The Guild Wars 2 community has been carefully analyzing some new patch notes that were leaked this weekend from the developers. I highly recommend reading them if you normally check out the weekly changes that ArenaNet posts. Nobody should have seen the list of updates until October 1st, but they were released two weeks early from an unknown source. Players have been intensely speculating about the source of the update list since it became public.
An Accidental Leak
Some players are convinced that the leak is genuine and ArenaNet made a mistake by letting it slip out into the forums early. If this is the case then not only does ArenaNet have a huge security problem, but players have a huge opportunity. The notes describe mainly changes to skills so if people are using anything from a turret engineer to a minion necromancer they are going to need to rework their builds to stay effective in competitive play. This gives players a chance to think about their skills before everything changes in two weeks.
An Intentional Leak
The patch notes address so many balance issues in the game that some players theorize that the leak came directly from Jonathan “Chaplan” Sharp or another high-level developer on the balance team at ArenaNet who wants to gauge player reaction to the changes. The player versus player metagame will be dramatically different if these patch notes take effect so player reactions to changes in every profession will be important for balance. By releasing the notes early Chap could adjust the numbers based on how enthusiastic players are about certain skills. This seems a bit mean to me — to rile up the community just to gauge anger — but I can see the use of it.
A Forgery
It’s possible that the patch notes aren’t real at all. Some player could have made them up based on what they thought the developers were working on and posted them all over the internet just to troll the community. In that case they wasted your time and mine and I’m disappointed. I doubt this conclusion based on the specificity of the one hundred and thirty-one updates. Who could come up with that many bugs and skills that needed changing other than the devs? I think it’s real and it’s worth looking into.
