I’m not sure whether this is entirely true or rather whether this is true for the more casual MMO player. You are describing the traditional Until Death Do Us Part way of playing MMOs. But GW2’s (mostly) lack of vertical progression makes it really easy to return to the game after taking a break or playing something else (another MMO, e. g. GW3), without feeling that you have missed out on a lot.

By the way, this is one of the things I do not like about the new daily system (wizard vault), because it kinda discourages playing something else or taking a break, unless you are able to …

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds … 🎶

I mean, it’s possible that they are currently doing all the refactoring and cleanup that has been neglected in previosu years. This would also explain, why they are not able to produce more content at the moment (and why it’s so costly). If this is actually the case, then there might be light at the end of the tunnel, i. e. future additions to the game might become less complicated and less likely to produce bugs/regressions.

Also, why would GW3 lead to players abandoning the franchise? This is not what happened with GW2, or did it? I always thought that a lot of former GW1 players are now playing GW2 and some maybe even still play GW1.

My theory is that whatever ArenaNet had in the working during IBS was not good/finished enough or too far off from the current francise that NCSoft pulled the plug and “condemned” ArenaNet to continue releasing content for GW2 (with a much smaller development team on a code base which is increasingly hard to maintain).

Yep, that’s what I’m saying all along. The GW2 code has become a nightmare to maintain and ArenaNet desperately wanted to start from scratch with a new game (not sure that it actually was GW3), but they weren’t allowed by NCSoft.

• 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.
• From our experiences with Secrets of the Obscure alone, we’ve adjusted development schedules, review processes, dev resource allocations, documentation and communication practices, and more. All of these contribute, to some degree, to improving the quality of what we deliver.

TL;DR: The code is already a proper mess, We are now inflating administrative overhead to further decrease efficiency. Our goal is for every new line of code to produce at least one new bug and involve at least 100 members of staff.

I’ve completed my bullshit bingo card not even half through the interview …

I’m working on no longer caring about being efficient.
Ignore daily tasks and the vault while listening to Bob Marley’s Redemption Song …

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds … 🎶

SDF’s lemmy instance does not even sync lemmy user profile changes to their own mastodon instance (mastodon.sdf.org).

@SDF Looks like it’s happening again. Outbound federation stopped. I have tested this from two other lemmy instances. I can still pull comments from lemmy.sdf.org via search, but neither posts/comments nor votes are actively pushed out.

Which means that lemmy.sdf.org is in a bubble. Nobody hears us. Can you please look into this and/or state whether you are intending to maintain this lemmy instance or not.

As long as I still have a character which does not have map/heart completion everywhere I don’t mind some actual progress while doing the daily.

By the way, the GW2Wiki maintains a list of easy daily/weekly objectives. Of course it does. 😄

Still fixing the November 7th bugs which are immediately affecting new content. Not to mention collateral damage to existing content like the Birthday Cake or the Jade Bot Buffs which have already been hit by the Halloween patch. The game seems to be falling apart.

Probably a false alarm.

➡️ Discussion page on the GW2wiki

Of course, breaking changes are expected while development is on 0.X. But does that mean you would or should install updates known to have breaking changes on a system which is used by other people without notifying them (in advance)?

DST in Germany ended on 2023-10-29 (2 weeks ago). You probably would have noticed by now, if the GW2wiki/Browser time is off by one hour, right?

… quest-like achievement-structure.

With the worst being task collections which have to be completed in order, e. g. Frode’s Journal which even forces you to do/repeat the 3 SotO metas in a specific order or it doesn’t count,

W T F !

Yep, I’m probably one of those fans. Though I also very much like the team-play aspect that usually comes with (instanced) group content. What I would like are random encounters you’d find in open world (possibly instanced) which would require encourage people to spontaneously group up as a team of max. 5 to beat it.

Similar to Dungeoneering in RuneScape, but with occurances/entrances randomly spread out over the open world, using your current gear scaled to the level of the encounter, difficulty/rewards scaled to the number of people in the group and the overall theme based on the current zone.

My interpretation is that the support team is overwhelmed by the amount of bugs that the content teams are releasing into the world on a now (new release schedule) even more regular basis.

My suggestion (to you) is that you unblock as many of those morons as you can handle by having a thick(er) skin.

I think that GW2 already lost it’s way/innocence very early on when ArenaNet listened to a vocal minority of players who wanted WoW-like progression and instanced content … which lead to Fractals and Ascended Gear with Agony Infusions and later with HoT even to Raids.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying this type of content. I hear that WoW is very much alive and – according to MightyTeapot – Mythic+ is even better than Fractals. Funny enough, he also says that he is playing WoW as an Instance Simulator (and not as an MMO).

What I fiind kinda sad is that ArenaNet didn’t have the balls (or chance?) to stick with their original vision of what an MMO should be like and instead tried to be more like WoW.

➡️ The miller, his son and the donky

I like this/your illustration with colors indicating the expansion releases:

It’s very interesting to also look at the quarter after each expansion release which I would read as follows:

• HoT was hyped very much, but wasn’t very well received. Many players probably found it too hard (before HoT difficulty nerfs and power creep from later expansions) and told their friends about it.
• PoF wasn’t hyped very much, but was very well received. People loved their mounts and spread the word.
• EoD+Steam was … I don’t know.

To me it looks like outbound federation is working again, e. g. posts I create on lemmy.sdf.org are now federated again to the (original) community on lemmy.wtf.

Lemmy 0.19 Breaking Changes

Lemmy 0.19.0-rc.4 and Development Update - 2023-11-03

We are also readying another release candidate 0.19.0-rc.4. As usual it is available for testing on voyager.lemmy.ml and by installing the Docker image on your server. There are no breaking changes this time as we are preparing for the final release. It has been one month since we announced the major breaking changes for 0.19. In that sense we would like to know from developers of Lemmy clients and frontends if their projects are ready for 0.19, as we are planning to release it within the next weeks. There is no specific release date, but we will first update lemmy.ml to a release candidate, and if it works well publish the new release shortly after.

I didn’t get the impresssion that frontend and client devs have signaled that they were ready for a backend update to 0.19.X. And consequently lemmy.ml is still on 0.18.5.