We’ve got a bunch of scattered Guild Wars 2 news to cap off the week! First up: the balance patch. Unfortunately, in typical recent ArenaNet fashion, we don’t know that much about what it’ll actually include. Reddit is hopeful anyway.
“We wanted to let you know that next Tuesday the Systems team will be releasing a smaller balance update,” the studio’s Gaile Gray told players last night. “This update is coming out a bit earlier than we normally release a balance pass – consider it a little bonus! The release is focused around updating some weapon traits to make them more broadly usable and splitting some skills between game modes.”
As for the Belgian players blocked from purchasing gems? There’s an update for that now too. We previously reported that after several days of silence, ArenaNet confirmed that the decision was in accordance with Belgian gambling laws and that ArenaNet was hunting for “more flexible solutions.” Yesterday, Gray posted a follow-up along with an FAQ.
“We recently disabled Gem purchases for players located in Belgium. This action was in response to the Belgian Gaming Commission’s declaration that paid loot boxes violate Belgium’s gambling restrictions. We have now implemented a more refined system, which only restricts the purchase of loot boxes and related items, such as chest keys, dye kits, and certain packs by players located in Belgium. For players located in Belgium, you will see the following message when viewing these items ‘This item is not available for purchase in your region.’ All other items and purchases are now available.”
Players report that it’s not just keyed lockboxes affected; things like the mount lockboxes are also off-limits.
Finally, the September forum chat is coming to a close this afternoon, with – as Redditors have pointed out – still no dev response on the Sigil of Nullification uproar we covered earlier this week. There’s at least one fantastic player solution in the thread, too: “Just put a kitten NPC in LA that accepts any sigil in exchange for the [Sigil of] Nullification.” That’d do it.
