Similar to Seitung which also would be much nicer, if it were less color saturated. Both are also significantly more resoucre hungry than previous/other maps. Did they use (AI) upscaled colorized textures form the previous game instead of creating new ones from scratch?

I sometimes wonder what happens internally at ArenaNet. How often do they switch the tools used to create maps? Does every developer (team) use their own favorite tool?

How else would you explain that some maps are so much more resource hungry than others, have oversaturated colors and other weird properties like the slider which should control environment effects like snow is inverted. It's a complete mess.

I assume you are referring to Icebrood Saga.
[...]
IBS is really weird.

Also, regardless of how far your character has progressed through the SotO story, you still see Mabon in Skywatch Archipelago. Either patrolling Wizard's Ascent or playing his role in the Meta.

On the other hand you won't see Isgarren in the Wizard's Tower, unless your character has progressed far enough through the story.

But maybe it's true and Story is as optional in Games as it is in Porn -- A developer quote I sadly can't find the source for anymore.

I did for roughly 2 minutes, but I couldn't stand her voice and I started to fast-foward to figure out what the video is about. I think that most of what she said is not specific to GW2, but more or less describes playing MMOs in general.

I've played WoW, Rift, WildStar, RuneScape, ESO and GW2 and I kinda stayed with (or rather returned to) GW2, because it used to be the MMO which encouraged to "play what/how you want" and allowed to drop out and come back without feeling to have fallen behind. Well, "used to be" ...

And still there are quite a lot of players who seem to like doing rifts. Which is the actual scary part to me. If using the Open World Legendary Armor as a Carrot on a Stick is enough to sell this uninspired, repetitive, boring and terribly implemented grind to enough players, there is litttle reason for ArenaNet to put effort into explorable content.

Then it looks like I got it ... though you could have made it easier for people to understand your point. 😎

I don't think there are DBM-like Addons for GW2 (BlishHUD Timers is the closest I could find), but maybe ReShade could be used to emphasize the effect by boosting or modifying certain color values.

I think that this is an area where GW2 could still improve a lot. I wish it had more options to reduce visual clutter and less variety in how (important) visual cues look on the screen. It appears like developers have a lot of artistic freedom when they design those effects.

You can trade them for Provisioner Tokens at Rend Scorchmaul in the Wizard's Tower who does not have a daily limit. This would have been an unlimited supply of tokens for roughly 20 silver a pop (see below) and people already know that they will need 300 tokens per piece of legendary armor.

But the Price for Quartz Crystals does not appear to have exploded, since ArenaNet was quick enough to fix it. Or maybe it's true and the exploit did not even consume the stacks and you could get unlimited amounts of Charged Crystals == Provisioner Tokens for free while it lasted.

I can craft a bit and sell it

Probably not, since ArenaNet crashed the market for (crafted) exotic gear with the addition of a new WvW vendor who sells stat selectable exotics for very little coin and honor. If I were mean, I could say they did this to make people buy PoF and HoT so they can also pick stat combinations from these expansions. Anyway, crafting is now officially dead.

At least on my secondary account I don't have the back piece yet. The rewards aren't mind-boggling, but decent enough for me to let a twitch stream run in the background, even though I don't like twitch and this account linking business. But I'm a sucker for free stuff. 😏

That's kinda the point I was trying to make earlier. It very much depends on the build how much you benefit or loose from celestial stats.

Seems like it, though it wasn't actually my intention. I'm not even (planning on) using my Mastodon account much. But when I followed the MassisvelyOP account on Mastodon they followed back and I thought, I should (at least) pin a post to my Mastodon profile which references our GW2 community.

What I didn't know until now is that referencing a lemmy community from Mastodon also creates a post in the referenced community. I thought that you could only comment on lemmy posts from Mastodon.

But it appears that only direct replies to the post (comments on top leveL) are federated back to Mastodon. Replies to comments (nested comments) aren't shown when expanding the post.

We should consider ourselves lucky that anything but mobile games still exists, though I completely fail to understand why adults or rather people with access to credit cards play these mobile games.