Astralporing.1957

Most of the events seem to scale just fine. The one i have issues with is the pre for Vermingus event. The bars on batteries scale just fine, but the mob spawns to fill those batteries do not. As a result the event takes forever, while at the same time being distinctly hard to tag (as mobs spawn very slowly, and die practically immediately after appearing).

Considering they said the "raids lite" will be done as convergences, that's going to be severely limiting on all potential future raid narratives.

But then we'd be getting Rift essences from Convergences. If the name change was supposed to be due to moving to their more general use, they should have used a more widely applicable name as well.

My point was the explaining the issues by the fact this expac model was new, and thus hoping it will be better once they catch their stride is naive. Most issues they've had (like the poor storywriting) had nothing to do with the model they chose. SotO is not bad because it was their first miniexpansion. It's bad because it was shoddy work done with minimal resources according to not well thought out design goals. Any lesson they could learn from that is something they should have known before that already.

The article reads like you are basically saying (again) that raids just aren't popular enough. And then indirectly admitting that the idea of "bridging content" failed, and didn't really create any visible impact - that the people that wanted to play raids, want to play raids, and the people that didn't want to play raids before still do not want to play them nowadays. And then you go on saying that regardless of that you will try (once again) to push raid content forward, hoping this time it will somehow turn out different than in all previous cases. Also, you want to increase Convergence difficulty across the board completely ignoring the lessons you should have learned from the previously mentioned failure of the "bridging content". I think there's something to say about learning valuable lessons from the past, and then immediately discarding them because you happen to dislike them.

It does not. The timer starts when you enter the combat (and only then), and ends either when you move/use a skill, or 5 minutes pass and you get logged out. It does not reset if you leave the combat, nor does it get reapplied during the combat itself. In the unlikely case of place where there's so much mobs (or other effects, like melandru shrine thorn aura) to put you in combat indefinitely, you could still move/use skill only once, and then go full afk and you would not get logged out.

You don't make trash rewards metas more popular by nerfing decent reward metas. This way you just make people play less overall. Besides if HoT metas get nerfed to the point it would affect their popularity, people would move to more rewarding metas, not to less rewarding ones.

Actualy that wasn't the only reason it was removed. Another reason was that (other) people asked for all other cultural armor sets to be similarily released. And this was not something Anet wanted to do. Although, notice that there isn't anything really preventing cultural armor from working on other races. Originally it was possible to preview it on other races, and it worked mostly fine... apart from few overlaps/weird joins on usual suspects (Charr, Norn and Asura).

They are purchasable on TP.

The main issues with SotO might have been made more visible due to repackaging, but in truth are primarily consequences of design choices Anet should have known for years to avoid. This expansion would have been bad even if it was released in a single package.

General cost and functionality are fine. It's narrow-locking legendary armor that always was an issue. And while Obsidian set was finally released for OW, it is still suffering from the same issue. They really should have spread it more over GW2 OW content, instead of locking it behind a single expansion so strongly. It might have been different had SotO was a good expansion (or at least a decent one), but unfortunately it wasn't.

Most likely simply they are paid for a certain amount of work, and all that work goes for the more current stuff. Nobody's going to work overtime without being paid for it.

We do already know that this wasn't the case at least in the early GW2 years. Abandonment of dungeons was a good example of this, btw (one that was made worse by whole dungeon dev team leaving Anet very soon after launch, leaving noone who knew what was going on in that mess of a code). Another such example is why they are unwilling to make race change available - it's, again, because the multitude of interactions tied to that that would have to be addressed weren't documented anywhere. If such was a situation in two completely separate parts of code, you can bet it was the standard for the whole development process.

That MMORPG project has already been past early development stages 3 years ago. If it won't get cancelled, that "distant future" might turn out to be not so distant at all.

I'm not hopeful myself. Lately their idea of "interesting mechanics" is "make players do stuff that will keep them away from attacking the boss". Which would have been completely fine, had it not been always coupled with their other favourite "mechanic" - massive HP bloat. With said boss itself usually playing the part of the golem, standing still in the very middle of the platform.