We talk with some of the developers behind the last Flame and Frost arc and the changes coming to sPvP.

We definitely took a look early on that. We want to make sure that we are challenging ranged, that we are challenging melee; we want everyone to be engaged at all times in these fights. I think that people are going to find that they are pretty engaged throughout the entire experience, without feeling that they are overwhelmed or that it is non-stop, but in an enjoyable way. They are going to go from experience to experience and really use a variety of fighting skills and teamwork in a variety of ways. We pretty much designed with a lot of lessons learned from existing dungeons in that we have a much more tightly gated experience so that you are not going to breeze through this thing in like seven minutes. It is going to be a fun experience that will last for about 35-45 minutes for the hardcore players, whereas players who are getting used to things and taking their time will probably take around an hour or so.

Since our dungeon was positioned as the conclusion to the Flame & Frost living world content we understood from the beginning that we were going to have players from all different play styles and all different levels who want to complete this event so that they can see the conclusion of the storyline with Rox and Braham. To address that we positioned this 5-man dungeon somewhere in difficulty between a story and explorable level dungeon and scaled all players up to level 80. We did this so that it would be as accessible as possible to the greatest number of players with different play styles and we think we hit a really good balance between being over challenging and something that is just really fun for any group.

I think we found a position where even though for some people it will be a bit challenging initially, it is not challenging in the way of frustrating or not knowing how to get better. I think we have a done a great job in really helping present the mechanics in such a way that people are going to be able to learn and get better not only over the course of one dungeon run but over the course of multiple dungeon runs during the final Retribution phase of the Flame & Frost arc. So for those people that are maybe less hardcore skilled players, they are going to get the story elements that they want and for the more hardcore players there are some really great mechanics in here that are just fun to play. I think those hardcore players are also going to get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that they are able to use their coordination and their skills to be more effective up against these groups and really kick some butt.

We've also got some variety in terms of the voice-over dialogue so it doesn't always feel like the same experience every time you go in; it is going to have subtle differences. Then we've got this sense of progression, namely the conclusion of the story as Rox, Braham and the players accompanying them into these dungeons knock out these facilities. As you knock one facility down another will spring up somewhere else as the entrances to these facilities will get burned down by the players. Eventually, at the end of the Flame & Frost story arc, we will have a final dungeon that has different VO and scenes between Rox and Braham so that you know that you have completed the story.

There are some really cool unique rewards that we are only going to have in this dungeon and will be gone when this content is gone. We don't want to reveal what the rewards are yet but, in addition to the dungeon rewards, there will be a new meta-achievement award that is going to be associated with the content itself.

Talking with us about SPvP Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode was PvP Designer Jonathan Sharp.

The custom arenas will basically be places where you can go in the current PvP Browser and you can actually rent a spot and name it however you want. You get to carve out a piece of the Guild Wars 2 PvP area and that becomes your place. You can do tons of stuff that you couldn't do before. So let's say that you wanted to do dueling. You can actually set the team size for each team to one, so you can have 1v1 and let other people come and spectate. Which means that players can basically just do dueling if that's what they want to do.

Players can also host tournaments with these, media sites can host tournaments or you could do scrimmages against opposing teams. Let's say you have two different teams that are both built differently from one another and they want to test some stuff against another top team but don't want to risk taking hits on the ladder. With custom arenas you can invite the other team over and scrimmage all day and all night if you want to and then take your tactics and strategies that you gleaned from another top team back into the ladder.

If you are a player that just doesn't like some of the maps, because we know that some people don't like some maps, you can take those and keep them off of your custom arena. If you want to take just one map and play it over and over again and do 24 hours a day with that map, you can do that with custom arenas.

It is also a good place to teach. You can slow the game down and only allow people to play on the server that you give the password to. You can set up members, bandwidth and all of those types of things. This means you can invite your friends and in a very safe environment you can teach them the game. Spectator mode is also really important for helping new players.

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