The amount of filler content in story is out of hand

[kharmin.7683]

You lost me at "blatantly pay-to-win".

[Anyandrell.6238]

43 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

SotO is just terrible, like Dragon Response Missions levels of lazy. Not to mention that the content quality and quantity pales in comparison to LS3-L4 for a higher pricepoint.

LS1 and LS2 are excusable because some parts are still relevant today and they were still figuring out what they wanted to do with the game inbetween expansions and living story  AND they made attempts to improve parts of them.

Meanwhile SotO just feels like a slap in the face in terms of everything... maps, story, replayability of the content, rewards etc. If it was not for the blatantly pay-to-win weapon master and expanded weapon proficiencies, there would be next to no reason to ever play through SotO unless you are a new player and want to skip the LS4 Skyscale grind OR an extreme open-world-only-and-nothing-else player that would rather do the same boring event 2000 times than raids, PvP or WvW for the legendary armor.

Here's an unpopular opinion:

I like SOTO.

[Izzy.2951]

49 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

SotO is just terrible, like Dragon Response Missions levels of lazy. Not to mention that the content quality and quantity pales in comparison to LS3-L4 for a higher pricepoint.

LS1 and LS2 are excusable because some parts are still relevant today and they were still figuring out what they wanted to do with the game inbetween expansions and living story  AND they made attempts to improve parts of them.

Meanwhile SotO just feels like a slap in the face in terms of everything... maps, story, replayability of the content, rewards etc. If it was not for the blatantly pay-to-win weapon master and expanded weapon proficiencies, there would be next to no reason to ever play through SotO unless you are a new player and want to skip the LS4 Skyscale grind OR an extreme open-world-only-and-nothing-else player that would rather do the same boring event 2000 times than raids, PvP or WvW for the legendary armor.

Completly agree with this post. 

I would even say LWS3 and LWS4 were way better in term of quality, in term of bringing new mobs, map experiences, metas than SoTo by far.

Edited May 3 by Izzy.2951

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Anyandrell.6238 said:

Here's an unpopular opinion:

I like SOTO.

Well, like you said yourself - it's an unpopular opinion.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

On 5/4/2024 at 11:17 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Well, like you said yourself - it's an unpopular opinion.

Is it though? If you (or rather a version of you who hadn't already made 10.8k forum posts) were happily playing GW2 including SOTO then would you come to the forums and post that you like SOTO?

Particularly if you hadn't posted on the forums ever before because you were happily playing GW2 with your time instead?

Selection Bias in the forums is strongly biased towards people who are unhappy and want to find an outlet to express that unhappiness. Those that are happy with the game are more likely to be just playing and enjoying the game.

[Astralporing.1957]

7 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Is it though? If you (or rather a version of you who hadn't already made 10.8k forum posts) were happily playing GW2 including SOTO then would you come to the forums and post that you like SOTO?

Particularly if you hadn't posted on the forums ever before because you were happily playing GW2 with your time instead?

Selection Bias in the forums is strongly biased towards people who are unhappy and want to find an outlet to express that unhappiness. Those that are happy with the game are more likely to be just playing and enjoying the game.

Actually, that's a convenient myth heavily overused by some people to dismiss some arguments outright without actually addressing them, but is not really true at all.

Sure, people unhappy with something are more likely to start a thread, but when it comes to participating in it, there's no such selection bias at all. And if we look at people that are likely to register on the frum in the first place, we will realize very fast, that if there is a bias, it would go in the exact other direction. Because people that are truly unhappy generally don't bother to register just to say so - they just quit.

[Shiyo.3578]

This is the type of content you should expect from games in maintenance mode.

Edited May 6 by Shiyo.3578

[kharmin.7683]

And we're doing that again?  People really need to understand what that term means.

[Therac.6431]

SOTO stands as Guild Wars 2's worst expansion by far, lacking in nearly every aspect. The sole redeeming feature is the legendary armor, which surpasses its predecessors and could reach even greater heights if the next tier maintains this visual quality. Apart from that, SOTO feels like an AI-generated expansion.

The maps lack any distinct identity. While they may connect to the lore, it's evident that laziness played a part in their creation. Amnytas is a prime example of AI-generated design, with its repetitive locations and uninspired monsters. It's a shame to see sprite reuse at this level.

The quality decline that began after PoF has culminated in SOTO, a peak of mediocrity. The future of expansions is concerning. If this trend continues, it might be better to halt expansion releases and focus on polishing the existing content. Releasing subpar content solely for profit is a disservice to the franchise.

[Hsanrb.1570]

I don't think its filler content, I just think there is quite a bit of "Please play the maps, please play the zones, please play the game." Steps in the entire story. Its not even stuff you can do early so when you get there its already done and marked by a renown heart. You get them through achievements, which gets you mastery points... but nothing in the story goes "You've played this zone and done these things already... so you can just move on ahead." Like other parts of the game. Heart of Thorns had mastery checks, Path of Fire put mount stages behind the renown hearts, End of Dragons generally had small checks like "Do you have a boat, did you get to Arborstone" but nothing as egregious as SotO.

Two of the biggest problems with SotO is 1) Flying helps make the worlds less fun to traverse. Now I'm biased here because I think flying is the death of an MMO, and all the expansions gave you reasons to walk when fast travel/mounts/flying were available. SotO is so flight heavy that even traversing the world is a pain because you HAVE a Skyscale to use most of the time. 2) Every other step of the story required you to just play events. Which is great if you are trying to just plow the story before doing the map metas... but when you play the map metas first you end up having to redo every single event in an area every single meta before you can progress to the next step.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

14 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Actually, that's a convenient myth heavily overused by some people to dismiss some arguments outright without actually addressing them, but is not really true at all.

Sure, people unhappy with something are more likely to start a thread, but when it comes to participating in it, there's no such selection bias at all. And if we look at people that are likely to register on the frum in the first place, we will realize very fast, that if there is a bias, it would go in the exact other direction. Because people that are truly unhappy generally don't bother to register just to say so - they just quit.

Source? I tried looking for studies on this but struggled to find directly applicable data. If you have some studies supporting your view that selection bias is negligible in online forums then please post it, I'm genuinely interested.

The closest I could find supporting your position was this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444814535190

However, this seems to be largely talking about conformity bias (rather than selection bias), which is where people will tend to avoid going against opinions posted by the majority. In the case of this thread conformity bias would actually be working to dissuade people who think SOTO is good from posting (as the majority of posts in this thread say it isn't, particularly looking at the first 10 posts).

This is backed by this study which suggests that conformity bias is a significant bias in online discussions where the first few responses set the tone for the rest of the thread: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jmr.14.0012

Other studies indicate that selection bias does exist, but I couldn't find one talking about the positive/negative nature of forum posts. The closest I could find was this one comparing self selected reviews vs retailer prompted reviews which showed that self-selected reviews were more negative: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314484384_Understanding_and_overcoming_biases_in_online_review_systems

This study is about computer gamers and indicates selection bias exists, in their study WoW players who responded to an online survey were significantly more experienced than not. That in itself doesn't help much with our question, tho I note most of the posts on the first page of this thread are from accounts with more than 1000 forum posts so it appears very few new GW2 forum visitors have commented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115258/

I look forward to seeing what you found to back your assertion that selection bias is not relevant in the tone of online forums.

 

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Source? I tried looking for studies on this but struggled to find directly applicable data. If you have some studies supporting your view that selection bias is negligible in online forums then please post it, I'm genuinely interested.

The closest I could find supporting your position was this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444814535190

However, this seems to be largely talking about conformity bias (rather than selection bias), which is where people will tend to avoid going against opinions posted by the majority. In the case of this thread conformity bias would actually be working to dissuade people who think SOTO is good from posting (as the majority of posts in this thread say it isn't, particularly looking at the first 10 posts).

This is backed by this study which suggests that conformity bias is a significant bias in online discussions where the first few responses set the tone for the rest of the thread: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jmr.14.0012

Other studies indicate that selection bias does exist, but I couldn't find one talking about the positive/negative nature of forum posts. The closest I could find was this one comparing self selected reviews vs retailer prompted reviews which showed that self-selected reviews were more negative: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314484384_Understanding_and_overcoming_biases_in_online_review_systems

This study is about computer gamers and indicates selection bias exists, in their study WoW players who responded to an online survey were significantly more experienced than not. That in itself doesn't help much with our question, tho I note most of the posts on the first page of this thread are from accounts with more than 1000 forum posts so it appears very few new GW2 forum visitors have commented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115258/

I look forward to seeing what you found to back your assertion that selection bias is not relevant in the tone of online forums.

I did not say selection bias does not exist. I said it's not what you think it is. And you have actually found the answer yourself. The selection bias on forums is towards more active and engaged players (and thus usually towards those representing more hardcore playstyles). Notice how this selection bias doesn't have much to do with whether said players are more positive or negative in their outlook, but does require at least some level of positive attachments (because, barring few exceptions, almost noone that's fully negative about a game is going to actively participate in said game's community - those people either do not register at all, or don't stay long)

Your mistake was you concentrated on posts instead of registered users - and yet, like you mentioned, it's generally not players that registered to make a singular post that carry the conversations, but the frequent forum goers.

So, sure, threads are more likely started by those that have some complains to voice (or, more generally, by those that want to see some kind of change in the game) rather than those that are okay with the game as it is, but once thread starts rolling, everyone that feels more strongly about the issue will add to it - whether to support or deny it.

So, again - i do not claim that forums are unbiased. In fact, they are very far from it. What i dispute is the specific claim that they are biased towards negativity. It's a claim that's very often made on MMORPG forums (and not just on MMORPG ones), but as far as i know it's completely made up idea not supported by any reliable study.

Now, if you do find a study that does support your original theory (which, i can see, even after putting a lot of effort into it, you haven't managed to do so far), please correct me. Until then, i will have to treat your argument as a pretty much unsubstantiated claim that is brought up for convenience because it allows you to just plain ignore opinions you disagree with without trying to engage with them.

[Ashantara.8731]

19 hours ago, Therac.6431 said:

SOTO stands as Guild Wars 2's worst expansion by far, lacking in nearly every aspect. The sole redeeming feature is the legendary armor, which surpasses its predecessors and could reach even greater heights if the next tier maintains this visual quality.

🤣 Are you serious? It's the ugliest of all legendary armor sets, so "redeeming" is definitely not be the right term to describe it.

To me, the only "redeeming" thing about SotO was the initial release. It was decent, with pretty maps and a cool story, and raised expectations for the upcoming 3 SotO Updates to a certain level only to disappoint heavily in the end (for reasons you listed).

 

Edited May 7 by Ashantara.8731

[Therac.6431]

15 minutes ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

🤣 Are you serious? It's the ugliest of all legendary armor sets, so "redeeming" is definitely not be the right term to describe it.

To me, the only "redeeming" thing about SotO was the initial release. It was decent, with pretty maps and a cool story, and raised expectations for the upcoming 3 SotO Updates to a certain level only to disappoint heavily in the end (for reasons you listed).

 

That bomb in the chest is the charm

[Inssengrimm.7924]

SotO is definetly the weakest the game has been since the disaster that was the living story.
Compared to Living Seasons 3 and 4... Specially season 4 which is the most epic this game storytelling has ever got, yeah.

I just hope this has been more than anything a chance to put some order in the house with the new release schedule and planification, but storytelling and in general content needs to be taken a lot more care in the future. 

[DoomNexus.5324]

I'd still prefer Anet to invest less into voice acting the entire game in 25 different languages and instead focus more on good replayable content..
Maybe I'm alone here idk but I think the quality of the story and dialogues has dropped off significantly essentially after the base game. HoT was ok imo and mainly stood out with its great metas, which are actively played to this day (only downside were the abysmal maps) and gliding, which was a very welcome feature and the introduction of the horizontal progression.

But with PoF and LS4 started the downfall, stalled a bit with EoD, which was... okay-ish but really picked up speed again with SotO.
In general Amnytas is a really cool map but just essentially copy-pasting the bastions 6 times (which are themselves copy-paste of the awful-to-navigate wizard's tower) is pretty meh.. Initially I thought Nayos is pretty cool but the more I've been playing on that map the more I dislike it.

What I really hate about the newer GW2 maps is also that the team seemingly tries to adjust for mounts, which in theory is pretty good but I think it's pretty badly executed since you are just making the maps more difficult to navigate and considering the Skyscale has such a limited height and resetting while flying is pretty cumbersome makes everything put together just a more kitten and annoying version of just running around on foot in older maps.
Why even have a dragon if I have to cling on a wall and reset my endurance several times to get up normal walls in the new maps? Doesn't make sense to me..

Idk, to me most of the fun of having mounts was because it felt better to get around. And now you basically have to have a fully trained dragon just to get around semi-unhindered.

[Astralporing.1957]

51 minutes ago, DoomNexus.5324 said:

What I really hate about the newer GW2 maps is also that the team seemingly tries to adjust for mounts, which in theory is pretty good but I think it's pretty badly executed since you are just making the maps more difficult to navigate and considering the Skyscale has such a limited height and resetting while flying is pretty cumbersome makes everything put together just a more kitten and annoying version of just running around on foot in older maps.

I did mention more than once in the "we want mounts" threads that mount intoduction will negatively impact map design (and map movement) for anyone not using them. This was my biggest beef with mounts from the very beginning - and even though their design turned out to be way better than i originally expected, that part happened exactly as predicted. Less waypoints, more convoluted terrain, and now flat out requiring skyscale in order to be able to get from any point A to B in reasonable time.

Not a fan of that at all.

[Futa.4375]

Please look forward to filling a bar several times with the next "major" update of this very bad "expansion".

We're not yet at the level of FFXIV regarding filler content in the story but we're getting there slowly.

[ProtoGunner.4953]

Of course, easy way to stretch this micro-expansion and its little content to a certain length (it's still short).

[Ashantara.8731]

3 hours ago, Futa.4375 said:

Please look forward to filling a bar several times with the next "major" update of this very bad "expansion".

I can't wait! Such excitement! 😂

[Shiyo.3578]

On 5/6/2024 at 2:47 PM, kharmin.7683 said:

And we're doing that again?  People really need to understand what that term means.

Stating facts?

Always.

  

15 hours ago, DoomNexus.5324 said:

I'd still prefer Anet to invest less into voice acting the entire game in 25 different languages and instead focus more on good replayable content..
Maybe I'm alone here idk but I think the quality of the story and dialogues has dropped off significantly essentially after the base game. HoT was ok imo and mainly stood out with its great metas, which are actively played to this day (only downside were the abysmal maps) and gliding, which was a very welcome feature and the introduction of the horizontal progression.

But with PoF and LS4 started the downfall, stalled a bit with EoD, which was... okay-ish but really picked up speed again with SotO.
In general Amnytas is a really cool map but just essentially copy-pasting the bastions 6 times (which are themselves copy-paste of the awful-to-navigate wizard's tower) is pretty meh.. Initially I thought Nayos is pretty cool but the more I've been playing on that map the more I dislike it.

What I really hate about the newer GW2 maps is also that the team seemingly tries to adjust for mounts, which in theory is pretty good but I think it's pretty badly executed since you are just making the maps more difficult to navigate and considering the Skyscale has such a limited height and resetting while flying is pretty cumbersome makes everything put together just a more kitten and annoying version of just running around on foot in older maps.
Why even have a dragon if I have to cling on a wall and reset my endurance several times to get up normal walls in the new maps? Doesn't make sense to me..

Idk, to me most of the fun of having mounts was because it felt better to get around. And now you basically have to have a fully trained dragon just to get around semi-unhindered.

Mounts have no place in MMOs umless they are very limited(FFXI 75 era).

They advertise and brag about their voice actors on social media, lol.

They have no interest in adding fun rewarding replayable content, the last we got was drizzlewood....

Edited May 8 by Shiyo.3578

[QueenKeriti.5176]

15 hours ago, Futa.4375 said:

We're not yet at the level of FFXIV regarding filler content in the story but we're getting there slowly.

Playing through Endwalker now to prep for Dawntrail, and I'd forgotten just how horrible the filler is in this game's MSQ, lmao. GW2's filler doesn't hold a candle to this madness. 😂

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, QueenKeriti.5176 said:

Playing through Endwalker now to prep for Dawntrail, and I'd forgotten just how horrible the filler is in this game's MSQ, lmao. GW2's filler doesn't hold a candle to this madness. 😂

I'd say that it's specifically Endwalker filler that was bad. I didn't have the same feeling with Shadowbringers one.

Notice, though, that when we're saying "filler", for FF XIV we do need to include not just the story, but also raids (both alliance and normal) and Savage tier progression. In casual OW content category FF XIV does indeed have less to offer than GW2, but it changes completely when we're comparing instanced content instead. That's normal, considering that, unlike GW2, FF XIV is not OW focused.

[DoomNexus.5324]

On 5/8/2024 at 8:19 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

I did mention more than once in the "we want mounts" threads that mount intoduction will negatively impact map design (and map movement) for anyone not using them. This was my biggest beef with mounts from the very beginning - and even though their design turned out to be way better than i originally expected, that part happened exactly as predicted. Less waypoints, more convoluted terrain, and now flat out requiring skyscale in order to be able to get from any point A to B in reasonable time.

Not a fan of that at all.

Yea. But my main point was that imo even with a fully trained skyscale the maps are just kitten to traverse. Everything is now juuuuust tall enough that you can't straight up fly up but have to rest/reset at some point.
I don't even want to get into navigating those maps without fully trained mounts, let alone on foot.

[kharmin.7683]

14 hours ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

Stating facts?

Always.

  

 

It is not a fact that GW2 is in maintenance mode.