Lead Content Developer Colin Johanson stopped by the GuildWars2Guru forums to clarify a few points made in his recent ArenaNet Blog post.

This blog post doesn’t address stuff from BWE 2 and how we plan to respond to the feedback from it, because this post was written and submitted before BWE 2, long before we compiled all the feedback from the BWE. The posts that go up on our blog are usually written weeks/months in advanced and sent over for editing and then posted when there is a downtime where there isn’t anything currently scheduled on our blog. However, keep an eye out on TenTonHammer where Jon and I are currently working on answering questions for Lewis Burnell that answer some very BWE 2 specific questions, many of which have been asked in this very thread.

Regarding the cash shop:

This blog post was written from the perspective of the content design team and the folks on it who are directly responsible for the production of event, story, and dungeon content in Gw2. Stuff like cash shop, traits, skill progression, etc. are all handled by other teams in the company, and as such really aren’t the focus on this article. The focus here is how we develop content specifically at ArenaNet on the Content Design team, and the metrics we use to help track the success of that content specifically, vs. how content is developed for games with subscription models. The cash shop isn’t mentioned in the article because quite frankly, we simply don’t design content on our team with the intent of the cash shop being needed to do any of it. Our bonus hope from this article was also to help explain why you should fill out those little surveys in the BWE events!

Wrapping it up:

We realize a lot of you are insanely excited at this point and just want more information period that helps get us towards release. We’ll absolutely be getting more information out for all of you, but as usual with our development philosophy until we’ve fully tested and are happy with changes we’re making, we don’t want to talk about them. Keep an eye on the internets, lots more is coming from us to shed light into aspects that are probably more up the Gw2Guru fans alley, blog posts like this content one are really intended more for the casual gaming audience to help draw more attention towards the game and its development.

You can check out the forum post here.