, so I'm pretty excited for when we get to the point of actually talking about it. Watching how people have been following the Guardian, it occurs to me that we need more fan-made acronyms for things. I'm going to propose CFST and HTLLYC as the first ones for this build.

This must be a reference to the BML acronym (Blue Mace Lady) that is popular for the Guardian profession. So let the speculation begin... what does he mean by CFST and HTLLYC... and what does this tell us about which features are going into the Embark Beach build?

HTLLYC... Heroes That Live Longer than Your Character?

[Winterbay]

CFST: Canthan Feast Stores Trouble?
HTLLYC: How to love lovely yellow canaries?

[Centaur]

John Stumme says:

February is going to be an exciting month.

Could this mean that we can expect new updates in GW1 in the coming month - possibly the long awaited Dervish update, and/or the start of the "Winds of Change" story? I sure hope so!

[Centaur]

If we can believe the posts from the people on the TestKrewe on John Stumme's discussion page, then chances are fairly large that the Dervish skill update will indeed be released this coming month... to quote Zesbeer (one of the people on the TK):

John did say start getting people excited, so that's what I am trying to do. February will be a very epic month. Like i said my head exploded at how awesome the changes are.

(punctuation/capitalisation added for readability)

[Centaur]

Don't forget Canthan New Year celebrations this weekend...

Regina posted on twitter:

Are you ready to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit in #GuildWars ? Canthan New Year starts on Thursday! Event details to come tomorrow! ~RB

[Edit] See the full description of this year's Canthan New Year celebration here on guildwars.com and here on the wiki.

[Edit] fixed link

[Centaur]

Taken from a Gamespot interview with Eric Flannum:

I just spoke to John Stumme, who heads up the live team, and he told me that their next big project takes place in Cantha and involves the plight of the tengu, the origins of the Ministry of Purity, and the isolation of the entire continent.

[Winterbay]

Don't forget Canthan New Year celebrations this weekend...

Regina posted on twitter:



[Edit] See the full description of this year's Canthan New Year celebration here on guildwars.com and here on the wiki.

The first Arena-net link is broken due to a line break leading to the html haveing a <br> tag in it (not too hard to fix, but anyway...)

[Centaur]

thanks... fixed. On a sidenote, more updates from John Stumme about the Dervish update (and possibly more) this month:

This week's thing is going to be Canthan New Years, but it's going to be very soon that people will understand the extent to which the Dervish has been worked on. And the month won't even be done with that. I've got some pretty legitimate reasons to be excited, and I think people will understand by the time the month is out (not to say it isn't cute watching people attempt to fail-troll my personal life.) On some of the other points, I don't think we'd be tackling another undertaking like the Dervish. After it's out, I would rather see us doing smaller balance fixes than major overhauls. I think what we're getting out of that update is going to be fantastic, make no mistake about that. I just have some other things I'd like to pursue for the future that I feel are going to be a good time investment to benefit ratio.

So we might get some info about the reworked Dervish as soon as next week, and possibly more (I'm hoping for some info on the Embark Beach build) before the end of the month...

[Centaur]

Dervish Skill update is live, and based according to John Stumme there's another update coming early March:

Well, there goes the Dervish build. On top of that, there was one other thing I got to do today that was pretty cool. I was hoping it would go out next week to finish out the month, but it looks like it will be the first week of March instead. Ah well, I'm looking forward to it regardless!