Guild Wars 2 Structured PvP Development Blog

The latest development blog post for Guild Wars 2 is centered around some new features that will be added to structured Players versus Player in the near future, including free and paid automated tournaments and custom arenas. Here’s a sampling on the latter:

Custom arenas

Alright. You’ve got your build. You have your 5-person team, and you’re really good at working together. You want a place to train. You want a place to challenge other teams (and by challenge, I mean you wanna slap down those punks who were talking trash in that tournament you just played!!!). You want the ability to play only the maps you want to play. You want a place where you and your friends can play without random people jumping in on the game.

What do you do?

You rent a custom arena.

Custom arenas are special PvP maps, rented by players, that will allow you to set up passwords, host scrims, and test strategies with your team. This will allow you to challenge other teams, work on your builds in secret, and test your skills 1-on-1 with friends. You can open the server up to everyone and set the map rotation you like best, or keep your arena password-protected so it serves as your private training ground.

We expect custom arenas will be a massive boon to the sPvP community. These rentable arenas will allow you to break up into teams, have a place to call your own, and allow you to organize your own private tournaments. You can customize the arena the way you want it (within established parameters), and you can select which maps to play on.

In a future blog post, we’ll talk about custom arenas in a lot of detail, and we’ll talk about all the settings available on them, as well as how you rent them!