We interview ArenaNet president Mike O'Brien about Guild War 2's first year.

"So we think about the content differently. The content is not about laying new runways in front of people, it is about players are changing the world as they play the game. We start to think about it as layering it into the stuff we already made. This is kind of a thought exercise, but you could layer in new events all the time and to some degree players wouldn't even know that you are layering in events all the time because they are just playing the game. Now is an event one that has been around since launch and a player just hasn't seen it before, or is it one that was coded into the game a couple of weeks ago and this is the first time it is getting triggered?

When we think of it that way, our job is just to keep things happening in the game and then from that is how often things should be happening in our game which gets back to the question. We released the game and we thought that doing updates every month would be a pretty powerful thing to do. Other games are only releasing content every three months, but it is content that players can grind against for three months before the next content. But we looked at the past at games which tried to do it every month and we thought that having it every month would really make the world feel fresh. So we did it every month, we did our Halloween event, Lost Shores and Wintersday and it did feel fresh. I think we could do it every month and it feel exciting, that as we play the game we are exploring this new content with our friends and it is very exciting.

You kind of measure it in different ways, like everyone is talking about it on forums and fansites and your guild is doing this new content while players are trying to add everything to the wiki. There is that moment where there is that excitement of discovery. Then there is that excitement where you know the world is about to change. You have that kind of water cooler talk in the community where ArenaNet has released something and players are wondering if it is going to be this or if it is going to be that. Then there is the time in between where the excitement has died down. You can see this really tangible excitement in the community of new things changing.

Then we thought, why does there have to be that gap in between where things aren't changing? This is a game about a living world and we took it as a challenge upon ourselves so that the world always feels like that, where the world always has something going on. So we decided internally that we thought we could do that and geared up and built out these teams to accomplish that. It is a huge challenge and it has taken us a while to get it right, but I think it does have the effect. I look at it now and every week really is the excitement of either the week leading up to something or the week that something happens. You look at the forums, fansites and in-game and every week really is like what those few good weeks used to be, so that's why we do it."

Some players consider the problem not to be the rate of content, but that all of these content releases are temporary requiring players to do the content now or miss it completely. GuildWars2Hub followed up asking how he felt about the player comments of temporary versus permanent content.

"I think when we were starting that was a totally fair comment. Again, it is not an easy thing to constantly do things to keep the world alive. So from a player perspective we don't want them to have to think about the details and they shouldn't need to think about them, we just want to entertain the players. From our perspective we need to make sure everything is at a level where we are happy to leave it in the game and keep impacting the world going forward. Then we need to be sure we are not leaving players behind.

With 25 or 26 updates a year, imagine if each update we added a dungeon so we end up adding 25 dungeons in a year. Then after a year, a player is trying to run a dungeon but other players want to run some newer dungeon. Then if we do that another year there are 50 dungeons. Players don't need to think about those things, but behind the scenes we are thinking about them. The Living World should feel like they are permanent and it is changing the world, but we need to make sure we are getting it right and not make mistakes that leave behind content that isn't right or is fragmenting the player base.

Flame and Frost: Retribution I thought was a good release. Players were really looking forward to the Molten Weapons Facility, but it got blown up at the end of it. Players really liked it and said they ran it many times during the two weeks of its release, but it got destroyed at the end and they didn't like that. I think that is totally valid, but it takes time to gear up.

Now it is not like that anymore. Now Scarlet is attacking the world and launched these invasions. Those invasions aren't going anywhere. There will be a new pacing to it and we have talked to players saying there will be a different pace than it's at now, but that's the kind of permanence I think you want. You don't want permanence to the degree that nothing will ever change, but you want the permanence so if you like something you can continue to play it and it is not being taken away every two weeks. We are gearing up to give more permanence in this way. If we just kept doing what we did before with everything leaving after a couple weeks, then I would be complaining too. If we are doing thing where players are voting and their choice is changing the world and if a bad guy shows up and is invading where the player must combat this new enemy; that is the kind of world changing, leaving a mark on the world that we want to see. What I personally want to see is a year later, after 25 of these releases, the world feels like a completely different world. That's the level of change I want to see and that is what we are doing now."

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