My two cents.
Temporary content
- Living Story should have a permanent impact on the world. If it is a simple new threat every 2 weeks that is being taken care of, players will eventually get bored.
- New players joining Guildwars 2 community permanently lose an opportunity to experience all the work you have done.
Pace too fast
- Two weeks to complete a content is way too fast for casual players.
- Completionists feel the need to participate in said content in that time frame to complete all achievements, especially when it will be either removed or be available next year. This makes living story more like a work instead of enjoyment. Players should participate in that because they like it, not because it will be unavailable or because they will miss their achievement points.
- Go back to monthly or even bimonthly living story releases with more meaningful content than smashing pinata.
Focusing players in one area
- While it may looks appealing, especially to show how the game is flourishing it comes with few, very serious design drawbacks.
- It makes server lagging very noticeable. Everyone hates when they cannot fully control their own characters because of connection bottleneck.
- A work of designers that create new champions and bosses gets fully wasted. The reason is called a zerg. Because of 5 person aoe limit any champion fighting more than 5 people will have limited mechanics. If said zerg includes more than 30 people a vast portion of them treat those champions as dummies, literally. They spent their time in the game on attacking enemies you spent time on designing without even considering what those enemies can even do. Very good examples are temple bosses.
- Recently, I started to guest on empty servers like Vabbi with 2-3 friends and we tried to do temple events in Orr with our little group. I have never thought I would say that but you can actually design great and enjoyable fight. Bosses like Statue of Dwayna or Risen Priest of Melandru became one of my favourite, on the level of Giganticus Lupicus or Legendary Imbued Shaman. That clearly shows your more than capable of creating engaging fights but this work goes to waste because zerg completely negates every single mechanic of almost all the bosses. Players that do them on daily basis with zergs most likely would have no idea how to fight world bosses in limited group.
- I would say that if you would have moved almost all the temples bosses to Seer path in Ruined City of Arah (path 4) and replaced dungeon version of those priests that path would be the single best designed content you have ever created.
- To put it more simply, focusing players creates zergs, zergs are rewarded equally because of the design of not sharing loot, that in turns leads to very lazy gameplay (you can literally go make a cup of tea while killing world bosses) that completely negates all the hard work you put in creating combat mechanics.
Old content forgotten
- Living Story premise sounds great, a breathing living world. But it comes with the price, a steep one. Old content like dungeons or fractals is completely forgotten, left to rot with its bugs and faulty reward system.
- Replacing old paths with new ones like you did with Twilight Arbor is not exactly an answer, especially when the new path is being designed as a story mode path. This new path has also few issues like relying on AI, length and not enough rewards for its length.
- Last instanced, group based and permanent content update was at the start of 2013 when Ascalonian Catacombs revamp went live. You have enough content, there is no need to forget about it and create new one, there is a need to update it with meaningful additions or revamps.