ReaverKane.7598

While i agree with the sentiment, there's a few issues with the whole idea: 1) Not adding map won't necessarily open up that much manpower for the other stuff. The people in charge of environment, levels and music design, don't have the same skill set as those in charge of designing skills and professions. They wouldn't necessarily be unable to do it, but it isn't a clear either or scenario. 2) Without maps, what is it expanding? I mean yeah maybe professions, but honestly, i've held the belief that Elite specs should have been dropped during living world, because its been 5 years since HoT and we still only have 2, which entirely prevents the game from delivering on one of its fundamental promises, the no trinity. Had Arena Net delivered Elite Specs with Living World, instead of hogging them as another sell point for expansions, we'd have already 2-3 more elite specs, which, if well executed would mean that by now each profession would have at least one support, one dps and one "tank" spec, which would also improve the health of competitive play by balancing through counters instead of nerfing and gutting professions (looking at you Scourge). 3) The bloat is only due to Arena Net having a bit of a Obsessive compulsive behaviour on how they structured Living World from season 3 onward. It follows the exact same recipe every time, with only a couple recent exceptions. New Map, new currency, new stat combos, new ascended gear, some sort of new cosmetics, a bunch of achievements, and that's it. Season 4 actually ramped that with armor or weapon sets, which is kinda nice, but also increases the bloat. But the main thing has always been a new map, with the recent exceptions in Season 5. Istan, for example was a prime example of a map ripe for expanding, it feels tiny compared to the GW1 map, with barely half of it being accessible, compared to the original, yet that went unexplored, in favor of always new maps. While they could have opened that map up to Gandara in a homage to the original game, without changing any of the story, just relocating some of the setting. Dry top to this day still stands as probably one of the best map releases in the game, from the way it actually made sense in the story, to how we watched it evolve through several releases, and yet its one of the smallest maps in the game. Compare that to the huge vastly uninhabited expanses of some of the Season 4 maps, and new maps really stopped holding the importance it had when Dry top released. (Also we hadn't had a new map in over a year by then). While i would also enjoy seeing Arena NEt take a step back and find their old aggressively innovative and creative core from the GW1 and early GW2's era, and the game really could use a much needed pass on much of the old systems and environs to add new systems, the economy and balance need a spring cleaning with many egregious changes having been made irrelevant by posterior changes and new content (for example the silk costs on ascended armor, a ton of balance changes, etc). An expansion without any new maps to explore would be a massive dud, while a lot of veterans might find a bit of appeal, the vast majority, and new players would simply find no value to such a purchase.