So, the solution to redirect old missions away from old Dark Astoria

I think it'd be pretty cool if I23 had a revamp of all the Freedom Phalanx TFs to reflect the new situations in the game world - Positron takes over a revamped STF, Penny Yin gives a new TF in the same range as Sister Psyche's TF, Citadel's TF deals with the Council-5th Column war, and so on.

I had a sense that for some time mission arcs requiring Echo DA might be a problem. After installing the hacked TP units, I attached echo DA's beacon and the new DA's beacon after obtaining all the exploration badges. I find that having to go to Ouroboros all the time gets a bit tedious in my opinion. I do love these new TP units. Now we can get to any location in the city in seconds instead of long minutes of traveling normally required to get around.

All this makes me wonder why they bothered with the "echo" version in ouroboros at all. They could just have made the door from Talos go to the old version of DA and the portals in PI and Grandville go to the new version. Explain it by the usual slipping time-scale; levelling up means time passes.

And to think I raced an Astoria-themed character through the Miriam Bloechel arc on the night before i22, thinking it'd be gone that morning. Still, I'm glad I got it done that night instead of after the change: "go to Dark Astoria and stop the Banished Pantheon from breaking the seal" just has a better ring to it than "go to the echo of what Dark Astoria used to be and stop the Banished Pantheon of the past from breaking the seal that's going to break anyway, except even earlier, so, you know, time paradox."

Having just gotten another arc that referred the player to Echo Astoria, what worries me is that it's not going to make any sense for new players. There's no in-game explanation of what the term means, so anyone who hasn't already found Ouroboros, which is easy to miss if they skipped Faultline and haven't been taken there by another player, is going to get stumped when they see "Echo: Dark Astoria" as the destination. And when they ask around, find out about Ouroboros and i22 and how they have to go to the echo version now, it's going to snap the narrative immersion for them like a rubber band.

The most immersive solution, as someone else said, would be to have old Dark Astoria at Talos Island for most of the game, and then it gets sealed off at level 50 and new Dark Astoria kicks in as the events there unfold during the player's personal timeline. The only problem there is that, since high-level players might still want to go back to old Dark Astoria, the developers would probably need to create an echo entrance for them that opens up at level 50. It'd be a lot of work, but it'd be great if the messy in-game referrals to Echo: Dark Astoria right now are just a stop-gap while something along those lines is worked out.

Or they could just move the missions to another rundown trial/hazard zone. Y'know, like they said they would.

A few of them wouldn't make sense anywhere else, though. Miriam's Scroll of Tielleku arc hinges pretty strongly on old Dark Astoria and thwarting a BP plan to free Mot; without the personal timeline effect that having both zones open would allow, her story just doesn't make much sense anymore.

But yeah, some of the others needed to be moved to more appropriate zones long ago. There's at least one non-magic, 20'ish-level mission that sends you there to a fully staffed, ordinary office building to rescue hostages and recover some files. I just boggled for a moment, fighting the urge to shout "who's crazy enough to still be commuting there?!" before rushing off into the fog to go save them.

I would honestly rather run a Synapse, Sister Psyche or Manticore than a Numina. Yes, "defeat all" missions beating the same foes up in basically the same maps is tedious, but it's combat. Blowing away spawns of grey-con critters for 15 minutes hither and yon across the game zones is a version of tedium I am much less tolerant of.