Well now that the event has been announced and described officially, I guess I had better put up an article covering what we learned about it at ArenaNet!
Colin is the main dev behind the Canthan New Year, and as seems pretty obvious now, it follows the tradition of the Chinese New Year. It is slated to start next week, so I figured I would provide whatever additional insights I learned during my trip now.
Colin said there would be some events in Tyria and Elona, but the majority of things would take place in Canthna. This event seems to be in response to a lot of player discussion concerning lack of Canthan events, even though we have had some in the past.
Colin also mentioned that there would be new NPCs, new quests, and a lot of other new things to do. Most of these are mentioned in more detail in ArenaNet's recent announcements, and really wed didn't get much information about them. We were afforded the chance to try one of the new missions though - Rollerbeetle Racing.
Rollerbeetle Racing
First off I thought these beetles were native to Elona, but probably I just missed them in Cantha since I just blew through Factions a couple of times before going back to focus on PvP again.
Anyway, they had six workstations set-up for us to use (I sat out the first round and watched, then swapped in for the next). We started at what looked kind of like the Random Arena staging area. Each of us were on a warrior that was called something like "Competitor X" where "X" was a number from 1 to 6. We then had to select enter mission and wait for the other people to join in and the timer to count down for the mission start.
We were then ported to the starting line for the race and transformed in to rollerbeetles with different colored shells. Each of us was in a starting gate like you see in horse racing - kind of like a stall with a front gate. We also had a new set of skills, though a lot of them had these weird temporary icons.
The mission timer counted down and at zero the gate opened and we could start moving. To move you used the WASD keys, though probably the arrow keys would work as well. You slowly built up momentum and sped up going downhill and slowed down going uphill. If you crashed into another rollerbeetle you could get stalled altogether, and would have to rebuild your momentum again. It took a while to get used to the controls and follow the track, while also trying to use skills on the other racers. The track had a lot of turns and switchbacks, so every once in a while you might get caught on a corner or edge of a bridge if you were not careful. If that happened you'd get stalled and have to back up and try to get your momentum going again.
The race itself only took a couple of minutes to complete, and at the end if you are not the winner, you die and get transported back to the staging area to try again if you like. There seemed to be only room for six racers at a time, and the mission didn't start until you had six people join in.
Rollerbeetle Skills
Here are the skill descriptions they gave us afterward, since we were too busy racing to also take notes on them:
Ram: You and target touched roller beetle are knocked down.
Harden Shell: For X second(s), you move extremely fast.
Super Rollerbeetle: For X second(s), you move extremely fast, and cannot be knocked down.
Rollerbeetle Echo: For X second(s), this skill is replaced with the next Skill you use. Rollerbeetle Echo acts as this Skill for 30 seconds.
Distracting Lunge: All of the target touched Rollerbeetle's skills are disabled for X second(s).
Rollerbeetle Blast: Target rollerbeetle is knocked down.
Spit Rocks: Spit rocks at target Rollerbeetle, if they hit that Rollerbeetle is knocked down.
I think it will take a couple of runs in order to figure the best uses for each skill. We only did a couple of runs so I don't think we did a very good job racing or using the skills on ourselves or the other racers.
Prizes
One more thing that Colin mentioned was that there would be an in game prize for the top 50 people based on winning times in the Rollerbeetle Race. I think they said it would be a special mini-pet. If only 50 people ever get these they I imagine they will be quite rare and valuable!
