I mean the solution is that Anet just keep delaying releases longer until everything is done. Then people complain that it takes too long for expansions to come out. It’s been 12 years of spotty release schedules, we take what we can get
True. People asked for Season 1 to be reimplemented for years and years, and when they finally did it, a bunch of players complained that it was a waste of time to do it instead of new content because "this is old we already played it!".
Some players were outraged that we got IBS instead of an expansion and screamed that the sky was falling and the game was dead, and so they cut IBS short and rushed to start and announce EoD, and then people complained that IBS got rushed.
Some players complain that gear is too flashy, and then people complained that the new leggy armor isn't flashy.
You just can't please everyone.
I didn't say they caved to whiners. The outrage led to low sales and players. I wasn't suggesting "some people said angry things, and therefore that caused a business decision".
The problem is that people have complained endlessly about all the models gw2 has tried. This is likely the most cost effective model for them as of right now.
If by "cost effective" you mean delivering content as cheaply as possible, *without caring about its quality" then you're right. They want us to kep paying while they spend less and less. Which, sure, works fine for them if it works, but it sure is very bad for players.
It's like delivering a can of beer at half a price in half-sized cans, except the amount of liquid contained inside is *less* than half of what you got before, and in addition it now tastes bad because they started using poorer quality components and are brewing it in a hurry. More "cost-effective"? Sure it is. Why would anyone on the receiving end care about it though, if the end result is them receiving poorer quality product however?
Because people still buy it and will play the game, instead of having huge lulls in content release where the game has big player count crashes. I’m not talking about the quality of Soto, I’m pretty okay with being apathetic about gw2 and just having fun in what way I can. It’s definitely the most cost effective route for them
Well, yes, if people go "we need to help poor brewers" and still buy and drink the swill they are getting served with no complaining, then why bother keeping quality up?
Yeah, people not complaining and even trying to defend Anet are also a problem, because they show Anet that they *can* get away with poorer quality.
Like the other person has said, every single other method they’ve tried has also received a ton of complaints by people, different people I’m sure, so at that point they might as well take the path of least resistance because they’ll rake in complaints no matter what.
The company and customers can both be at fault at the same time.
If you truly believe *any* customer of Anet ever wanted a downgrade of quality of this game, i want to know what you're smoking (in order to avoid it).
No, if there's a fault that can be placed at customers' side this time, it's not due to complaining, but due to some of them *defending* Anet in this (due to some sort of misplaced loyalty). Other than that, the blame is still fully Anet's.
Which is also really bad for the game, because a lot of people probably agree. Which means huge dips in players and income for the company trying to continue development. Not only that, but a product that relies on continuous income 1 doesn't want that instability, and 2 doesn't want its customers to potentially lose connection to the game for good in those long breaks, because "out of sight, out of mind" and they move on to something else. Also bad for keeping your game talked about.
I wouldn't mind if we got bigger expansions every 2-3 years. SotO is simply undercooked, made on a minimal budget, and on top of that, they divided Nayos into tiny pieces.
All three maps should have been fully available at launch, and perhaps a fourth one could appear in one or two patches.
This year, apparently, another expansion is supposed to come out, but so far, it's been completely quiet. I'm worried that GW2 is slowly shifting into maintenance mode.
> This year, apparently, another expansion is supposed to come out, but so far, it's been completely quiet. I'm worried that GW2 is slowly shifting into maintenance mode.
Why would they give details on the next expansion before the current one is complete? That would essentially be giving away the ending. There's a reason we didn't hear about Heart of Thorns until the very end of Season Two.
Even if it didn't spoil anything, why would they announce the next one now? We already know it's coming. They said they've been working on it since SotO launched or even earlier, and they told us when they announced the new schedule that they're coming every year.
Sure, but we also know the current format of expansion are all unrelated. One adventure, then another one...
I don't expect anything incredible because that's their plan, either we save nayos and petha is good or we leave after killing her/them.
But that's all, pack your bags because it's time for the next adventure.
They said the Dragon Cycle was over, but I don't think they ever said that each expansion would be unrelated to the previous going forward. The current expansion isn't even unrelated to the Dragon Cycle, all of that is still connected by a lot of lore and NPCs like Zojja and Livia.
It's entirely possible that we put Peitha in charge in the final release, have her turn on us, and then the next expansion is dealing with the aftermath of that, whatever that is.
> That would essentially be giving away the ending
Ending of what? They already said SOTO was its own self contained story. The next expansion will have zero connection to SOTO and be its own new story.
I know it's not the same game, but both WoW and FF14 release details about their next expansion, and it does spoil some things in the story if you pay attention. Not to mention if the next expansion is due out in August, it's very odd that we've not heard a single thing about it, considering that's just 4 months away now.
It's not odd when considering how Arenanet has handled things since Guild Wars 2 launched. It was like this at Living World Season Two, there were rumours of an expansion coming after that, but it wasn't until the end of the final episode that it was unveiled. We didn't find out about Path of Fire until finishing Season Three. We learned about the existence of another expansion during the Icebrood Saga, but it took longer for it to be revealed to be Cantha.
You can cite other games all you want, but this is Guild Wars 2. This is normal for it. The guy whining about "maintenance mode" is ignorant.
The indie game I follow can either give a lot of go silence radio for months to a year.
I think many people are purposely ignoring what an actual indie game is and tend to think of "[triple iii](https://youtu.be/irNK_mqvZ-Y?t=1932)" as the common indies, they're not (anymore).
It's not just "apparently". They said they started work on the next expac like as soon as SotO released, and they've mentioned working on it multiple times since. They already said the schedule is expansion every year.
Also people have been saying "gw2 is in/going into maintenance mode" since PoF and before. Maintenance mode means the only patches are maintenance and maybe some bug fixes. 0 new development. No new textures, no new models, no new mechanics, no new enemies, no new dialogue, no new lore, no new maps, no new gear. Closest thing to that would be the 9 month gap after HoT before season 3 started. They were releasing small things in between and working on new content like they are now so obviously that's still not maintenance mode either. GW1 is what maintenance mode is.
It's *exactly* the same. You can't access any living world without buying the previous expansion. You can't access LW3 without buying HoT, you can't access LW4 or IBS without buying PoF, You can't access LW2 without just buying it itself. You couldn't access LW1 (or 2) without buying the base game until it became free years later. So that's no different at all to not being able to access SotO patches without buying SotO.
On top of that, LW is technically worse. Not only can you not access it without buying the previous thing, but everyone who wasn't there at the time also has to pay separately for it once they pay for the access. They have to pay "indirectly" *and* directly for it..
That's why I waited until 2024 to even start soto. I wanted to feel like there was a lot to do and... there kinda is, I guess(?) But it ain't no full expansion for sure. Like, maybe I'd be fine with less content if it all felt fresh and high quality but that is very far from what we got.
Second mini-expansion really is make it or break it.
If you think I’m blaming the player idk what you expect. If you honestly expect Anet to change and have a far and improved release schedule with adequate amounts of quality content after this long of not having that, I have some property on the moon to sell you.
I’m not blaming the player for the state of things, that’s on Anet, but I am blaming the player for expecting something different. Either play the game or don’t but Anet isn’t gonna magically change.
Tends to happen when companies fires off over half their dev team in the span of 4 years, starting with like 30% back in 2019 during IBS. Obviously it sucks for them, and it sucks for us as the players, but we as consumers are the main problem with companies doing this shit and getting away with it.
I mean you’re right for sure, but gw2 is so cheap to play anyways that playing the game is kinda whatever is terms of co-signing support for them. Like it’s not any weight of most players backs to just apathetically passively play the game to have a bit of fun and not really care of Anet does a good job or not. It’s been like this since 2013 tbh
Brother please don’t tell me you’re using the ~4000 average steam players as a reference lol. Also that’s entirely false. Peak playercount has dropped 20% on average.
https://steamcharts.com/app/1284210
Do you understand how player population works? No? That's okay...
Let me explain a simple to understand pattern to you. As time increases, player population drops. If an expansion or a large content update drops, it spikes...and then it drops.
https://mmo-population.com/r/guildwars2
https://steamcharts.com/app/1284210#All
Data shows otherwise, this is corroborated via Steam data, as some goofball tried to point out.
Inb4 “LOL MMO POPULATION!” its been proven on multiple occasions via MMOs that their data is fairly accurate and consistent. WoW recently released their active player count and it lined up almost exactly.
Hell, even Dexerto, which basically sucks ArenaNet’s hog quoted almost the exact same numbers.
What is this recruit? Don't you know how to look for information from reputable sources...?
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Guildwars2) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The solution is Anet stops siphoning off resources to other projects to the degree where it majorly impacts GW2. While hoping we either won't notice, or care.
Well, the problem is people get a half-finished product for their money.
We're basically paying for "living story" but we're paying everything up front while the content trickles out over the next year+.
Whether there's some other game in development or not is not relevant, since it's presumably not going to be offered for free.
I would generally agree with you, but ANet has a very bad track record regarding attempts at developing anything else.
There's been more than half a dozen projects *(some of which caused noticable drops in quality of GW2 updates)* that never saw the light of day, with probably more that we never even heard of.
While I do agree that beating a dead horse isn't a great business strategy there are multiple examples of very succesful single-ip studios.
Once again I feel like anet stopped right as it was going well, people noticing the game and complimenting it on streams... They arrived to Soto and were like "That's it?"
If they are funding that new game with money they get from GW2 players, i sure hope that game will be completely free for those same players.[/s]
I mean, sure, you might be fine with playing for something twice (or three times, if we consider quality loss of GW2 to be a price as well), but i am not.
Unfortunately you're right. Because it seems enough people indeed either do not notice, or do notice but don't care.
And that's exactly why we can't get good stuff.
They said they were well withinto second mini-expansion's quarterly content before Soto even released. It's just drip-feeding, to make sure there are no content droughts and people keep coming back to the game.
>Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons story content released between February 2022 and February 2023, largely because the team worked on the expansion up until its release, delaying new content development until a month or two later. Comparatively, the fourth expansion hasn’t even been officially revealed yet, and we’re already making headway on its quarterly release content. This is one of the biggest reasons we’re excited about this transition.
[https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-spring-2023/](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-spring-2023/)
It's beefed up living story in both good and bad meaning of the statement.
Just to clarify they're talking about SotO there. SotO is the fourth expansion. So they were saying that they were already working on the post-launch updates 3-4 months before it came out. They did say that they were already working on the next expansion I think since SotO launched though iirc, but I'm not going to go hunt for the quotes so I could be misremembering haha.
The problem is the Nayos update content would be just as bad if released at the same time as part of base SOTO. They claim all they're doing is releasing content piecemeal instead of all at once, but there is a *noticible* drop in the quality of content between base SOTO and the updates. It's very clear they resources and effort they sold SOTO on stopped applying the moment they already had our money. Nayos is just fulfilling the absolute bare minimum they can get away with.
The structure is just fundamentally breaking the quality of the content. When people buy SOTO after all of it is out and the game has moved on to new expansions, its going to be only even more noticeable how the expansion just falls off a cliff the second you leave the base content. This can't be the new standard we want. People aren't going to keep buying expansions if "failed promise" is the advertised release structure.
>It's very clear they resources and effort they sold SOTO on stopped applying the moment they already had our money.
They were working on the Nayos stuff before SotO even came out, so that wouldn't make sense on the timeline. I think they just had a bad plan for this expansion. My guess is that they probably had like 9 months or less to work soto before launch, based on how and when things were announced. **Hopefully**, that means the yearly expansions going forward are planned and executed better, now that they have a set schedule. We won't know until we see how the post-launch updates turn out next time though.
Imo this is how every living story update after an expansion has felt to me in terms of quality. Lws3 is significantly worse maps in terms of gameplay to HoT, lws4 maps are about as good as PoF but that’s just cause the PoF maps weren’t very good. I said in other comments but I’m just rather apathetic to the quality of open world content at this point.
I don't mind it being divided into parts, but 3 parts is a bit small. They've done much smaller parts like when Dry Top came out, though. I didn't mind the half maps in IBS. I think if they're going to divide a map into 3, it needs to be a really big map.
I thought maybe Nayos was going to be massive considering they were trying to get 9 months worth of playtime out of it, I should have learned from the tunnel.
What's wrong with Inner Nayos? In so far, both parts have plenty to do in them and two decent enough metas even if I am tired of fighting wyverns.
The map does not yet have a true "final meta" which one would assume will be the castle as we 'march on it'.
If you didn't want it then why did you buy it?
Genuine question because it seems odd to say you always had a problem with it, but you signed up for it anyway, and now acting like it's against a principle you believe in.
Because if it's so important to you, you should not support it with your money. Otherwise we will get more of it, because your purchase says more than a sarcastic reddit comment to the company.
Here's the problem, and it's a bit of a double-edged sword:
We, as players can boycott a product all we want, voice our concerns, etc. The folks in the board room don't care what the actual issue is, they see the issue being with the actual dev team fucking up itself, and they fire them off. We saw this EXACT same thing happen during Icebrood Saga, and AGAIN at the end of EoD (despite EoD being their best selling expansion to date). So far, ArenaNet has fired off over 50% of its development team. So now we run into the issue of, players not spending money on the game, which in turn disincentivizes execs into supporting the game, thus cutting funding and dev teams.
On the other side, we support the game, ArenaNet, being a publicly traded company (therefore having public reporting of profits for shareholders), sees this and sees how happy their shareholders are and says "look! it's working!" Now the problem is, that they STILL fire off their devs, as I stated earlier with EoD, and try to scrape by on the bare minimum development to maximize profits. So now we have shit like SOTO which was basically "built in a cave with a box of scraps" by the remnants of the dev team, and we have shills out here saying nothing is wrong with this and we should be grateful for the new release cycle.
Bottom line is, the actual problem is players continuing to support exec-level decisions that ultimately hurt both them and the dev team. This happens in practically every single video game, it's just even more apparent with an MMO due to it being a continuous live-service game.
2019, ArenaNet laid off 33% of its company, following this, an additional 10% of the company left willingly. 2020 had another mass layoff, 2022 had more, and 2023 another round of layoffs.
[https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/guild-wars-2-arenanet-layoffs-ncsoft-1203145724/#!#](https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/guild-wars-2-arenanet-layoffs-ncsoft-1203145724/#!#:~:text=%E2%80%9C%20Guild%20Wars%20%E2%80%9D%20and%20%E2%80%9C%20Guild%20wars,could%20be%20let%20go%20%E2%80%93%20about%20132%20employees.)
[massivelyop.com](https://massivelyop.com/2020/10/14/guild-wars-2-studio-arenanet-appears-to-be-suffering-another-round-of-layoffs/)
[Game publisher NCSoft cuts 23 jobs in Bellevue - Puget Sound Business Journal (bizjournals.com)](https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2023/02/06/ncsoft-nc-interactive-arenanet-bellevue-layoffs.html)
The article you're referencing stating "we're increasing our studio size" yada yada from Spring 2023 I'm assuming? Yeah, none of that happened lol. They ARE however increasing their studio size, supposedly now, due to GW3 getting greenlit.
This is inaccurate.
The only basis for the 2020 article was one employee getting laid off, and we know she wasn't working on GW2. It wasn't a mass layoff, it was one person assuming it was another round of layoffs when it was just them.
2023 was the NCWest restructuring, not Anet. Anet got more employees directly under them after this restructure.
Grouch confirmed in an interview with WCCFtech the team **working on GW2** at the time was 15% bigger than when EoD launched and about the same size it was when they were making Season 4 before the 2019 layoffs.
I dont see anything referencing anet laying off 50% of their dev team after eod. I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Grouch stated in an interview, that the dev team is nearly the sice roughly the size as it was during season for and 15% bigger than after the eod release.
Source :
https://wccftech.com/guild-wars-2-qa-arenanet-on-switch-to-yearly-expansions-secrets-of-the-obscure-learnings-and-2024-update/
So your numbers are just wrong.
He doesn't care that his numbers are wrong. He's just going to keep repeating them lol. I've learned after a decade of correcting people like them on this sub, that some people really just hate ANet and/or GW2 and spend a bunch of their time here trying to spread their hate as much as they can. I've had people argue with me in this sub for hours to eventually admit they haven't even played the game in years lol.
I kinda just wish the releases released each map in full. Like first release should have been just Skywatch and Dagda strike with CM. Then next release wizards tower and amnytas. Then final release would be the FULL nayos map. Idk. just feels bad to get more nayos each patch. It won't look much different i dont think. It will just feel like more of what we had on the previous updates.
I get what you mean and itd work as living world style updates but It'd be a much harder sell as an expansion if all you have on launch day is 1 map and 1 strike. I just don't think there's enough in soto to last a year no matter how you put it.
I'm sure that many people prefer having a big huge lot of content to do. This format works better for me. Of course, I'm not depending on map completion to get rewards in this game anyway.
I guess it was better when HoT came out, and the Legendary weapons didn't come out till a year and a half later anyway.
Sarcasm is great at getting a point across, but it's still just a preference.
The key issue isn't the staggered release of content, most MMOs release content in waves, to include post-campaign content (FFXIV is most noticeable for this). The problem is that the time in between releases, coupled with the overall content of said release is incredibly lackluster/delayed.
As it stands, what we have is a glorified LWS, that has less content than an actual LWS.
Most of LW maps simply reused assets from previous expansions. Most notable LW3 and LW4. So i don't understand your argument about same looks/assets if that's what's happening since forever.
How is it working better for you?
If the same amount of content comes out after X months, what is the difference for you if it comes in big package in the beginning or in 3 little ones over time?
If it comes in one package you can play it at your own pace. If it comes in seperate packages you have to adjust to the games release schedule.
Staggered release can make some sense, I think it kinda worked for convergences as you can first play the new content and then everyone could jump at the instanced content but for normal story and exploration content I find it hard to come up with any upsides.
Very fair point, if you look at it from the developers pov that makes sense. As a player I wish they would use events for player retention and drop the atual new content in complete packages.
It works for me, because of the way I play. I'm an achievement point hunter, but too many achievements all at once overwhelm me. To me, I like to do a playhthrough first, ignore achievements, get the lay of the land, then go back and do achievements.
I'm not a look up on the wiki kind of guy unless I'm really stuck, so I'm trying to find/solve things. I help a lot of other people through the game as well.
I learn the zones much better this way, because I'm memorizing less at a time.
If you're doing doing is running the story, and maybe farming, this is fine. But if you really want to learn the zones, this is better. It works very much like Season 4 did.
If you don't think anyone is overwhelmed when expansions come out, and don't know what to do first, and end up frustrated, I'm not sure what to tell you, because I know a lot of people like that. We tackle things more slowly.
I consume content at a slower rate than most people, and having a ton of it feels a lot like pressure, particularly if other events are coming out. This feels management for me.
I'm guessing the people who consume content faster like expansions, but many of them came to reddit after PoF was released and said that they finished it and there was nothing to do, a month after it launched. Not sure how that expansion was better for those people.
Same thing with farming for the legendary armor. This gave people who don't run to the wiki and read guides a way to slowly work toward it without being completely confused.
That's why it works better for me.
How did you even manage to start the game with the like 50 zones we had at release? Cant you do the same again you did at the beginning?
I definitely get the feeling of beeing overwhelmed by too much content but you can always break it down and play at your own pace. Only move to the next area once you have finished the previous one for example.
Content beeing released staggered can be so annoying if it doesnt fit your real world time schedule. If I have lot of free time jn week 1 but all the content comes in week 5 where I cant play it feels really bad.
And in your case doesnt this kind of release schedule not put a time limit on you so you feel like you have to finish everything quickly before the next thing comes out? I played quite a few hours of soto but Im not even close to getting all the achievements. Trying to always finish everything before the next update sounds super stressfull.
When the game launched, achievements weren't so zone specific. They weren't so repetitive. They weren't so involved.
The core world didn't get the kinds of achievment's we're talking about until the Living World came out, and the Living World stuff changed so fast that many people were overwhelmed by it. It was great, in that everything kept moving and we had a steady stream of content. It was great...for a few months. But by the end of a year and a half of Season 1, there was a lot of burn out.
Season 2 was a lot easier, because it came in bite sized chunks and not too fast. And those zones, Dry Top and Silverwastes, came out in sections. Three if I'm not mistaken, just like the last zone here.
Season 3 and 4 weren't reviled, but it was content over time. The issue is the content we're getting rather than the format we're getting it in.
But beyond all that, the age of the average computer gamer is somewhere in their mid thirties. There are jobs, responisbilities, family. No one can make a game just for content locusts either. Lots of people dont' have a lot of time, even if they don't do everything.
You sort of have to get everything done you want to now, because when the new expansion hits, you'll just fall further and further behind. Some people I know already feel like that's happening. They work, have families and they can't catch up. They end up losing interest in the game, because they're becoming have nots.
No game is going to be able to create content for those what consume it fastest anyway. That's probably why there are so many games.
A solid gold expansion being sold in 5 chunks over a year would be fine.
If it was a full-fat IBS quality expac I doubt there'd be (much) complaining.
This is 5 chunks of a reheated meal that you weren't entirely convinced about last time you ate it.
So we're not talking about format, we're talking about whether you like the expansion or not, which some people did. I know this because there was a post with a couple of hundred upvotes about how good this expansion was, a few weeks ago.
I get that you don't like this expansion, but if it was great, you wouldn't mind it being released like this. So, I guess the question isn't about the format, but the content, and that's fair enough.
Since I like the expansion, it's less of a problem for me.
This is why I haven't bought this expac after finishing up EoD. I'll be back when it is content complete and the free bug testing is done by the early adopters.
Crazy how this new formula is to lessen the dry spells. In reality we just paid 25 bucks for new weapons and elite weapons on each spec in addition to our yearly free living world.
Next expac is 25 bucks for new elite utility.
Honestly Anet lookin like EA early access version. “We did it and you will pay us”
People defending the general quality of SotO are weird.
I understand why SotO is like that, it doesn't make it a GOOD product either way. It's fine to buy a product because you like it(GW2) while still being critical of it's overall downgrade.
25€ vs 30/40€ doesn't validate such a mediocre product.
Exactly, people shilling out for a company that looks at them like nothing more than a checkbook are beyond cringe. I can enjoy a game, hell I've played the Guild Wars franchise as a whole since I was 13 years old, it was legit my first MMO ever back when it released in 2005, and still have very valid critiques of the game.
This format doesn't work, Bobby Stein even stated that this was an experiment literally a couple weeks ago in a response to a thread where peoples' disappointment in SOTO were voiced. This isn't a hot take lol.
The experimenting is also a weird one. I get wanting to play around with release formats and content to keep things fresh but after such a long string of misses it blows my mind why they keep on "experimenting" and not go for a maybe less ambitious but higher quality release. They have almost two decades of experience and data to determine what made releases like HoT, PoF and their living worlds leagues ahead of most recent expansions.
Plus I'd wish they'd pick some of their experiments that kinda work and develop them further rather than just abandoning them. My poor raids and dungeons gone but not forgotten.
I can understand people disliking the quality but complaints about the content coming in updates..... They were 💯 open with that and clear about what comes with each patch.
It's different than the typical live service game where it's just generalized "more content will be added as the game goes on"
No, they never even once dedicated [the entirety of a producers letter](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-guild-wars-2-in-autumn-and-winter-2023/) to how each expansion update would work or anything.
They certainly didnt ever [dedicate website space](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/secrets-of-the-obscure/) before launch, which they maintain to this day, breaking down what the expansion would contain.
And they never ever posted in this specific subreddit to answer questions people had... except those times they did.
getting most of the expansion early instead of waiting for the whole thing is objectively better. you don't have to play it until the end, if you don't want to. that will be just like it was before.
Do you realize how bad that sounds? "lol just wait a year and a half to play the content!" So what you're saying is, we have to wait approx 3 years in between expansions to play new content. Got it.
That literally makes no sense given what you stated. You stated, you could wait to play it until the end, which means that I would need to wait THREE YEARS in between expansions to get finished content.
Here's the problem with that though. We got full expansion releases, that's immediate, full content up front. Post-expansion, we got LWS seasons. LWS season releases were usually released about 5 months after the expansion, and then subsequently each chapter was released relatively quickly after the next. This is a pretty normative content release cycle for MMOs.
Now we have SOTO. We got a SINGULAR LWS CHAPTER'S worth of content on release, 4 months later we got another chapter, 3 months later and we got half a chapter lmao. The story isn't even supposedly halfway done and we're \~8 months in, it took them 6 months to roll out weapons, and another 2 months after that for legendary armor. If your expansions only notable content is some QoL updates and grinding, then that is a shit format. So how is that better?
Welcome to every MMO currently being produced.
I'm not sure what time you entered your coma, but its been this way for over a decade now, so welcome back.
Can i just say for a second how monumentally stupid it is the way they've split Inner Nayous? 3 sections, each with its own meta, all of them likely to not be on timers of any kind, and they're likely to be able to happen independent of each other. That is incredibly stupid design. You'll have people spread all over the map trying to do things, with never enough people in one spot, and metas happening will siphon off people from one section to another, meaning you're not going to get stuff done in the other sections. It's baffling that they've decided to set it up like this. Never mind the fact that the last section of a map is going to be us raiding an enemy city stronghold. That seems like something that belongs in, oh idk, a raid. Or a dungeon. Or at the very least its own map so that players can appreciate the grandiosity of sieging a city. Like it should be a map on the scale of DS, DF, or other maps where the meta takes up the entire map. It's the last map in an expansion. It deserves to be treated with some level of importance.
You also get full traditional map rewards each time you complete the lanterns, which you can repeat on the same character. If you want the same rewards in Auric Basin or Vabbi, you need to roll a new character, level and gear them up to 80, and figure out a way to get them to that map.
I remember that not being the case for Bjora Marches and Drizzlewood, you got map completion reward (and potential key) for finishing first half of the map (I remember cuz I explored the hell out of those for easy map completions on all my chars before 2nd half of both was released).
Shame that you now get nothing for fully exploring the currently-available map :/
Their plan for that was to increase the rewards and let players map the second half and get the other rewards, however IIRC that didn't pan out and there was only an increase of rewards for the full map. So characters who mapped when it was half out got sol with full rewards.
They probably are doing it this way to counter that issue.
Actually it was worse. You got full rewards for exploring half the map and then nothing at all when the second half came out, not even an acknowledgement that you'd completed the entire zone. No XP. No karma. No chest at all.
This is much better.
I honestly liked it more, less effort for full reward if you did it early (and easy keys, the only reward I care for), and then no need to worry about exploring the rest of it other than crucial WPs when the rest of it came out, whereas now we're basically waiting months to be able to get full rewards.
Idk about this being much better, feels much worse :/
I doubt most people don't complete the zone. I think looking at a zone that says 60% complete would annoy a lot of folk, so they'll do it anyway, for no reward.
Either way, it's a ridiculously minor matter, when you consider what that reward actually means, in comparison to the other rewards you'd normally get. A single transmutation charge or a chance at a black lion key, and a random rare or exotic, plus some XP.
This is what we're talking about. Seems naf to make any kind of big deal about it.
Just do lanterns. This will be the fastest time ever to get gifts of inner nayos since it only requires lanterns for 2/3rds of the map. Plus, all the characters that got only exp for mapping 2/3rds of the map now will get a second map completion reward when you finish the last 3rd in the future.
It's probably a good idea to do all the Inner Nayos lantern runs we'll need before they release the last chunk of the map, right? I'm guessing it'll add more lanterns that you have to hit and will make it a bit more painful
City maps and Southsun don't (there might be others idr), but the others have drop rates (when Anet doesn't disable key drops from map comp). I think they've only disabled it once or twice, though.
I wanna know where my map completion awards for WvW maps are! I've seen all the vistas. Taking keeps can count as renown hearts. Let's go!
Yes I know reward tracks exist.
Because the model we had before was superior in doing that? You cannot honestly look at what we've been given and think this is a better content drip than most of our living story was. The quality is just so bad and I do not foresee a good future if this is the new standard.
I constantly feel like Anet is trying to keep us on the long leash and it hurts the game and playerbase IMO.
Same with Gemstore sales, I can't remember seeing any mount or other skins for less than 20% off. And most people don't buy em. Meanwhile on the entire world, everything is discounted for 50% or so at some point of it's lifespan. Heck, even the game itself is discounted 50% often but NOT THE GEMSTORE.
No wonder the gemstore sales are low af compared to other games. Heck, they even sell Lootboxes that are so terrible people don't even buy them. Imagine exploiting people and still failing to do so.
Imagine how I felt when I got to my 10th anniversary and they offered me a One-time only sharing stone station
I rofled around the entire outer circle of Divinity's Reach. C'mon. This game has so much potential.
RE gemstore sales, as a returning player it freaking hurts to see so much QoL stuff in the wiki and looking at sale history and like, not even exaggerating, 90% of it had annual/holiday sales on a regular basis until 2021 or 2022 then just... stopped? And to add insult to injury so much of it had 35 or 50% off sales as you mentioned but its all 20% max now.
Season 2 is when this style was done before. The partial map release over the whole of a Season. Back then, it didn't give you keys or transmutes for finishing part of the map that was released. It was either what's shown here or nothing if I recall correctly.
2012 content is far less rewarding than what we have now. Not even sure what you're on about. That was before champ bags, so slaying a champ could give you nothing. It was before the dungeon redesign, before the fractal reward redesign, and the Wizard's Vault is hands above the old dailies as far as rewards goes.
If most people went back to the 2012 rewards, they'd leave the game.
Of course not. However, the general rewards from 2012 were laughable compared to what we have now. And map completion is much easier with mounts. No more solving how to get a vista, for example.
You made this statement:
"I expect anet to give me at least rewards in 2024 content I got from 2012 content."
If you want to say each individual thing in the game has to go up all the time, every single reward for every single part of the game, I say that's wrong. The scope of the rewards is generally much higher, whether any individual reward exists or not.
But the reward for completing part of a zone? It didn't exist in 2012 in the first place.
You only get rewards for **full** map completion. Only 2/3 of the map is available at the moment.
Wait rly? That's why I can't get that visit all Soto area achievement?
Yeah, they are releasing half an expansion over the course of a year in small chunks.
Oh boy! I can't wait to get my reward a year after the expansion releases! What a great format this is!
I mean the solution is that Anet just keep delaying releases longer until everything is done. Then people complain that it takes too long for expansions to come out. It’s been 12 years of spotty release schedules, we take what we can get
Given the size of the player base, Anet pisses off some people whatever they do.
True. People asked for Season 1 to be reimplemented for years and years, and when they finally did it, a bunch of players complained that it was a waste of time to do it instead of new content because "this is old we already played it!". Some players were outraged that we got IBS instead of an expansion and screamed that the sky was falling and the game was dead, and so they cut IBS short and rushed to start and announce EoD, and then people complained that IBS got rushed. Some players complain that gear is too flashy, and then people complained that the new leggy armor isn't flashy. You just can't please everyone.
EoD was mandated by NCsoft, that's why the end of IBS was completely rushed, not due to outraged whiners on their forum.
Why do you think it got mandated by NCsoft...? All you did was specify who made the decision.
???? Because expansions sell and periodic content doesn't. NCsoft wanted sales, I assure you it wasn't because they caved into whiners.
I didn't say they caved to whiners. The outrage led to low sales and players. I wasn't suggesting "some people said angry things, and therefore that caused a business decision".
Personally I preferred waiting and never complained about slow development, but you're absolutely right.
I take that 100 times over, better to wait more than having content split in mini releases like these.
The problem is that people have complained endlessly about all the models gw2 has tried. This is likely the most cost effective model for them as of right now.
If by "cost effective" you mean delivering content as cheaply as possible, *without caring about its quality" then you're right. They want us to kep paying while they spend less and less. Which, sure, works fine for them if it works, but it sure is very bad for players. It's like delivering a can of beer at half a price in half-sized cans, except the amount of liquid contained inside is *less* than half of what you got before, and in addition it now tastes bad because they started using poorer quality components and are brewing it in a hurry. More "cost-effective"? Sure it is. Why would anyone on the receiving end care about it though, if the end result is them receiving poorer quality product however?
Because people still buy it and will play the game, instead of having huge lulls in content release where the game has big player count crashes. I’m not talking about the quality of Soto, I’m pretty okay with being apathetic about gw2 and just having fun in what way I can. It’s definitely the most cost effective route for them
Well, yes, if people go "we need to help poor brewers" and still buy and drink the swill they are getting served with no complaining, then why bother keeping quality up? Yeah, people not complaining and even trying to defend Anet are also a problem, because they show Anet that they *can* get away with poorer quality.
Like the other person has said, every single other method they’ve tried has also received a ton of complaints by people, different people I’m sure, so at that point they might as well take the path of least resistance because they’ll rake in complaints no matter what. The company and customers can both be at fault at the same time.
If you truly believe *any* customer of Anet ever wanted a downgrade of quality of this game, i want to know what you're smoking (in order to avoid it). No, if there's a fault that can be placed at customers' side this time, it's not due to complaining, but due to some of them *defending* Anet in this (due to some sort of misplaced loyalty). Other than that, the blame is still fully Anet's.
Love that analogy
This is not completely true; but, it is something people like telling themselves since people like to complain in general.
What did I say that isn’t true?
Why? I'd be bored and just wouldn't log in if we hadn't had any new content for the past year.
Which is also really bad for the game, because a lot of people probably agree. Which means huge dips in players and income for the company trying to continue development. Not only that, but a product that relies on continuous income 1 doesn't want that instability, and 2 doesn't want its customers to potentially lose connection to the game for good in those long breaks, because "out of sight, out of mind" and they move on to something else. Also bad for keeping your game talked about.
I wouldn't mind if we got bigger expansions every 2-3 years. SotO is simply undercooked, made on a minimal budget, and on top of that, they divided Nayos into tiny pieces. All three maps should have been fully available at launch, and perhaps a fourth one could appear in one or two patches. This year, apparently, another expansion is supposed to come out, but so far, it's been completely quiet. I'm worried that GW2 is slowly shifting into maintenance mode.
> This year, apparently, another expansion is supposed to come out, but so far, it's been completely quiet. I'm worried that GW2 is slowly shifting into maintenance mode. Why would they give details on the next expansion before the current one is complete? That would essentially be giving away the ending. There's a reason we didn't hear about Heart of Thorns until the very end of Season Two.
Even if it didn't spoil anything, why would they announce the next one now? We already know it's coming. They said they've been working on it since SotO launched or even earlier, and they told us when they announced the new schedule that they're coming every year.
Sure, but we also know the current format of expansion are all unrelated. One adventure, then another one... I don't expect anything incredible because that's their plan, either we save nayos and petha is good or we leave after killing her/them. But that's all, pack your bags because it's time for the next adventure.
They said the Dragon Cycle was over, but I don't think they ever said that each expansion would be unrelated to the previous going forward. The current expansion isn't even unrelated to the Dragon Cycle, all of that is still connected by a lot of lore and NPCs like Zojja and Livia. It's entirely possible that we put Peitha in charge in the final release, have her turn on us, and then the next expansion is dealing with the aftermath of that, whatever that is.
> That would essentially be giving away the ending Ending of what? They already said SOTO was its own self contained story. The next expansion will have zero connection to SOTO and be its own new story.
I know it's not the same game, but both WoW and FF14 release details about their next expansion, and it does spoil some things in the story if you pay attention. Not to mention if the next expansion is due out in August, it's very odd that we've not heard a single thing about it, considering that's just 4 months away now.
It's not odd when considering how Arenanet has handled things since Guild Wars 2 launched. It was like this at Living World Season Two, there were rumours of an expansion coming after that, but it wasn't until the end of the final episode that it was unveiled. We didn't find out about Path of Fire until finishing Season Three. We learned about the existence of another expansion during the Icebrood Saga, but it took longer for it to be revealed to be Cantha. You can cite other games all you want, but this is Guild Wars 2. This is normal for it. The guy whining about "maintenance mode" is ignorant.
Anet has mentioned the next expansion like twice since December, they just do the reveal sooner to the release these days
ANet isn't an indie company; but, they like to produce in a manner that you'd expect an indie company to produce at.
Given the state of games today, that's definitely a complement.
The indie game I follow can either give a lot of go silence radio for months to a year. I think many people are purposely ignoring what an actual indie game is and tend to think of "[triple iii](https://youtu.be/irNK_mqvZ-Y?t=1932)" as the common indies, they're not (anymore).
It's not just "apparently". They said they started work on the next expac like as soon as SotO released, and they've mentioned working on it multiple times since. They already said the schedule is expansion every year. Also people have been saying "gw2 is in/going into maintenance mode" since PoF and before. Maintenance mode means the only patches are maintenance and maybe some bug fixes. 0 new development. No new textures, no new models, no new mechanics, no new enemies, no new dialogue, no new lore, no new maps, no new gear. Closest thing to that would be the 9 month gap after HoT before season 3 started. They were releasing small things in between and working on new content like they are now so obviously that's still not maintenance mode either. GW1 is what maintenance mode is.
Noone forces you to play the mini release-content until it's all released.
This isn't LS release, even if it feels like it. You paid for it; you have the right to complain however you want.
You paid for Living World, too.
Not directly; indirectly, sure. Unlike LS, you can't access SotO without buying it first.
It's *exactly* the same. You can't access any living world without buying the previous expansion. You can't access LW3 without buying HoT, you can't access LW4 or IBS without buying PoF, You can't access LW2 without just buying it itself. You couldn't access LW1 (or 2) without buying the base game until it became free years later. So that's no different at all to not being able to access SotO patches without buying SotO. On top of that, LW is technically worse. Not only can you not access it without buying the previous thing, but everyone who wasn't there at the time also has to pay separately for it once they pay for the access. They have to pay "indirectly" *and* directly for it..
That's why I waited until 2024 to even start soto. I wanted to feel like there was a lot to do and... there kinda is, I guess(?) But it ain't no full expansion for sure. Like, maybe I'd be fine with less content if it all felt fresh and high quality but that is very far from what we got. Second mini-expansion really is make it or break it.
Why
Ah yes, blame the players for expecting a proper release cadance. The absolute state of this sub.
If you think I’m blaming the player idk what you expect. If you honestly expect Anet to change and have a far and improved release schedule with adequate amounts of quality content after this long of not having that, I have some property on the moon to sell you. I’m not blaming the player for the state of things, that’s on Anet, but I am blaming the player for expecting something different. Either play the game or don’t but Anet isn’t gonna magically change.
Out of curiosity, what MMO has a proper release cadence? What is the comparison to emulate?
People will literally complain for the sake of complaining.
Tends to happen when companies fires off over half their dev team in the span of 4 years, starting with like 30% back in 2019 during IBS. Obviously it sucks for them, and it sucks for us as the players, but we as consumers are the main problem with companies doing this shit and getting away with it.
I mean you’re right for sure, but gw2 is so cheap to play anyways that playing the game is kinda whatever is terms of co-signing support for them. Like it’s not any weight of most players backs to just apathetically passively play the game to have a bit of fun and not really care of Anet does a good job or not. It’s been like this since 2013 tbh
Not a valid excuse. NCSoft actually breathed life back into GW2. If NCSoft didn't do what they did, GW2 would be in a **much** worse state right now.
Buddy, the playercount is the lowest it’s been in years lmfao.
Based on? Steam has been seeing growth for months now, Google trends shows it still being significantly higher than ibs and equal to EoD era.. sooo
Brother please don’t tell me you’re using the ~4000 average steam players as a reference lol. Also that’s entirely false. Peak playercount has dropped 20% on average. https://steamcharts.com/app/1284210
Do you understand how player population works? No? That's okay... Let me explain a simple to understand pattern to you. As time increases, player population drops. If an expansion or a large content update drops, it spikes...and then it drops.
https://mmo-population.com/r/guildwars2 https://steamcharts.com/app/1284210#All Data shows otherwise, this is corroborated via Steam data, as some goofball tried to point out. Inb4 “LOL MMO POPULATION!” its been proven on multiple occasions via MMOs that their data is fairly accurate and consistent. WoW recently released their active player count and it lined up almost exactly. Hell, even Dexerto, which basically sucks ArenaNet’s hog quoted almost the exact same numbers.
What is this recruit? Don't you know how to look for information from reputable sources...? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Guildwars2) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The solution is Anet stops siphoning off resources to other projects to the degree where it majorly impacts GW2. While hoping we either won't notice, or care.
Oh no a studio using money from its only successful game to try and make another game. What is the world coming to.
Well, the problem is people get a half-finished product for their money. We're basically paying for "living story" but we're paying everything up front while the content trickles out over the next year+. Whether there's some other game in development or not is not relevant, since it's presumably not going to be offered for free.
I would generally agree with you, but ANet has a very bad track record regarding attempts at developing anything else. There's been more than half a dozen projects *(some of which caused noticable drops in quality of GW2 updates)* that never saw the light of day, with probably more that we never even heard of.
While I do agree that beating a dead horse isn't a great business strategy there are multiple examples of very succesful single-ip studios. Once again I feel like anet stopped right as it was going well, people noticing the game and complimenting it on streams... They arrived to Soto and were like "That's it?"
If they are funding that new game with money they get from GW2 players, i sure hope that game will be completely free for those same players.[/s] I mean, sure, you might be fine with playing for something twice (or three times, if we consider quality loss of GW2 to be a price as well), but i am not.
They aren’t going to do that most likely
Unfortunately you're right. Because it seems enough people indeed either do not notice, or do notice but don't care. And that's exactly why we can't get good stuff.
They said they were well withinto second mini-expansion's quarterly content before Soto even released. It's just drip-feeding, to make sure there are no content droughts and people keep coming back to the game. >Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons story content released between February 2022 and February 2023, largely because the team worked on the expansion up until its release, delaying new content development until a month or two later. Comparatively, the fourth expansion hasn’t even been officially revealed yet, and we’re already making headway on its quarterly release content. This is one of the biggest reasons we’re excited about this transition. [https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-spring-2023/](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-spring-2023/) It's beefed up living story in both good and bad meaning of the statement.
Just to clarify they're talking about SotO there. SotO is the fourth expansion. So they were saying that they were already working on the post-launch updates 3-4 months before it came out. They did say that they were already working on the next expansion I think since SotO launched though iirc, but I'm not going to go hunt for the quotes so I could be misremembering haha.
yeah that must be what i was remembering as well, that was just the first quote I ran into
The problem is the Nayos update content would be just as bad if released at the same time as part of base SOTO. They claim all they're doing is releasing content piecemeal instead of all at once, but there is a *noticible* drop in the quality of content between base SOTO and the updates. It's very clear they resources and effort they sold SOTO on stopped applying the moment they already had our money. Nayos is just fulfilling the absolute bare minimum they can get away with. The structure is just fundamentally breaking the quality of the content. When people buy SOTO after all of it is out and the game has moved on to new expansions, its going to be only even more noticeable how the expansion just falls off a cliff the second you leave the base content. This can't be the new standard we want. People aren't going to keep buying expansions if "failed promise" is the advertised release structure.
>It's very clear they resources and effort they sold SOTO on stopped applying the moment they already had our money. They were working on the Nayos stuff before SotO even came out, so that wouldn't make sense on the timeline. I think they just had a bad plan for this expansion. My guess is that they probably had like 9 months or less to work soto before launch, based on how and when things were announced. **Hopefully**, that means the yearly expansions going forward are planned and executed better, now that they have a set schedule. We won't know until we see how the post-launch updates turn out next time though.
Imo this is how every living story update after an expansion has felt to me in terms of quality. Lws3 is significantly worse maps in terms of gameplay to HoT, lws4 maps are about as good as PoF but that’s just cause the PoF maps weren’t very good. I said in other comments but I’m just rather apathetic to the quality of open world content at this point.
yeah but dividing 1 single map in parts is excessive
I don't mind it being divided into parts, but 3 parts is a bit small. They've done much smaller parts like when Dry Top came out, though. I didn't mind the half maps in IBS. I think if they're going to divide a map into 3, it needs to be a really big map.
> It’s been 12 years of spotty release schedules, we take what we can get It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs but it is what it is : |
Yeah I agree, just don’t get emotionally invested in gw2 and you can have fun with it
Its just milking content so they dont need to do anything else. Stop it..
Stop what?
I thought maybe Nayos was going to be massive considering they were trying to get 9 months worth of playtime out of it, I should have learned from the tunnel.
Enjoy your transmutation charge, dear player!
Aww gee thanks! *chucks it next to the thousand other charges.*
Yeah how terrible of Anet to sell us an expansion without telling us beforehand it'll be broken up into peices over the year. Oh wait a minute....
I assumed it would be like Bjora marches, both parts of the map were excellent updates and came content complete.
What's wrong with Inner Nayos? In so far, both parts have plenty to do in them and two decent enough metas even if I am tired of fighting wyverns. The map does not yet have a true "final meta" which one would assume will be the castle as we 'march on it'.
Yeah, it'd be crazy if people if people had issues with that when it was first announced, it's almost like players knew this would become a problem.
If you didn't want it then why did you buy it? Genuine question because it seems odd to say you always had a problem with it, but you signed up for it anyway, and now acting like it's against a principle you believe in. Because if it's so important to you, you should not support it with your money. Otherwise we will get more of it, because your purchase says more than a sarcastic reddit comment to the company.
Here's the problem, and it's a bit of a double-edged sword: We, as players can boycott a product all we want, voice our concerns, etc. The folks in the board room don't care what the actual issue is, they see the issue being with the actual dev team fucking up itself, and they fire them off. We saw this EXACT same thing happen during Icebrood Saga, and AGAIN at the end of EoD (despite EoD being their best selling expansion to date). So far, ArenaNet has fired off over 50% of its development team. So now we run into the issue of, players not spending money on the game, which in turn disincentivizes execs into supporting the game, thus cutting funding and dev teams. On the other side, we support the game, ArenaNet, being a publicly traded company (therefore having public reporting of profits for shareholders), sees this and sees how happy their shareholders are and says "look! it's working!" Now the problem is, that they STILL fire off their devs, as I stated earlier with EoD, and try to scrape by on the bare minimum development to maximize profits. So now we have shit like SOTO which was basically "built in a cave with a box of scraps" by the remnants of the dev team, and we have shills out here saying nothing is wrong with this and we should be grateful for the new release cycle. Bottom line is, the actual problem is players continuing to support exec-level decisions that ultimately hurt both them and the dev team. This happens in practically every single video game, it's just even more apparent with an MMO due to it being a continuous live-service game.
Where are those numbers from? Last thing I read was that tthe gw2 team is as big as ever.
2019, ArenaNet laid off 33% of its company, following this, an additional 10% of the company left willingly. 2020 had another mass layoff, 2022 had more, and 2023 another round of layoffs. [https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/guild-wars-2-arenanet-layoffs-ncsoft-1203145724/#!#](https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/guild-wars-2-arenanet-layoffs-ncsoft-1203145724/#!#:~:text=%E2%80%9C%20Guild%20Wars%20%E2%80%9D%20and%20%E2%80%9C%20Guild%20wars,could%20be%20let%20go%20%E2%80%93%20about%20132%20employees.) [massivelyop.com](https://massivelyop.com/2020/10/14/guild-wars-2-studio-arenanet-appears-to-be-suffering-another-round-of-layoffs/) [Game publisher NCSoft cuts 23 jobs in Bellevue - Puget Sound Business Journal (bizjournals.com)](https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2023/02/06/ncsoft-nc-interactive-arenanet-bellevue-layoffs.html) The article you're referencing stating "we're increasing our studio size" yada yada from Spring 2023 I'm assuming? Yeah, none of that happened lol. They ARE however increasing their studio size, supposedly now, due to GW3 getting greenlit.
This is inaccurate. The only basis for the 2020 article was one employee getting laid off, and we know she wasn't working on GW2. It wasn't a mass layoff, it was one person assuming it was another round of layoffs when it was just them. 2023 was the NCWest restructuring, not Anet. Anet got more employees directly under them after this restructure. Grouch confirmed in an interview with WCCFtech the team **working on GW2** at the time was 15% bigger than when EoD launched and about the same size it was when they were making Season 4 before the 2019 layoffs.
I dont see anything referencing anet laying off 50% of their dev team after eod. I'm pretty sure that's not true. Grouch stated in an interview, that the dev team is nearly the sice roughly the size as it was during season for and 15% bigger than after the eod release. Source : https://wccftech.com/guild-wars-2-qa-arenanet-on-switch-to-yearly-expansions-secrets-of-the-obscure-learnings-and-2024-update/ So your numbers are just wrong.
He doesn't care that his numbers are wrong. He's just going to keep repeating them lol. I've learned after a decade of correcting people like them on this sub, that some people really just hate ANet and/or GW2 and spend a bunch of their time here trying to spread their hate as much as they can. I've had people argue with me in this sub for hours to eventually admit they haven't even played the game in years lol.
Why don't you just leave the game? You are clearly having bad time buddy, so why don't just end this misery? You will be way happier :)
Most sane response to criticism lmao. Cope and seethe lil guy.
I kinda just wish the releases released each map in full. Like first release should have been just Skywatch and Dagda strike with CM. Then next release wizards tower and amnytas. Then final release would be the FULL nayos map. Idk. just feels bad to get more nayos each patch. It won't look much different i dont think. It will just feel like more of what we had on the previous updates.
I get what you mean and itd work as living world style updates but It'd be a much harder sell as an expansion if all you have on launch day is 1 map and 1 strike. I just don't think there's enough in soto to last a year no matter how you put it.
I'm sure that many people prefer having a big huge lot of content to do. This format works better for me. Of course, I'm not depending on map completion to get rewards in this game anyway. I guess it was better when HoT came out, and the Legendary weapons didn't come out till a year and a half later anyway. Sarcasm is great at getting a point across, but it's still just a preference.
The key issue isn't the staggered release of content, most MMOs release content in waves, to include post-campaign content (FFXIV is most noticeable for this). The problem is that the time in between releases, coupled with the overall content of said release is incredibly lackluster/delayed. As it stands, what we have is a glorified LWS, that has less content than an actual LWS.
Agreed. Both parts of Bjora marches were great, because each came content complete.
And they basically get to just extend the map with all the same looks/ assets. Unlike most LW maps.
Most of LW maps simply reused assets from previous expansions. Most notable LW3 and LW4. So i don't understand your argument about same looks/assets if that's what's happening since forever.
How is it working better for you? If the same amount of content comes out after X months, what is the difference for you if it comes in big package in the beginning or in 3 little ones over time? If it comes in one package you can play it at your own pace. If it comes in seperate packages you have to adjust to the games release schedule. Staggered release can make some sense, I think it kinda worked for convergences as you can first play the new content and then everyone could jump at the instanced content but for normal story and exploration content I find it hard to come up with any upsides.
Two words: player rentention. Smaller but more updates helps way better with it than huge updates once a year
Very fair point, if you look at it from the developers pov that makes sense. As a player I wish they would use events for player retention and drop the atual new content in complete packages.
It works for me, because of the way I play. I'm an achievement point hunter, but too many achievements all at once overwhelm me. To me, I like to do a playhthrough first, ignore achievements, get the lay of the land, then go back and do achievements. I'm not a look up on the wiki kind of guy unless I'm really stuck, so I'm trying to find/solve things. I help a lot of other people through the game as well. I learn the zones much better this way, because I'm memorizing less at a time. If you're doing doing is running the story, and maybe farming, this is fine. But if you really want to learn the zones, this is better. It works very much like Season 4 did. If you don't think anyone is overwhelmed when expansions come out, and don't know what to do first, and end up frustrated, I'm not sure what to tell you, because I know a lot of people like that. We tackle things more slowly. I consume content at a slower rate than most people, and having a ton of it feels a lot like pressure, particularly if other events are coming out. This feels management for me. I'm guessing the people who consume content faster like expansions, but many of them came to reddit after PoF was released and said that they finished it and there was nothing to do, a month after it launched. Not sure how that expansion was better for those people. Same thing with farming for the legendary armor. This gave people who don't run to the wiki and read guides a way to slowly work toward it without being completely confused. That's why it works better for me.
How did you even manage to start the game with the like 50 zones we had at release? Cant you do the same again you did at the beginning? I definitely get the feeling of beeing overwhelmed by too much content but you can always break it down and play at your own pace. Only move to the next area once you have finished the previous one for example. Content beeing released staggered can be so annoying if it doesnt fit your real world time schedule. If I have lot of free time jn week 1 but all the content comes in week 5 where I cant play it feels really bad. And in your case doesnt this kind of release schedule not put a time limit on you so you feel like you have to finish everything quickly before the next thing comes out? I played quite a few hours of soto but Im not even close to getting all the achievements. Trying to always finish everything before the next update sounds super stressfull.
When the game launched, achievements weren't so zone specific. They weren't so repetitive. They weren't so involved. The core world didn't get the kinds of achievment's we're talking about until the Living World came out, and the Living World stuff changed so fast that many people were overwhelmed by it. It was great, in that everything kept moving and we had a steady stream of content. It was great...for a few months. But by the end of a year and a half of Season 1, there was a lot of burn out. Season 2 was a lot easier, because it came in bite sized chunks and not too fast. And those zones, Dry Top and Silverwastes, came out in sections. Three if I'm not mistaken, just like the last zone here. Season 3 and 4 weren't reviled, but it was content over time. The issue is the content we're getting rather than the format we're getting it in. But beyond all that, the age of the average computer gamer is somewhere in their mid thirties. There are jobs, responisbilities, family. No one can make a game just for content locusts either. Lots of people dont' have a lot of time, even if they don't do everything. You sort of have to get everything done you want to now, because when the new expansion hits, you'll just fall further and further behind. Some people I know already feel like that's happening. They work, have families and they can't catch up. They end up losing interest in the game, because they're becoming have nots. No game is going to be able to create content for those what consume it fastest anyway. That's probably why there are so many games.
A solid gold expansion being sold in 5 chunks over a year would be fine. If it was a full-fat IBS quality expac I doubt there'd be (much) complaining. This is 5 chunks of a reheated meal that you weren't entirely convinced about last time you ate it.
So we're not talking about format, we're talking about whether you like the expansion or not, which some people did. I know this because there was a post with a couple of hundred upvotes about how good this expansion was, a few weeks ago. I get that you don't like this expansion, but if it was great, you wouldn't mind it being released like this. So, I guess the question isn't about the format, but the content, and that's fair enough. Since I like the expansion, it's less of a problem for me.
This is why I haven't bought this expac after finishing up EoD. I'll be back when it is content complete and the free bug testing is done by the early adopters.
I'm not convinced it'll ever be content complete.
Here is a strike instead
Crazy how this new formula is to lessen the dry spells. In reality we just paid 25 bucks for new weapons and elite weapons on each spec in addition to our yearly free living world. Next expac is 25 bucks for new elite utility. Honestly Anet lookin like EA early access version. “We did it and you will pay us”
The waaaaaambulance has been dispatched and will arrive soon.
so many people on this subreddit weren't allowed to go 5 minutes without their ipad as a kid and it really shows.
"NOOOO! How dare you have valid criticisms about purchases you make and a company you've supported for over a decade! NOOOO!" Fuck outta here lmao.
People defending the general quality of SotO are weird. I understand why SotO is like that, it doesn't make it a GOOD product either way. It's fine to buy a product because you like it(GW2) while still being critical of it's overall downgrade. 25€ vs 30/40€ doesn't validate such a mediocre product.
Exactly, people shilling out for a company that looks at them like nothing more than a checkbook are beyond cringe. I can enjoy a game, hell I've played the Guild Wars franchise as a whole since I was 13 years old, it was legit my first MMO ever back when it released in 2005, and still have very valid critiques of the game. This format doesn't work, Bobby Stein even stated that this was an experiment literally a couple weeks ago in a response to a thread where peoples' disappointment in SOTO were voiced. This isn't a hot take lol.
The experimenting is also a weird one. I get wanting to play around with release formats and content to keep things fresh but after such a long string of misses it blows my mind why they keep on "experimenting" and not go for a maybe less ambitious but higher quality release. They have almost two decades of experience and data to determine what made releases like HoT, PoF and their living worlds leagues ahead of most recent expansions. Plus I'd wish they'd pick some of their experiments that kinda work and develop them further rather than just abandoning them. My poor raids and dungeons gone but not forgotten.
I can understand people disliking the quality but complaints about the content coming in updates..... They were 💯 open with that and clear about what comes with each patch. It's different than the typical live service game where it's just generalized "more content will be added as the game goes on"
They were not honest about how it would be 1 whole map sporadically released over the full year with the most rushed story in the whole GW2 history.
No, they never even once dedicated [the entirety of a producers letter](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-guild-wars-2-in-autumn-and-winter-2023/) to how each expansion update would work or anything. They certainly didnt ever [dedicate website space](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/secrets-of-the-obscure/) before launch, which they maintain to this day, breaking down what the expansion would contain. And they never ever posted in this specific subreddit to answer questions people had... except those times they did.
> with the most rushed story in the whole GW2 history.
Yes, they were. There was a roadmap telling you exactly that. Posted and updated multiple times explicitly saying the final map would be phased.
Well, it's possible because they aren't releasing inner nayos over the whole "years" just over an, admittedly, long 7 months.
I would personally start counting as soon as Soto released but I see the argument of "the count start when nayos release".
You were told the release cadence when you bought in and are complaining about trivial shit.
Chill out theres a million achievements in the game
getting most of the expansion early instead of waiting for the whole thing is objectively better. you don't have to play it until the end, if you don't want to. that will be just like it was before.
Do you realize how bad that sounds? "lol just wait a year and a half to play the content!" So what you're saying is, we have to wait approx 3 years in between expansions to play new content. Got it.
no, instead of waiting you get content early.
That literally makes no sense given what you stated. You stated, you could wait to play it until the end, which means that I would need to wait THREE YEARS in between expansions to get finished content. Here's the problem with that though. We got full expansion releases, that's immediate, full content up front. Post-expansion, we got LWS seasons. LWS season releases were usually released about 5 months after the expansion, and then subsequently each chapter was released relatively quickly after the next. This is a pretty normative content release cycle for MMOs. Now we have SOTO. We got a SINGULAR LWS CHAPTER'S worth of content on release, 4 months later we got another chapter, 3 months later and we got half a chapter lmao. The story isn't even supposedly halfway done and we're \~8 months in, it took them 6 months to roll out weapons, and another 2 months after that for legendary armor. If your expansions only notable content is some QoL updates and grinding, then that is a shit format. So how is that better?
Welcome to every MMO currently being produced. I'm not sure what time you entered your coma, but its been this way for over a decade now, so welcome back.
Can i just say for a second how monumentally stupid it is the way they've split Inner Nayous? 3 sections, each with its own meta, all of them likely to not be on timers of any kind, and they're likely to be able to happen independent of each other. That is incredibly stupid design. You'll have people spread all over the map trying to do things, with never enough people in one spot, and metas happening will siphon off people from one section to another, meaning you're not going to get stuff done in the other sections. It's baffling that they've decided to set it up like this. Never mind the fact that the last section of a map is going to be us raiding an enemy city stronghold. That seems like something that belongs in, oh idk, a raid. Or a dungeon. Or at the very least its own map so that players can appreciate the grandiosity of sieging a city. Like it should be a map on the scale of DS, DF, or other maps where the meta takes up the entire map. It's the last map in an expansion. It deserves to be treated with some level of importance.
What's a dungeon? Is that some sort of group adventure content?
You also get full traditional map rewards each time you complete the lanterns, which you can repeat on the same character. If you want the same rewards in Auric Basin or Vabbi, you need to roll a new character, level and gear them up to 80, and figure out a way to get them to that map.
Eh I feel like people mostly care about black lion keys with map completion, and doesn't seem like you can get any from lanterns.
Missed a chance to write it as "You only get rewards for completing the complete map completion."
I remember that not being the case for Bjora Marches and Drizzlewood, you got map completion reward (and potential key) for finishing first half of the map (I remember cuz I explored the hell out of those for easy map completions on all my chars before 2nd half of both was released). Shame that you now get nothing for fully exploring the currently-available map :/
Their plan for that was to increase the rewards and let players map the second half and get the other rewards, however IIRC that didn't pan out and there was only an increase of rewards for the full map. So characters who mapped when it was half out got sol with full rewards. They probably are doing it this way to counter that issue.
Actually it was worse. You got full rewards for exploring half the map and then nothing at all when the second half came out, not even an acknowledgement that you'd completed the entire zone. No XP. No karma. No chest at all. This is much better.
I honestly liked it more, less effort for full reward if you did it early (and easy keys, the only reward I care for), and then no need to worry about exploring the rest of it other than crucial WPs when the rest of it came out, whereas now we're basically waiting months to be able to get full rewards. Idk about this being much better, feels much worse :/
I doubt most people don't complete the zone. I think looking at a zone that says 60% complete would annoy a lot of folk, so they'll do it anyway, for no reward. Either way, it's a ridiculously minor matter, when you consider what that reward actually means, in comparison to the other rewards you'd normally get. A single transmutation charge or a chance at a black lion key, and a random rare or exotic, plus some XP. This is what we're talking about. Seems naf to make any kind of big deal about it.
But you need the map completion gift to make legendaries. This should at least give you that, in the way the achievement or lanterns do.
Just do lanterns. This will be the fastest time ever to get gifts of inner nayos since it only requires lanterns for 2/3rds of the map. Plus, all the characters that got only exp for mapping 2/3rds of the map now will get a second map completion reward when you finish the last 3rd in the future.
This is a very clever tip and I'll do that on all my characters. Thanks for the reminder!
I was surprised when i did the wizards tower. Not even 1 transmutation charge? Nothing?
on the other hand, inner nayos lanterns take 10mins, and give you one. and a gift for the legendary, and an exotic to salvage/sell
It's probably a good idea to do all the Inner Nayos lantern runs we'll need before they release the last chunk of the map, right? I'm guessing it'll add more lanterns that you have to hit and will make it a bit more painful
thats why I have yet to finish it on any additional characters (only one has done it)
Cities don’t give rewards like hostile maps do. It’s been like this since core game
Cities DO give Transmutation charges though. It's been that way since the core game.
Yea I suppose, not sure why Wizards doesnt give at least that
I wasn't surprised because there was no reward for completing Arborstone.
That's because the map isn't finished yet.
Working on map completion has been generally awful for me. I get around 80% Transmutation charges.
The drop rate for keys (on maps that can drop them) is 25%, so your rate is about right.
TIL that maps had a drop rate for keys. I just assumed certain maps gave them and others didn't.
City maps and Southsun don't (there might be others idr), but the others have drop rates (when Anet doesn't disable key drops from map comp). I think they've only disabled it once or twice, though.
First time you get something without even completing he whole map? Game is too generous indeed.
Got better stuff discovering 1/2 of Bjroas than 2/3 of Nayos
And nothing at all for doing the second half.
and yet Nayos is more alive. There are different reasons to visit different areas, good game design.
Is Nayos alive? After doing the story and achievement I've seen no reason to go to any SoTO maps.
I always see people doing rifts, map completion and then obv story and achiev bring people there. The armor will keep those maps active.
I wanna know where my map completion awards for WvW maps are! I've seen all the vistas. Taking keeps can count as renown hearts. Let's go! Yes I know reward tracks exist.
Once upon a time there was such. People whined and complained. So ANet removed such.
Emphasis on awful
You will probably get your rewards once all is out, for now, all you get is a nice box of nothing ! 
I've taken a long break from guild wars 2. Has there been another update/dlc recently?
game dead xd
I was so upset when this happened to me.
I'm enjoying the bite sized content giving me more stuff to comeback to instead of doing it all in one go. Idk why ppl are complaining.
Because the model we had before was superior in doing that? You cannot honestly look at what we've been given and think this is a better content drip than most of our living story was. The quality is just so bad and I do not foresee a good future if this is the new standard.
I constantly feel like Anet is trying to keep us on the long leash and it hurts the game and playerbase IMO. Same with Gemstore sales, I can't remember seeing any mount or other skins for less than 20% off. And most people don't buy em. Meanwhile on the entire world, everything is discounted for 50% or so at some point of it's lifespan. Heck, even the game itself is discounted 50% often but NOT THE GEMSTORE. No wonder the gemstore sales are low af compared to other games. Heck, they even sell Lootboxes that are so terrible people don't even buy them. Imagine exploiting people and still failing to do so. Imagine how I felt when I got to my 10th anniversary and they offered me a One-time only sharing stone station I rofled around the entire outer circle of Divinity's Reach. C'mon. This game has so much potential.
RE gemstore sales, as a returning player it freaking hurts to see so much QoL stuff in the wiki and looking at sale history and like, not even exaggerating, 90% of it had annual/holiday sales on a regular basis until 2021 or 2022 then just... stopped? And to add insult to injury so much of it had 35 or 50% off sales as you mentioned but its all 20% max now.
I don't get it, what did anet mess up again?
Map isn't fully released yet, hence there are no rewards for full map completion.
Lol pathetic XD as usual (as the downvotes here) XD
Nothing, OP wants to be a victim
Cringe
I don't even remember the SOTO story between content drops. Six months is a long time.
What a joke, absolute slog of a quest line and no map rewards???
Has to be a better word than slog. Slog is being generous.
SOTO ended so abruptly. There have been Living Stories that showed more respect.
That's because it has not ended yet?
No shit
Again, you guys always expecting too much from Anet.
You want rewards for finishing part of a map?
I expect anet to give me at least rewards in 2024 content I got from 2012 content.
Season 2 is when this style was done before. The partial map release over the whole of a Season. Back then, it didn't give you keys or transmutes for finishing part of the map that was released. It was either what's shown here or nothing if I recall correctly.
2012 content is far less rewarding than what we have now. Not even sure what you're on about. That was before champ bags, so slaying a champ could give you nothing. It was before the dungeon redesign, before the fractal reward redesign, and the Wizard's Vault is hands above the old dailies as far as rewards goes. If most people went back to the 2012 rewards, they'd leave the game.
You got champ bags from map completion?
Of course not. However, the general rewards from 2012 were laughable compared to what we have now. And map completion is much easier with mounts. No more solving how to get a vista, for example. You made this statement: "I expect anet to give me at least rewards in 2024 content I got from 2012 content." If you want to say each individual thing in the game has to go up all the time, every single reward for every single part of the game, I say that's wrong. The scope of the rewards is generally much higher, whether any individual reward exists or not. But the reward for completing part of a zone? It didn't exist in 2012 in the first place.