People were just way more chill back in the day, perhaps because GW1 was so much slower paced. I distinctly remember doing Vizunah Square with randoms and after the second big fight my mom got me for dinner. So I explained that in chat real quick and my party was like "yeah no big deal, we're gonna continue so just try to catch up when you get back."

- The meta event has an interesting end if you fail it. Anet took the time to make a cool failure state for the meta (like the Drakkar meta), and since the meta failed a lot when the patch landed, it isn't a real time waste. I would recommend seeing it on KZfaq or failing in game to see it. - No, the meta was supposed to take place before the next chaper (The Eleventh Hour), they added an achievement for doing it properly in timeline (like the Soo-won meta) - I would recommend taking the spire of salvation (not the one in the video) for the splitting part. That path had Peitha, Nephus and Dagda, and they talked about Isgarren's attitude towards Peitha ruling Nayos, which added some tense to the story later. - I mean, when we get to the next chaper, it would be good if you discuss a bit about Eparch's character *cough*. - The meta actually ties a lot of event in Nayos together, but unfortunately since Nayos is such a poor map design-wise, it wouldn't get noticed by most players. This little story about the boss WP fight in the video starts with her trying to open a portal to Tyria in Heitor's territory. Then two of her followers became event bosses in the second release and her student was again trying to open a portal to the Wizard's Tower. Then in this final release we finally beat her. I get the sense that Anet was trying to make the map feel more connected, but these are still a bit too shoddy :(

You were asking at the start how to get to the SotO region on an alt: There's a portal in LA if you've got far enough like the one to Arborstone, and it's there for your alts as well. So you can always just go through from there and it takes you to the Wizard's Tower.

IMO the complaint about events being required for story progress isn't about having to do events. Its that story instances used to be a bespoke, majority part of progressing the story, with the occasional open world section which felt refreshing. That balance has shifted the other way - now the "story patch" has a much shorter run time than historically, and instead of doing curated instances, we end up mostly being in the open world, which we are going to end up doing after the story anyway. It's an issue of getting LESS story and being told that doing events or hearts or VISTAs is an acceptable tradeoff for the loss of interesting story instances.

Really impressed with the housing system. I do really hope they keep expanding it with future expacs, such as new locations, new decorations etc. Kind of similar to guild halls being added with the previous expacs.

1:19:10 ANETS bar is so low now xD, WOWWW they made a world boss xD I love WP reaction.

If nothing else was consistent about SOTO, at least the sound design/music was top notch throughout

Man I've never seen someone use a legendary sword for necro sword, and I gotta say it looks a lot less cool with the legendary imo lol. With regular swords it shoots out green "slicing waves". With Bolt it looks like you're just throwing the sword... haha

The house decorating features they showed off look so cool. The scaling, clipping, and x-ray mode to find lost stuff. Reminds me of spending hours and hours in Forge mode in Halo back in the day. The showcases you can build with alts hanging out and the mount stables look fun as well

I agree with you entirely about the bad feelings when you're back in core zones! There's so much there! They could do whole expansions in old zones with new storylines and I would eat it up (they will never do this)

as i understand it WP it the homestead crafting is a crafting profession, and the homestead is unlocked though a Mastery probably also the crafting, but then you will be able to by decorations off the gem store and be able to craft them yourself

29:00 this whole "asking the players what's ok" speech feels very Andrew Ryan to me lol

I quite enjoy marionette, dragonstorm and convergences, so I am looking forward to the open world raid. Unfortunately I don’t have the time for normal raids anymore, though I still want to finish my ring one day. I’m kinda disappointed with not having strikes. I think they are a fundamental good system adding proper encounters and replayabilty to the story content. Though I do prefer raids to strikes in general.

Wow you make that target practice look so easy at 38:40! That's gruelling hard on the steam deck.

Talking about housing, wouldn't it be possible for ArenaNet to add "Houses" as a type of static decoration that you should be able to put down, lock it from being deleted (to prevent accidents) and then just be able to furnish and decorate it. They could sell different designs for such a thing in the Gem store if they want. Now imagine if we can go anywhere in the open world and choose a location to be our home, which would place us in a private instance (empty of NPC's) and then be able to build homes from scratch. Or use existing world pieces like havens or other houses you can come across. I think it would be super cool if we could pick a home anywhere and make that your home. I would love to see what creative things people would come up with.

23:00 horrible gross cheesy builds describes my current build

Middle mouse button story: FFXIV Ninja comes out, and I have a mouse with left/right scroll buttons, middle mouse, and then back and forward. I put all my basic combo and weapon skill stuff on 1-6 and some modifiers, and then I put all the ninjutsu stuff on the mouse. So the mudra were left scroll, middle mouse, and right scroll, and forward was the ninjutsu button.

My issue with "do events for story" is threefold: 1, it's very obvious padding that usually doesn't fit the story. I'm prepping for the final stages of this war, why am I doing an adventure? 2, story is a different gameplay experience from events. If I'm sitting down to play the story, that's because I want to play the story. Let me do that! And 3, it's not communicated well that this will be coming up. So far, every time a story step has gone "hey to advance the story please do these events", it has consistently been after I just did that. I did the Skywatch meta and then immediately the next story step was "hey could you do the meta please", that really feels like the devs are just taking the piss.

on the housing, feels like maybe they are trying to makeup for the fact that the game probably should've had some form of it before? Like, it really does feel like a lot. And not that I don't like the little kodan lodge, but I really want to see what other options will look like.

i just play the expansion till i hit the story end, then count up how many masteries i need to finish them all and prioritize getting at least that many before doing any meta grinds or events for achievements etc. then the grind begins. this time around i took a long break after i did the previous release's story and only just finished the masteries as of last week get the guild tavern xp buff, birthday buff, food buff, banners if there are any around, and Arborstone resting buff and just do meta and events wherever till done. adventures give a good chunk of xp too

be cool if we could put plaques and interactbles lore book pages on our statues in the houses

Very unpopular opinion but I actually like Eparch's meta. I'd just love for him to have an attack animation cuz it feels weird to see him stand still lmao

Learning 3d modelling with blender (modding Skyrim got me into it) so it having to use middle mouse button a lot. I should probably rebind it to a side button 😂

I think people don't mind doing stuff in the map but when they do story they wanna focus on just doing the story and do the map content seperately.

achievements tied too old maps for decorations would have been fantastic

How is the economy not stimulated by Homestead? The recipes are locked behind Masteries, yes, but they didn't say the crafting won't consume materials, did they?

WOODEN POTATOES 🥔…😎👍🏻👍🏻

as for the mastery thing soto were well pace, i legit have no idea what points im missing from IBS but im missing like 8 and cant seem to work out what im missing there

personally the new weapons do nothing for me, I would rather 2 elite specs per expansion over every class getting weapons which barely change anything, hell at this point they could even just make 1 hero class that starts at lvl80

There's not much I can think of that's going to resonate less with 97% of the player base than three different difficulty nomenclatures for a strike mission.

I hope it's not another crying n complaining video.....