User:Robert Gee/Journal/2012-02-01

February 1, 2012 – The February Flux: Keep Yourself Alive

I’ve seen a few questions pop up regarding this month’s Flux, and I wanted to take a moment to clear them up:

1. Tie in to Guild Wars 2: While Guild Wars 2 has a bigger emphasis on self-healing than Guild Wars does, and it’s certainly true this Flux draws inspiration from that, that inspiration shouldn’t be interpreted as us using Flux to develop a tie in. The goal of Flux since its inception has been to shift the meta in the PvP side of the game to prevent it from becoming stale. Guild Wars already has several ties to Guild Wars 2, such as the current Winds of Change content, but this is not one of them.

2. Flux Selection Process: This Flux was selected in large part because it would not adversely affect the Canthan New Year PvP formats: Rollerbeetle Racing and Dragon Arena. While we do sometimes sync up Flux with holiday PvP formats (Minion Apocalypse in Costume Brawl), we felt that the disparate rules of each format made it too difficult to do effectively in this case.

3. Functionality: There are a few engine constraints that prevented us from setting up this Flux to work on all heals that directly affect the caster (like Shadow Refuge). Natural regen is also excluded, but I think the wiki community got it right by comparing it to how Healer’s Boon works.

4. Song Reference: I’m partial to the Guilty Gear version myself, though I also like the original by Queen. Of course, the Guilty Gear song title is a reference to the Queen song anyway, so I’m not sure it really matters. This Flux was originally called “Help Yourself” but we changed the name partway through the process because we thought it sounded at least 20% cooler.

Hope that clears things up for some of you.