Guild Wars 2 player base is on the rise after post-launch slump

Despite a drop in Guild Wars 2's player base following its initial release last year, the game is seeing a slow but steady rise in players following the introduction of bi-weekly updates, lead designer Isaiah Cartwright told Polygon.

"We've been able to stabilize since the post-launch decline, and we're seeing slow but steady growth in concurrent players and also overall," said Cartwright.

Cartwright didn't specify the number of players involved, but noted it's common to see a drop in players immediately following the launch of any MMO and that the initial burst of players in the first few weeks of launch is not a "normal" representation of the player base.

"It's important to plan for the inevitable drop," he said, stating that the introduction of updates every two weeks came about following an accumulation of player-data processed by the studio to work out how often players play and when.

"We ended up thinking that if we got to making these updates more often then players will stick around longer."

As a result, Guild Wars 2 pulled a "very large amount" of players from the original Guild Wars; however, the original game is still economically viable enough that there are "no plans to turn it off" any time soon. Guild Wars is currently being maintained by a small development team within ArenaNet.