Red Posts: SPvP Armor Sets, Tome Of Influence and more...

A round up of some of the important developer posts today on the GW2 forums.

On whether or not we will see the inclusion of sPvP armor set tiers (much like WoW PvP Tier Gear) [Link]

Jonathan Sharp: Short answer – no. The reason is that we are working towards an esport based on skill. I realize some of you want your items to matter, and if you want that, WvW gives you that feeling. But we feel it’s very important that you are on equal footing with your opponents when in sPvP. We want skill to be the single largest determinant in who wins in sPvP. We may add more aesthetic choices down the road, and maybe the stats on the amulets can change, but overall we want to stay w/ the “no power grind” system that we have established.


On Tome of Influence not granting influence [Link]

Jason King: I wanted to update you with where we’re at on this issue. While we don’t have a way to return influence you would have received or give you a replacement influence-giving item yet, we’re still actively working on a solution. Until we have more information, you probably won’t see an update on any related support tickets, but I assure you that this issue is still one that we’re aware of and want to fix.

In the meantime, please make sure to only use influence-giving items on your server’s main shard, as influence granted from these items on overflow shards is not applied.


On the TP showing the incorrect pricing in the search results – i.e. it no longer shows the lowest price for an item. [Link]

Tyler Cole: This was not intentional and I believe its timing in relation to the update yesterday is coincidental. We’ll come up with a solution as soon as we can. Sorry for the inconvenience!


On the lack of people wanting to do Story Mode dungeons. [Link]

Jon Peters: This is absolutely an issue as the game matures and we are working on ways to make running story mode with someone worthwhile even if you have already run it so players just reaching these dungeons can more easily find groups to play with. It will probably take some experimentation before we find the right motivator.


On the addition of a “buy back” vendor option to return accidentally purchased items. [Link]

Gaile Gray: A “buy back” feature needs to be carefully and thoughtfully designed. If the team wanted to implement this feature, they would not want to rush it out as a stop-gap measure, only to find that it wasn’t designed as well as it could be. Any feature that is implemented into a game should be well-thought and carefully designed, which is something that the team is fully capable of… and somewhat well-known for doing.