Whine and Spirit.4359

I don't think we have to worry too much about more maps in Cantha--there are a few map areas (Kinya Province, Togo's Estate, Raisu Palace/Ruined Kaineng) that look like locks for LW6, and I'm sure we'll get at least one Jade Sea map too. GW1 Cantha was big, but there was a lot of redundancy. I don't mind if we only get one or two map sections per region as long as they're interesting--especially the Jade Sea now that the color is a bit more, glowy. My long shot hope is for a Maishang Hills + Archipelago + Gyala Hatchery map. That would cover a lot of interesting stuff and, more importantly, have turtles. I am a little bummed about Old Kaineng though. Why does every old city from GW1 end up as some stony, antiquated pile of ruin? It was only 250 years! Leave it a gross, towering slum the way it was in GW1. Old-old Kaineng had a unique, grungy aesthetic that I think would be cool to revisit. I miss the Xaquang Skyway, running on top of those makeshift skyscrapers was so cool and an interesting map concept for GW2. Undercity would have been a freebie for some sort of instanced content. Maybe we'll get a taste of that if we go to Raisu? To be fair, New Kaineng does capture a similar sense of GW1's height and expanse--if only there was a little more to do in there. It's a beautiful area and I'd love to see it fleshed out more, maybe with some LS6 related content. I am admittedly very nostalgic for Cantha.

I've been a casual player my entire GW2 career and was thinking about using this expac to get into some of the end game content like fractals, raids, and strikes. I've always loved how collaborative open world metas are, but I know they're not always that challenging and felt like I should give the harder stuff a shot. After trying DE I realized that the endgame is not for me. Plenty of players have already outlined the mechanical frustrations of the meta and rightfully criticized the decision to lock a casual, for-fun mount behind it, to which I agree. I think I could get over that, but I wont find out. The toxic elitism coming from the hardcore community has really put me off. Hard to get motivated to learn a punishing new meta with players acting like you're some coddled piece of trash who just wants free prizes. Okay! So it's not for me, and I will disengage to let everyone else enjoy. To each their own, but I doubt this is what Anet had in mind for their big finale. Hardcore and casual players seem to have fundamentally different visions of what GW2 is about, and I don't think that's necessarily a problem. The problem is how Anet wants to bridge these communities: by locking desirable casual content behind hard metas and strike missions. It's a recipe for conflict.

Had this happen at the end of a Tequatl meta this morning. Many people, enough to wonder if it was the entire map, lost their rewards/completion. We got back into Sparkfly Fen about five minutes later and figured out in map chat we'd had the same experience. Looking back through the forums it seems like an error around releases before, and probably has something to do with server load. I doubt our entire map of players had simultaneous, independent router issues! It's the first morning of the first weekend, and by now the entire US is awake--servers are probably pretty stressed right now. Hopefully things smooth out over the next few days.

Dying in Joon's mech room still kicks you out as of today.