ArenaNet:Developer updates/20090115

[Dev Update] - 15 January 2009
Six months ago, we assembled the Live Team with one goal: sustaining high quality support for Guild Wars. We started with smaller changes, getting our feet wet by balancing skills and tweaking AI. After these initial successes, we moved on to title balancing and the golem Hero M.O.X. before finishing off the year with new festival content. As the Live Team looks to the new year, we are streamlining our processes, where we can create even more exciting new features and content than ever before. In this Dev Update, we explain the reasons for some of these changes and reveal tidbits of what we've got planned for the future.

Monthly Maintenance
Throughout the year, our regular monthly builds will include Xunlai Tournament rewards, changing out the Zaishen chest monthly tonic, and map rotations for Automated Tournaments. These builds may also include small skill balance changes, tweaks to AI, or bug fixes on an as needed basis. However, we are discontinuing the monthly ATS skill usage charts on the website as the feature isn't popular enough to warrant the time investment required to compile, sort, and publish the data.

Content Updates
Content updates will be done separately from the monthly maintenance and occur every three to four months. By spacing out our content releases, we gain the time to tackle larger and more difficult projects that, previously, would've been impossible. Some features that once seemed unattainable are now being explored as upcoming projects. We are even expanding the Live Team to offer more of the best quality support and content that we can for Guild Wars. With this new system, we release our new content in fewer yet more substantial updates. We want players to feel connected to what we are developing even though it may be months away from release, so during development we will be more open about our process and what we are working on.

Coming Attractions
The Live Team is now designing the first big content update of 2009, which we expect to release in April. We had many discussions towards the end of last year and ended up with a major wish list and a plan for what it would take to make that list a reality. At this point, we have a clear idea of what is ahead of us and we hope everyone will be as excited about these prospects as we are.

Here are a few features we are currently developing for April:
 * Increases to account-based storage
 * Improvements to character-based storage
 * Account-based changes to the Hall of Monuments