In Forbes, John Gaudiosi offers a brief look at ArenaNet’s development style:

NCsoft-owned ArenaNet has spent the past five years developing a new experience working with the millions of Guild War fans who love the fantasy world. Guild Wars 2 has been designed with the help of gamers. The developer lines the halls of its beautiful Bellevue, Washington studio with fan art, as well as an occasional life-size Charr created by an extremely talented gamer. [. . .]

“We strive hard to make a great game,” said O’Brien. “NCsoft is a great company to be partnered with because they’re a game development-driven company. The feedback the head of the company gives us is good feedback, but he leaves it to us because we want to take online worlds to places they haven’t been before. We want to offer players a truly dynamic online experience they haven’t seen before.”

[. . .]

“How we’ve built our company is that we’re very iterative when designing games,” said O’Brien. “We do like 20 new versions of our game a day and we constantly tweak gameplay according to what’s working. We bring in external testers, alpha testers for a long time and they play these new versions. We’re also able to get broad feedback from players. We’ve all been trained to read alpha forums for years now. Everybody reads them. We have really thick skin. We’re providing a service to our customers and if there’s something our customers aren’t getting, we need to make it more clear, or make the system more fun so that it becomes second nature once the game is released.”