PvP Unlocks available to buy from Online Store

[Lurker Wyrm]

The official statement, in case anyone's interested:

In the near future, a purchase of Prophecies will not be required to purchase the Prophecies All-Profession Skill Unlock Pack. Those who purchase this pack will be able to create Prophecies PvP characters and play PvP without purchasing the game itself. At that time, we'll rename the pack to something like Guild Wars Prophecies PvP Edition. (Ok, the name is very much a TBD, so it may change before release.)

Furthermore, prior to the release of Nightfall, we are contemplating offering a Guild Wars Factions PvP Edition (name, again, TBD). This, too, will not require the purchase of the game itself.

Depending on how the Nightfall PvE leaves me feeling, I might wind up getting just the PvP editions of GW. If it's anything even remotely like the Factions PvE then that's pretty much a given.

There are also a few other tidbits about future plans for GW (not from the same press release):

* M&J says they are considering the suggestion of adding voice communication to Guild Wars.
* lvl 20 is the core of Guild Wars' design; They will not increase it for any reason
* "Life Skill" had becoming more and more popular in many MMOs (cooking, fishing, etc.); M&J says they may add this as part of Guild Wars to increase its replayability toward those more social type.

Built in voice comm would be a major plus, but I'm not sure how the logistics of that will work (i.e. adding an additional fee or something -- TS and Vent server hosts make lots of money off games like GW and WoW).

Edit: Probably should have mentioned that these are all rumors at the moment. If they were implemented, my guess would be that they'll be part of a future campaign, something along the lines of Factions and the storage addition.

[WarBlade]

Built-in voice comm would be nice.

Imagine someone opening a channel to talk and everyone else in the party gets to see a yellow highlight appear on the appropriate name in their party panel. 8)

I can't see this having a major impact on bandwidth, maybe a marginal improvement, but as far as resource hogging is concerned hopefully it would cut down the total a bit. The real benefit would be that people without appropriate peripherals like microphones could probably just configure audio within GW and listen to the caller without the potentially messy business of finding and accessing the TS channel.