Guild Wars 2 opening API for user-created tools

Guild Wars 2 lead content designer Mike Zadorojny says the team is opening up its API enough to allow fans to create tools and apps. This is part of a responsive strategy that is also the reasoning behind the recently-announced more frequent updates.

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ArenaNet has been pretty reliable in releasing new Guild Wars 2 content, most recently announcing it would be updating every two weeks. In case that's not enough Guild Wars for you, though, the team is in the process of opening up some of the API to players, so they can create game resources.

"We have a team working on exposing some of the code to the player base," lead content designer Mike Zadorojny told PCGamesN. "We have APIs the players can tie into. The fans are already working on a Google Maps for Tyria that lets you zoom in and see what's going on at the individual map level. We've exposed what events are running and where they're running too, so say you're on Metrica Province, you'll be able to determine what events are on right now and where they are at that location."

They'll also be exposing information like who owns what towers and keeps, or the current World versus World status. This level of information should allow for development of iOS and Android apps, according to Zadorojny. He says this ties into the more frequent update plan, since they "want to create a true living world that reacts to what the players are doing as much as possible," a strategy he calls the "holy grail" for MMOs.

"We look at metrics to see where players are spending their time and what we’re doing," he said, "and that influences what we've done since the last release, but in the future the idea is to take this strategy to allow the players to more overtly give us their feedback and control some of the destiny of where we're taking this world. The cool thing about it is that it allows us to try new things. If players don't like something, two weeks later it's gone, we can learn from it."

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