The massive Flame & Frost: Retribution patch is culminating in April. The final portion,Retribution, will end the living story of ‘Flame and Frost’ by adding new dungeon content and introducing custom PvP arenas complete with a spectator mode. Naturally, the patch wouldn’t be complete without the typical addition of new rewards and guild missions.

The latest dungeon will put players against The Molten Alliance as they venture into the Molten Weapon Facilities. Battling Braham and Rox will lead to the final conflict with Charr and Dredge, finalizing the lore behind Flame & Frost. Molten Weapon Facilities is available for a limited time. Be sure to tackle it as soon as possible to earn the dungeon’s unique rewards.

Custom Arenas will take a bit of time, entering beta first. There’s no word on how the process will work or how long it will take. Guilds will be able to pool money to customize their arena. Privacy, score limits, team sizes, time limits and much more are customizable from the game settings. The Spectator mode is just as robust.

All these features and more will go live as part of next week’s patch, which was just added as a big update to the official Guild Wars 2 page.

Having hit the level cap almost two weeks ago, my focus, aside from the on-going Mad King Halloween event, has been World vs World. I touched upon it a bit in my Guild Wars 2 review, but it really deserves it’s own review since it’s a completely separate system then PvE. So here we are.

As I stated in that review, my currently relationship with WvsW is a love/hate one. It solves a lot of problems other MMORPGs have with RvR, but doesn’t get in quite right and makes a few errors itself.

I’m going to start off by talking about map size as I feel everything is in some way influence by it. The World vs World area is split into four deceivingly large maps and while they feel and appear to be large at first, they’re actually very small and the source of many of WvsW woes.

Currently the primary, and really only successful tactic, is to form massive armies to attack structures around the map and while this type of tactic is expected, it ends up being the only tactic used. I’ve tried soloing or running with smaller groups, but they don’t last long; you’ll run into a massive army after taking a camp or two and will be forced to retreat. The problem is that maps are so small, these zerg armies are able to go after small bands of players while on their way to larger structures. There’s no decision to be made whether or not to take a camp as it’s only a few seconds off the path and players that separate can quickly regroup with the zerg in a few mins.

If you expand the size of the maps, these zerg armies will be forced to break into smaller groups to go after small hold points or bands of players. Creating a greater variety of combat other than massive scale.

Moving on, lets discuss towers, forts and castles. Towers require small armies to take over, while castles are the crem della crem of massive PvP combat, with forts being somewhere in the middle. Sound good, right? Well the problem again comes from the small map size. While towers should be objectives taken by smaller groups of armies, it ends up being large scale combat most of the time. The problem is that 2-3 defenders can successfully hold off a group of 10-15 attackers fairly easily to give enough time for reinforcements to arrive. So what ends up happening is people get discouraged, join the zerg, then attack the tower. The problem again stems for small map sizes. While a group of 10 attackers might eventually overwhelm the defenders, they can’t take over the structure in the speed required to avoid reinforcements.

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From the moment World vs World was announced my interest in Guild Wars 2 PvE dropped to zero. During the beta’s I spent maybe 30 minutes to an hour in PvE, just to try it out, which didn’t impress me, and the rest of my time in WvW. However due to the massive WvW queue times after launch I was basically forced into PvE. At first I was a bit upset, but assumed the queue times would diminish after a few days or perhaps weeks, but almost two months after launch, I still find myself sitting in the WvsW queues.

I have to admit I gave up pretty quickly on PvP, as a new dad, I just don’t have the time to sit in queue for 1-2 hrs, then spend another 1-2 in WvsW. So my attention turned to PvE, which not only grew on me surprisingly quickly, but is probably the best PvE I’ve every played in a MMORPG.

To understand where I’m coming from, let me give you some background; I hate questing, can’t stand it. I hate running to NPC quest hubs and having to run back; I hate the mindless quest grind; I hate that everything is marked on the map and there’s absolutely no challenge, exploring or surprises. I also hate that quests hubs turn MMORPG into linear games, which they were never meant to be. While I’m not saying Guild Wars 2 solves all that, I am saying that is how horrible the last decade of PvE games have been.

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ArenaNet reports that it received 8,500 hacking-related support requests last weekend and another 2,500-plus by Monday, after a hack into an unknown Guild Wars 2 fansite.

They’re promptly responding with a load of common sense advice that everyone should know this late into the technological era: Don’t use the same password / login for the fansite as you do the game… or anything.

Many players are laying blame on ArenaNet for lack of strong account security at launch, while others are blaming the players who aren’t using the common sense. I’m making a public announcement that you should change your passwords just to be safe.

Those of you playing, how do you feel on the issue?