I have mixed feelings about SOTO [Merged]

[Linken.6345]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

So a dev, in an interview, tells you something as someone that works there, but your theory, with nothing at all to prove it is somehow okay to spread. If you're saying the dev is lying that's one thing, but devs seldom lie in my experience, even if they misrepresent occassionally. It's very unlikely the game director is going to directly lie during an interview in my opinion. It's the best source of knowledge we have, someone who actually works in the place.
 

What you have is rumor, and conjecture.

Unsure if it is a good thing that we have afew more people then when Anet was winding down gw2 development at the end of season 4.

If they had said they had more people then when they developed pof and season 3 in tandum we would have something to work with.

[Vayne.8563]

2 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

Unsure if it is a good thing that we have afew more people then when Anet was winding down gw2 development at the end of season 4.

If they had said they had more people then when they developed pof and season 3 in tandum we would have something to work with.

 Show me some numbers, instead of making vague and possibly misleading statements. I didn't hear about huge layoffs near the end of Season 4.  And we'd have heard that if there was. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. The point is you don't know.  This is part of the problem with this community. Everyone has a pet theory and everyone knows stuff, and then the information snowballs and everything thinks it's true, and often it turns out to be wrong.  It seems to me that the implication there were significantly less people working on Guild Wars 2 at the height of Season 4 than say during PoF development is a theory. Prove it, or stop implying you know something you can't possibly know.

[Linken.6345]

17 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

 Show me some numbers, instead of making vague and possibly misleading statements. I didn't hear about huge layoffs near the end of Season 4.  And we'd have heard that if there was. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. The point is you don't know.  This is part of the problem with this community. Everyone has a pet theory and everyone knows stuff, and then the information snowballs and everything thinks it's true, and often it turns out to be wrong.  It seems to me that the implication there were significantly less people working on Guild Wars 2 at the height of Season 4 than say during PoF development is a theory. Prove it, or stop implying you know something you can't possibly know.

Here is the quote from the inteview.

Our current team size is roughly what it was during the development of Living World Season 4 and about 15% larger than it was at the release of End of Dragons in 2022.

So its about the same as season 4 an icebrood saga when yea the studio was clearly not pouring money/personel into side projects that then lead to the lay offs and a rushed EoD.

So we dont know if his words are good or bad either way.

The only way they can show is is through actions.

So far clearly SoTO update 1 did not release much did it?

[Tiviana.2650]

AB and VB will forever be my fav zones. To me nothing comes close

[Vayne.8563]

3 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

Here is the quote from the inteview.

Our current team size is roughly what it was during the development of Living World Season 4 and about 15% larger than it was at the release of End of Dragons in 2022.

So its about the same as season 4 an icebrood saga when yea the studio was clearly not pouring money/personel into side projects that then lead to the lay offs and a rushed EoD.

So we dont know if his words are good or bad either way.

The only way they can show is is through actions.

So far clearly SoTO update 1 did not release much did it?

I think it did. The convergence is a new meta, and there's a meta in the first third of the zone. The ONLY way you can judge what is released or not released is to wait for all of it, and compare all of it to a regular expansion. It'll be smaller because they said it would be smaller, but besides that, I think the convergence is pretty cool.  Season 4 is considered to be the best of the Seasons by most players, but they still released Domain of Kourna, which a lot of people found disappointing. The meta was too small. There was nothing to do on the map. Plenty of complaints about that episode, but Season 4 itself is still considered some of the best content in the game, at least if you go by posts on reddit.  But you have to look at the whole season to get that. Not one episode.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, until I see the complete expansion I can't judge the complete expansion.

[Morvran.8265]

4 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

 Show me some numbers, instead of making vague and possibly misleading statements. I didn't hear about huge layoffs near the end of Season 4.  And we'd have heard that if there was. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. The point is you don't know.  This is part of the problem with this community. Everyone has a pet theory and everyone knows stuff, and then the information snowballs and everything thinks it's true, and often it turns out to be wrong.  It seems to me that the implication there were significantly less people working on Guild Wars 2 at the height of Season 4 than say during PoF development is a theory. Prove it, or stop implying you know something you can't possibly know.

He's referencing a Jessica Price comment, she claimed that Anet was steadily moving people off of GW2 during S4 development and the remaining skeleton crew had to maintain the illusion that the game was still a priority. Also it was supposed to be the end of GW2.

Considering how S4 ended and the fact that Anet wasn't working on an expansion at all despite 2 years passing since PoF, and the fact that NCSoft laid off 30% of the company and shut down the side projects not long after, her claims make perfect sense and we have no reason to doubt them.

[Vayne.8563]

1 hour ago, Morvran.8265 said:

He's referencing a Jessica Price comment, she claimed that Anet was steadily moving people off of GW2 during S4 development and the remaining skeleton crew had to maintain the illusion that the game was still a priority. Also it was supposed to be the end of GW2.

Considering how S4 ended and the fact that Anet wasn't working on an expansion at all despite 2 years passing since PoF, and the fact that NCSoft laid off 30% of the company and shut down the side projects not long after, her claims make perfect sense and we have no reason to doubt them.

Anet was working on the Icebrood Saga, not an expansion.  But Anet has ALWAYS wanted to deliver the story through the living world. Always. They didn't want expansions. Before HOT come out, they said they weren't going to do an expansion and instead would continue to deliver content through the living world system. Eventually they did release HoT, but the fact is, NcSoft always wanted expansions and Anet always wanted living worlds. There was a discrepency between when Ncsoft told investors and what Anet told us. 

The idea that another living world season followed Season 4 doesn't necessarily indicate things winding down. It would have, if Anet hadn't been so focused on the living world in the first place. That's what they wanted. And no one can say Grothmar, Drizzlewood and Bjorra were crappy zones. They wanted to focus on IBS. 

Of course the community came out with a bunch of crap about the game being dead and in maintainence mode. It was everywhere you looked over and over.  If you can go back far enough in my reddit posts and forum posts, you'll see I said all along the game wasn't in maintainence mode and there'd be another expansion.  People argued with me, disagreed, but they just didn't see what I was seeing. A repeat of what had happened with HoT.  Anet never wants to make another expansion and NcSoft always pushes for one. NcSoft eventually wins. It happened before, and it happened again, that's all.

Could it be those people were right?  I don't know, But IBS before they moved people off of it to work on an expansion they didn't plan didn't seem to be a winding down type of expansion to me.

[BlueJin.4127]

Did somebody at Anet actually state that they were ending GW2? I don't recall that at all.

I do remember that panic a few years ago when people on the forums were worried the game would shut down because of some veterans leaving GW2. Again, as somebody who worked in the game industry, I knew exactly what that meant... Absolutely nothing.

Resource shuffling is quite common. It generally doesn't mean a game is shutting down. Sometimes, people are switched around between projects. Sometimes, people are removed from projects. Sometimes, veterans are laid off so that newer employees who are paid less and have fresher ideas can take over in a new direction. Some changes are small, some are big. While the only info I had to go by was public info (since I don't know anybody who works at Anet), nothing I heard raised a red flag that the game was in danger of shutting down. And it clearly didn't.

I do have some concerns with the future of GW2 right now, though it's more of a yellow warning sign rather than a red flag.

[Astralporing.1957]

16 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

According to a recent interview, there are as many devs working on Guild Wars 2 right now as there were during the height of Living World Season 4.

Yes. The height of the LS4 was the time when (as we later learned) most of Anet devs got shuffled off to non-GW2 related projects. As such, we're actually comparing to one of the worst timeline in Anet history, not the best. That EoD was even worse than that doesn't really help things.

GW2 issues started pretty much as soon as PoF launched and they've dissolved the expansion team, it's just, due to development cycles, we were unable to see it until much later.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[AliamRationem.5172]

7 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

I think it did. The convergence is a new meta, and there's a meta in the first third of the zone. The ONLY way you can judge what is released or not released is to wait for all of it, and compare all of it to a regular expansion. It'll be smaller because they said it would be smaller, but besides that, I think the convergence is pretty cool.  Season 4 is considered to be the best of the Seasons by most players, but they still released Domain of Kourna, which a lot of people found disappointing. The meta was too small. There was nothing to do on the map. Plenty of complaints about that episode, but Season 4 itself is still considered some of the best content in the game, at least if you go by posts on reddit.  But you have to look at the whole season to get that. Not one episode.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, until I see the complete expansion I can't judge the complete expansion.

I'm not sure what happened with Kourna.  It did bring us the roller beetle, but otherwise seemed unfinished.  Maybe they pulled resources for the Jahai episode, because that one seemed pretty loaded.  But either way the ball was dropped with Kourna.

[Nekos.3649]

15 hours ago, BlueJin.4127 said:

Sorry, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Anet isn't really a big company. I haven't really noticed company size affecting the credibility of info as I have seen companies of all sizes spread a lot of BS. There's been so many that I don't remember specifics of many events, but there's one specific event that I will probably never forget because of how funny and liberating it was after dealing with so much BS.

The publisher I worked for is a really big publisher and the developer was a small company. Once, we submitted a game to a first party company (a first party company is a console owner like Sony, Nintendo, MS, etc.) for release approval and it got rejected because of how buggy it was. The first party company wanted a specific bug fixed. The producers and devs were emailing back and forth trying to decide what to do with the bug. In the end, they decided they didn't want to fix the bug, and the plan was to go with the spaghetti code excuse. That's when a game's coding is so messed up that if you try to fix one thing, it can have a domino effect and cause numerous other major bugs. It's a high risk, low reward issue that many in the industry understand and accept as a good reason not to touch something. Unfortunately, this means that it has also become the go-to excuse whenever somebody didn't WANT to fix something, and people not involved in the project have no real choice but to accept that excuse.

So the people within the companies all agreed to go with the spaghetti code excuse, even though it was a lie, when all of a sudden, a rep from the first party replied in that email chain, "So you're going to fix this, right?" Turns out, somebody accidentally CCed a first party rep in their email. /facepalm

The "unfixable" bug got fixed real soon after that. XD

lmfao

[Ashantara.8731]

19 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

According to a recent interview, there are as many devs working on Guild Wars 2 right now as there were during the height of Living World Season 4.  I'm not sure why people keep saying there are fewer people now with no evidence whatsoever.  I know that people think and believe this, but Grouch said otherwise, just a few days ago. I wish people would stop quoting their pet theories as some sort of fact.

Perhaps what people are saying is that they believe there are less devs working on actual playable content such as story, maps, proper achievements and the like. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the current workpower is put into those things that were mentioned earlier this year, like the overhaul of the developer tool, engine tweaks etc -- so stuff you don't "see" in the game.

[Vayne.8563]

7 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yes. The height of the LS4 was the time when (as we later learned) most of Anet devs got shuffled off to non-GW2 related projects. As such, we're actually comparing to one of the worst timeline in Anet history, not the best. That EoD was even worse than that doesn't really help things.

GW2 issues started pretty much as soon as PoF launched and they've dissolved the expansion team, it's just, due to development cycles, we were unable to see it until much later.

We learned that most of the Anet devs got shuffled off to non-GW2 related projects?  Please show me when we learned this. I know there were other projects, and I know there were a few devs that moved over and I know a few devs were hired by Anet to just work on those projects that never touched Guild Wars 2.  Please give me some numbers of what was what?  The amount of assumptions made by this community, pretty much at every turn, often bolstered by many many posts from people who speak with certainty but have no evidence is staggering. 

Show me where we learned that "most" of the GW 2 team was moved to other projects.  Show me even five devs that were moved.  If you don't have numbers. And you don't know how many projects, and you don't know how many people were hired specifically for those projects, then how do you know it was most? How do you even know it was significant?  

 

[Vayne.8563]

3 hours ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

Perhaps what people are saying is that they believe there are less devs working on actual playable content such as story, maps, proper achievements and the like. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the current workpower is put into those things that were mentioned earlier this year, like the overhaul of the developer tool, engine tweaks etc -- so stuff you don't "see" in the game.

That's my issue. I don't really care what people believe, if they're stating something as some sort of fact. And if people said I believe, I'd more likely leave some of these comments alone altogether. But over the years, I've seen a lot of statements spoken as fact that turned out eventually to be wrong, to the point where I know that people being certain of something about this game are wrong often enough to count everything as a theory.

But then, I'm here 11 years and I pay attention. Some people are new to the game. New to the forums. New to reddit. Those people may have no idea how often this community gets it wrong.  This isn't the only community this happens in, of course, judging without facts is fairly common and so is a lack of patience to see what actually happens. People judged HoT before it ever came out, and HoT had a rocky launch, but now, so many years later, many people (some of the same people who complained most likely) say it's their favorite expansion). 

I really think that Amazon opening a game studio in Anet's backyard and hiring away some of the more experienced developers, combined with covid and changing how they did things set Anet back far more than lack of staff did.

[Linken.6345]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

We learned that most of the Anet devs got shuffled off to non-GW2 related projects?  Please show me when we learned this. I know there were other projects, and I know there were a few devs that moved over and I know a few devs were hired by Anet to just work on those projects that never touched Guild Wars 2.  Please give me some numbers of what was what?  The amount of assumptions made by this community, pretty much at every turn, often bolstered by many many posts from people who speak with certainty but have no evidence is staggering. 

Show me where we learned that "most" of the GW 2 team was moved to other projects.  Show me even five devs that were moved.  If you don't have numbers. And you don't know how many projects, and you don't know how many people were hired specifically for those projects, then how do you know it was most? How do you even know it was significant?  

 

You know plain well noone can give you numbers the same you cant figure out numbers of the vague we got the same number of people now as on season 4 and 15% more then EoD.

Is that all 3-4 teams working on season 4 or just 1 of the teams?

We dont know that either, so yea everyone would be pleased if we got some numbers to work with.

The quantity of work shows that its either less developer or less experienced so they work slower.

Or there is more staff working on gemstore and less staff working on content, but more staff over all.

I mean like another poster like to post WvWvW is a corner stone game mode but still a corner wall of a keep is invisible in higher tier of that keep for 6+ years.

[Vayne.8563]

28 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

You know plain well noone can give you numbers the same you cant figure out numbers of the vague we got the same number of people now as on season 4 and 15% more then EoD.

Is that all 3-4 teams working on season 4 or just 1 of the teams?

We dont know that either, so yea everyone would be pleased if we got some numbers to work with.

The quantity of work shows that its either less developer or less experienced so they work slower.

Or there is more staff working on gemstore and less staff working on content, but more staff over all.

I mean like another poster like to post WvWvW is a corner stone game mode but still a corner wall of a keep is invisible in higher tier of that keep for 6+ years.

I think the change of management is enough to make them work slower. I'm seeing more improvements to older systems as well. Dungeon fixes, and dungeon rush, among other things. The point is, everyone says nothing is going on, because the thing they like isn't going on. Stuff is obviously going on.  Whether you like that stuff, that's another matter.

I'm enjoying the game and still playing it. But more to the point, one month after POF launched, people were already complaining there was nothing to do.  Since I'm playing and enjoying the game, more than I was say six months ago, I'd say the game is doing well.  I still have goals, things I'm working on.  It's grindier than it used to be for the stuff I'm working on, and that's absolutely a change to the game. I'm also doing more raids and strikes now than I'd ever done, though fewer fractals.  I used to WvW more and I'd like to get back into it, if I could carve out more time, but I don't have that time at the moment.

For me, the game is in a good place. If I'm spending $25 a year on an expansion and that expansion comes out in four parts, that means I'm paying $6.25 a quarter.  That's a cup of coffee were I come from. Well, a really big cup of very good coffee, once a quarter.  I'm okay with that. I definitely feel like I'm getting my money's worth, even though I now want a really good cup of coffee. Thanks for that.

I base my enjoyment of the game based on how much I'm playing it, and how much fun I'm having when I'm playing it. I'm having more fun now than I was having a year ago, for $6.25 a quarter.  

Speculation about how many people doesn't really change that, but people saying there's less as a fact is simply wrong. I agree I don't know how many people are working on the game, but I never claimed to. Me pointing out someone else doesn't know, when I'm not making any definitive statements myself is fair game.  You can't really find anywhere in this conversation where I said something that wasn't fact, unless I stated it as my opinion.

Edit: Yes, I think that last patch was worth $6.25. I get that you may have liked Season 4 better, and if you logged in you got it for free. But that was too generous for what it was, and it's easy to fail bad about having to pay for content now.  Except that for me it's worth it.

Edited December 30, 2023 by Vayne.8563

[Linken.6345]

24 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

I think the change of management is enough to make them work slower. I'm seeing more improvements to older systems as well. Dungeon fixes, and dungeon rush, among other things. The point is, everyone says nothing is going on, because the thing they like isn't going on. Stuff is obviously going on.  Whether you like that stuff, that's another matter.

I'm enjoying the game and still playing it. But more to the point, one month after POF launched, people were already complaining there was nothing to do.  Since I'm playing and enjoying the game, more than I was say six months ago, I'd say the game is doing well.  I still have goals, things I'm working on.  It's grindier than it used to be for the stuff I'm working on, and that's absolutely a change to the game. I'm also doing more raids and strikes now than I'd ever done, though fewer fractals.  I used to WvW more and I'd like to get back into it, if I could carve out more time, but I don't have that time at the moment.

For me, the game is in a good place. If I'm spending $25 a year on an expansion and that expansion comes out in four parts, that means I'm paying $6.25 a quarter.  That's a cup of coffee were I come from. Well, a really big cup of very good coffee, once a quarter.  I'm okay with that. I definitely feel like I'm getting my money's worth, even though I now want a really good cup of coffee. Thanks for that.

I base my enjoyment of the game based on how much I'm playing it, and how much fun I'm having when I'm playing it. I'm having more fun now than I was having a year ago, for $6.25 a quarter.  

Speculation about how many people doesn't really change that, but people saying there's less as a fact is simply wrong. I agree I don't know how many people are working on the game, but I never claimed to. Me pointing out someone else doesn't know, when I'm not making any definitive statements myself is fair game.  You can't really find anywhere in this conversation where I said something that wasn't fact, unless I stated it as my opinion.

Edit: Yes, I think that last patch was worth $6.25. I get that you may have liked Season 4 better, and if you logged in you got it for free. But that was too generous for what it was, and it's easy to fail bad about having to pay for content now.  Except that for me it's worth it.

Im happy you feel its worth it to you mate truly, still waiting for the last updates to see if it is worth it to me.

[Vayne.8563]

4 minutes ago, Linken.6345 said:

Im happy you feel its worth it to you mate truly, still waiting for the last updates to see if it is worth it to me.

Absolutely everyone's right to judge value, certainly. My guess is everyone that didn't want to PvP, WvW or do raids for legendary armor is going to think it's worth it, at the very least. $6.25 for the first drop was two metas, a bunch of mini games, and Rifts.  But I really like what I'm seeing from the third zone, I like the covergences, and I like the wizard's vault.  Keeps me busy and happy.  Hopefully, you'll like the new weapons that are coming with the next patch.

[Ashen.2907]

On 12/29/2023 at 3:35 PM, Vayne.8563 said:

So a dev, in an interview, tells you something as someone that works there, but your theory, with nothing at all to prove it is somehow okay to spread. If you're saying the dev is lying that's one thing, but devs seldom lie in my experience, even if they misrepresent occassionally. It's very unlikely the game director is going to directly lie during an interview in my opinion. It's the best source of knowledge we have, someone who actually works in the place.
 

What you have is rumor, and conjecture.

A statement is not evidence. If it were then corporations could just issue tons of statements every time they are sued for wrongdoing and win every case because, here in the US at least, civil suits are measured by the preponderance of the evidence. 

A rep for the dealership where my wife took her car tried jacking up the bill by stating that the issue was greater than we knew it to be. His statement was not evidence that the car needed more than minor work.

[Vayne.8563]

7 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

A statement is not evidence. If it were then corporations could just issue tons of statements every time they are sued for wrongdoing and win every case because, here in the US at least, civil suits are measured by the preponderance of the evidence. 

A rep for the dealership where my wife took her car tried jacking up the bill by stating that the issue was greater than we knew it to be. His statement was not evidence that the car needed more than minor work.

And you have no evidence at all. You have conjecture.  I'd wager that we're seeing more movement with stuff going on in GW 2 than we did a couple of years ago, but no one seems to notice. It's different kind of changes, but it's changes nonetheless.  You have a pet theory with no evidence, and you use every single bit of evidence that agrees with it to support it, in spite of the fact that you don't even have any real inkling of how many people worked on it then or now. The only thing we do have is a dev quote, which you can choose to believe or disbelieve.

At any rate, it's pointless to argue with someone who's mind made up. The difference between you and me is that I'm pointing to the one thing that was said by someone who works there now, and you're not.  You're making specific claims and I'm not. Everyone can decide which side of the argument they're on. I'm sure plenty of people feel exactly the way you do.

[Morvran.8265]

22 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Anet was working on the Icebrood Saga, not an expansion.  But Anet has ALWAYS wanted to deliver the story through the living world. Always. They didn't want expansions. Before HOT come out, they said they weren't going to do an expansion and instead would continue to deliver content through the living world system. Eventually they did release HoT, but the fact is, NcSoft always wanted expansions and Anet always wanted living worlds. There was a discrepency between when Ncsoft told investors and what Anet told us. 

The idea that another living world season followed Season 4 doesn't necessarily indicate things winding down. It would have, if Anet hadn't been so focused on the living world in the first place. That's what they wanted. And no one can say Grothmar, Drizzlewood and Bjorra were crappy zones. They wanted to focus on IBS. 

Of course the community came out with a bunch of crap about the game being dead and in maintainence mode. It was everywhere you looked over and over.  If you can go back far enough in my reddit posts and forum posts, you'll see I said all along the game wasn't in maintainence mode and there'd be another expansion.  People argued with me, disagreed, but they just didn't see what I was seeing. A repeat of what had happened with HoT.  Anet never wants to make another expansion and NcSoft always pushes for one. NcSoft eventually wins. It happened before, and it happened again, that's all.

Could it be those people were right?  I don't know, But IBS before they moved people off of it to work on an expansion they didn't plan didn't seem to be a winding down type of expansion to me.

Anet WASN'T working in IBS during S4, it's something they cobbled together real quick AFTER the layoffs. Who's the one with the headcanon now?

They went with making a saga because they needed to deliver something ASAP after NCSoft made them continue GW2. This flopped so they had to do 2 years of content drought to make an expansion, EoD.

[Vayne.8563]

1 hour ago, Morvran.8265 said:

Anet WASN'T working in IBS during S4, it's something they cobbled together real quick AFTER the layoffs. Who's the one with the headcanon now?

They went with making a saga because they needed to deliver something ASAP after NCSoft made them continue GW2. This flopped so they had to do 2 years of content drought to make an expansion, EoD.

I don't know. Grothmar doesn't really feel like a cobbled together zone to me.  There was a lot of detailed there. I could say the same about Drizzlewood and about Bjora.

One thing I did notice was that the achievements were more repetitive than previous achievements, at least on the whole. There were fewer achievements that were easy individual achievements and more repeat this X times. I prefer those less and for a while, along with the need to do strikes, it stopped me from getting the story meta achievements, which I had previously enjoyed.

But while what you're saying is what a lot of people say, I'm not convinced it's the case.  It's possible I'm wrong about Anet working on IBS during Season 4.  Definitely a possibility. But I doubt you have a reliable source that you can give me that proves it.

[Zenith.7301]

I finished the current expansion story in about 8 hours total. I'm sorry, but that's really bad. For FFXIV or WoW, we're talking at least a week of play. The first map was great, I love the fractals and imagined scenarios. The second map is OK, good meta event but otherwise too monotone. Nayos by far is the worst map. There isn't largely any distinctive landmark or features about it. It's just an unremarkable zone with a lot of events going on.

The story is not bad, despite the cringe referring to a clearly female demon mimmicking female anatomy with a stereotypically female voice register and established female designation (Cerus calls her sister) as a Midnight King. Come on, stop with that forced crap.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Zenith.7301

[SweetPotato.7456]

imho
Soto is a transition expansion, it is helping  players keep up, that is why they give easier way to get the skyscale, legendary kit in the wizard's valut, the introduction of weapon master, and relics. 
Soto is by far the ugliest expansion.  but i am okay, because i don't go there much, but what every comes after this better be grerat.

the game play is the most boring, that is why i only go there to get provisioner token. 

Edited December 31, 2023 by SweetPotato.7456

[Morvran.8265]

On 1/1/2024 at 12:44 AM, SweetPotato.7456 said:

imho
Soto is a transition expansion, it is helping  players keep up, that is why they give easier way to get the skyscale, legendary kit in the wizard's valut, the introduction of weapon master, and relics.

A transition into what exactly?

The way I see it the next expansion will have even less in it, as they won't be able to recycle as much. Weaponmaster training, relics, easy skyscale, even legendary armor - these were all existing things they repackaged. Next one will have to do something new and I don't think they're capable of that anymore.