14 DAY TRIAL // ArenaNet concluded the first season of its living world last month, ending it with the death of the arch-villain Scarlet Briar, after a year of plotting and fighting, finally liberating the world of Tyria.
The developers have been focusing on improving the game's system in the interim, seeking to raise the general quality of life for their players before committing to another major content update. As such, the April Feature Pack will introduce the wardrobe system, a major traits system overhaul as well as the new megaserver system.
The wardrobe system will make sure that players can customize their appearance easier than ever and with much more options, while also providing previews and allowing players to see all in-game artwork in the wardrobe bank tab, offering them more motivation to acquire gear.
The trait overhaul seeks to streamline the current system, limiting the number of options in order for each choice to feel more meaningful, making each of the new points count for the equivalent of five points in the old system.
Additionally, the developers have also introduced a new Grandmaster trait for all the available trait lines, making for a considerable addition of 40 new traits.
The April Feature Pack lands tomorrow, and it also brings some changes as far as PvP rewards are concerned, with currency like glory being made obsolete in favor of the reward track system.
As players get involved in PvP, they will earn experience on the reward track and will unlock PvP items and skins or gold or even PvE items once they reach certain thresholds, with the possibility to swap between different tracks.
One such track is the dungeon track, which cycles weekly, and players who go into the appropriate dungeon and complete it will unlock the track permanently, being then able to switch between tracks and earn a lot of the items from the dungeon through PvP.
Another new addition to the PvP side of things is the inclusion of a new arena map, allowing players to take part in small-scale gladiatorial skirmishes, also offering them a place where to engage in one-on-one duels in a more official setting.
Finally, the megaserver is perhaps the biggest change in the update, taking all the separate worlds (the servers) and putting all the players in a single immense pool. Players will then be sorted by their chosen world, but the system will be able to accommodate multiple worlds on the same map.
The megaserver's main purpose is to populate the in-game maps. For instance, there were a couple of maps that only a handful of players from all of the different worlds were playing, and as a result those maps would only have a few people in them before. With the megaserver, the free slots will be occupied by people from different worlds, making sure that there is always someone to play with – or against.
The game will still keep its system of overflow maps, dynamically adjusting the number of maps available and opening up new ones based on the number of people playing. The feature serves to maintain players' social groups, but also to match them with people in the same area, resulting in a greater potential for community forging.