Guild Wars 2 has a pretty active and dedicated sPvP community. ArenaNet's Jonathan Sharp took to the blog today to talk to that community (and the rest of you peasants, too) about some upcoming goodies for PvP.

Right now, players are able to compete in structured automated tournaments. These free tournaments pit eight teams of five against each other, with reward chests, glory, and rank going to the top four teams. Soon, players will also be able to participate in paid automated tournaments. Tickets for entry can be found in reward chests from free tournaments, bought in the gem store, or received whenever a player hits a new sPvP rank. Every team in the paid tournaments will receive a reward, but the four teams with the best performance will get better loot -- including gems.

What better way to hone your skills for paid tournaments than by renting custom arenas in which to practice? Custom arenas can be rented by players with options for password protection, scrimmage hosting, and setting a custom map rotation. Sharp promised more information about custom arenas in a future blog post, and said that after paid tournaments and custom arenas come online, the team will turn its focus to other key features for making Guild Wars 2 sPvP even better.

The folks at Aventurine are still working hard on a number of improvements for Darkfall such as new weapons styles, performance optimization, and UI modifications, but in the meantime they've decided to roll out a new feature that should be a great boon to clan leaders and officers. Currently, clan leaders are only allowed to grant clan-related permissions to their members based on clan rank. With the new system, clan leaders will be able to assign permissions to individual players, regardless of their ranks within the clan.

In addition, each clan permission will have an associated title that any member with that permission can choose to display if they so desire. For instance, a clan member with permission to recruit members can choose to show the "recruiter" title. Military ranks will remain in the game, but they are now governed by PvP performance and each new military rank is granted automatically upon the completion of specific goals. These ranks have no bearing on clan permissions. The full details on the new system are available for perusal over at the Darkfall official site.

[Thanks to Dengar for the tip!]